Breaking the Cycle: How the News and Markets Created a Negative Feedback Loop in COVID-19
New research from CBS Professor Harry Mamaysky reveals how negativity in the news and markets can escalate a financial crisis.
New research from CBS Professor Harry Mamaysky reveals how negativity in the news and markets can escalate a financial crisis.
Adapted from “Global Value Chains in Developing Countries: A Relational Perspective from Coffee and Garments,” by Laura Boudreau of Columbia Business School, Julia Cajal Grossi of the Geneva Graduate Institute, and Rocco Macchiavello of the London School of Economics.
Adapted from “Online Advertising as Passive Search,” by Raluca M. Ursu of New York University Stern School of Business, Andrey Simonov of Columbia Business School, and Eunkyung An of New York University Stern School of Business.
This paper from Columbia Business School, “Meaning of Manual Labor Impedes Consumer Adoption of Autonomous Products,” explores marketing solutions to some consumers’ resistance towards autonomous products. The study was co-authored by Emanuel de Bellis of the University of St. Gallen, Gita Johar of Columbia Business School, and Nicola Poletti of Cada.
Co-authored by John B. Donaldson of Columbia Business School, “The Macroeconomics of Stakeholder Equilibria,” proposes a model for a purely private, mutually beneficial financial agreement between worker and firm that keeps decision-making in the hands of stockholders while improving the employment contract for employees.
At Columbia Business School, our faculty members are at the forefront of research in their respective fields, offering innovative ideas that directly impact the practice of business today. A quick glance at our publication on faculty research, CBS Insights, will give you a sense of the breadth and immediacy of the insight our professors provide.
As a student at the School, this will greatly enrich your education. In Columbia classrooms, you are at the cutting-edge of industry, studying the practices that others will later adopt and teach. As any business leader will tell you, in a competitive environment, being first puts you at a distinct advantage over your peers. Learn economic development from Ray Fisman, the Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise and a rising star in the field, or real estate from Chris Mayer, the Paul Milstein Professor of Real Estate, a renowned expert and frequent commentator on complex housing issues. This way, when you complete your degree, you'll be set up to succeed.
Columbia Business School in conjunction with the Office of the Dean provides its faculty, PhD students, and other research staff with resources and cutting edge tools and technology to help push the boundaries of business research.
Specifically, our goal is to seamlessly help faculty set up and execute their research programs. This includes, but is not limited to:
All these activities help to facilitate and streamline faculty research, and that of the doctoral students working with them.
The authors examine how consumers respond to pseudo-free offers--offers that are presented to consumers as free but that require consumers to make a nonmonetary payment (such as completing a survey or providing personal information) in order to receive the "free" good or service. Across six studies, the authors find that consumers are generally just as likely to accept pseudo-free offers (with nonmonetary costs) as comparable truly free offers (with no costs), as long as the costs of the pseudo-free offers are below some threshold.
We extend latent Dirichlet allocation by introducing a topic model, hierarchically dual latent Dirichlet allocation (HDLDA), for contexts in which one type of document (e.g., search queries) are semantically related to another type of document (e.g., search results). In the context of online search engines, HDLDA identifies not only topics in short search queries and web pages, but also how the topics in search queries relate to the topics in the corresponding top search results.
Geographic price discrimination is generally considered beneficial to firm profitability. Firms can extract higher rents by varying prices across markets to match consumers' preferences. This paper empirically demonstrates, however, that a firm may instead prefer a national pricing policy that fixes prices across geographic markets, foregoing the opportunity to customize prices. Under appropriate conditions, a national pricing policy helps avoid intense local competition due to targeted prices.
The most effective behavioral policies are often also the most contentious. Psychologically informed interventions that promote non-deliberative behaviors ("nudges") are often more effective than "traditional" policies (like informational and educational campaigns) that target more deliberative processes. Yet, precisely because of their deliberative nature, people are often said to prefer the latter over the former.
In incentive-aligned choice experiments, each decision is realized with some probability, Prob. In three eye-tracking experiments, we study the impact of varying Prob from 0 (as in purely hypothetical choices) to 1 (as in real-life choices) on attention, information processing, and choice. Consistent with the bounded rationality literature, we find that as Prob increases from 0 to 1, consumers process the choice-relevant information more carefully and more comprehensively.
The rigidity of mortgage contracts and a variety of frictions in the design of the market and the intermediation sector hindered efforts to restructure or refinance household debt in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In this paper, we focus on understanding the design and implementation challenges of ex ante and ex post debt relief solutions that are aimed at a more efficient sharing of aggregate risk between borrowers and lenders.
Consumer reviews and ratings of products and services have become ubiquitous on the Internet. This paper analyzes, given the sequential nature of reviews and the limited feedback of such past reviews, the information content they communicate to future customers. We consider a model with heterogeneous customers who buy a product of unknown quality and we focus on two different informational settings. In the first setting customers observe the whole history of past reviews. In the second one they only observe the sample mean of past reviews.
We study a multi-server queueing model of a revenue-maximizing firm providing a service to a market of heterogeneous price- and delay-sensitive customers with private individual preferences. The firm may offer a selection of service classes that are differentiated in prices and delays. Using a deterministic relaxation, which highlights the first-order economic structure of the problem, we construct a solution that is incentive compatible and near-optimal in systems with large capacity and market potential.
This paper provides quasi-experimental evidence on the impact of paid leave legislation on fathers' leave-taking, as well as on the division of leave between mothers and fathers in dual-earner households. Using difference-in-difference and difference-in-difference-in-difference designs, we study California's Paid Family Leave (CA-PFL) program, which is the first source of government-provided paid parental leave available to fathers in the United States.
Sustaining large-scale public goods requires individuals to make environmentally friendly decisions today to benefit future generations. Recent research suggests that second-order normative beliefs are more powerful predictors of behaviour than first-order personal beliefs. We explored the role that second-order normative beliefs — the belief that community members think that saving energy helps the environment — play in curbing energy use.
Studies of how quantitative easing (QE) impacts asset prices typically look for effects in one- or two-day windows around QE announcements. This methodology underestimates the impact of QE on asset classes whose responses happen outside of this short time frame. We document that QE announcements by the Fed, ECB, and the Bank of England are associated with: quick price reactions of medium- and long-term government bonds; but with reactions in equity and equity implied volatility that occur over several weeks.
Exploiting variation in the timing of resets of adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs), we find that a sizable decline in mortgage payments (up to 50%) induces a significant increase in car purchases (up to 35%). This effect is attenuated by voluntary deleveraging. Borrowers with lower incomes and housing wealth have significantly higher marginal propensity to consume. Areas with a larger share of ARMs were more responsive to lower interest rates and saw a relative decline in defaults and an increase in house prices, car purchases, and employment.
Although choosing from large assortments has often been found to be demotivating, a robust finding in the marketing literature is that consumers generally prefer larger product assortments. Standard explanations for this preference for larger assortments have focused on reason-based considerations revolving around large assortments enabling potentially “better” choices. This paper offers a different and novel, affect-based explanation.
We examine the relation between shareholder activism and voluntary disclosure. An important consequence of voluntary disclosure is less adverse selection in the capital markets. One class of traders that finds less adverse selection unprofitable is activist investors who target mispriced firms whose valuations they can improve. Consistent with this idea, we find that managers issue earnings and sales forecasts more frequently when their firm is more at risk of attack by activist investors, and that these additional disclosures reduce the likelihood of becoming an activist's target.
Past research paints a mixed picture of rationales in negotiations: Some findings suggest rationales might help, whereas others suggest they may have little effect or backfire. Here, we distinguish between two kinds of rationales buyers commonly employ — constraint rationales (referring to one's own limited resources) and disparagement rationales (involving critiques of the negotiated object) — and demonstrate their divergent effects.
The adoption and diffusion of new products and behaviors has been studied extensively and comprehensively (e.g., Rogers 2003). Disadoption — how and why people volitionally stop using products and/or cease certain behaviors (e.g., customer defection, smoking cessation) — by contrast, has received less and more situation-specific attention. This paper presents a general (conceptual) framework for understanding disadoption. Disadoption is defined and delineated from other behavioral discontinuances.
Whether in everyday disagreements, bargaining episodes, or high-stakes disputes, people typically see a spectrum of possible responses to dealing with differences with others, ranging from avoidance and accommodation to competition and aggression. We believe people judge their own and others' behaviors along this dimension, which we call interpersonal assertiveness, reflecting the degree to which someone stands up and speaks out for their own positions when they are faced with someone else who does not want the same outcomes.
We evaluate the effects of the 2009 Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) that provided intermediaries with sizeable financial incentives to renegotiate mortgages. HAMP increased intensity of renegotiations and prevented substantial number of foreclosures but reached just one-third of its targeted indebted households. This shortfall was in large part due to low renegotiation intensity of a few large intermediaries and was driven by intermediary-specific factors.
Uncertainty is an unavoidable part of human life. How do states of uncertainty influence the way people make decisions? We advance the proposition that states of uncertainty increase the reliance on affective inputs in judgments and decisions. In accord with this proposition, results from six studies show that the priming of uncertainty (vs. certainty) consistently increases the effects of a variety of affective inputs on consumers' judgments and decisions.
To align employees' interests with the firm's goals, employers often use performance-based pay, but designing such a compensation plan is challenging because performance is typically multifaceted. For example, a sales employee should be incentivized to sell the company's product, but a focus on current sales without rewarding the salespeople according to the quality of the product and/or customer service may result in fewer future sales.
The present research considered what leads perceivers to evaluate someone as a good or poor judge of people. In general, we found a substantial role for agreement: perceivers evaluated another person as a good judge when he or she agreed with their perception of someone's characteristics. Importantly, the effect of agreement depended on who this " someone" was. We found that perceivers' evaluation of another individual as a good judge was more heavily shaped by agreement about their own characteristics than by agreement about a third-party target's characteristics.
The present research considered what leads perceivers to evaluate someone as a good or poor judge of people. In general, we found a substantial role for agreement: perceivers evaluated another person as a good judge when he or she agreed with their perception of someone's characteristics. Importantly, the effect of agreement depended on who this " someone" was. We found that perceivers' evaluation of another individual as a good judge was more heavily shaped by agreement about their own characteristics than by agreement about a third-party target's characteristics.
While most studies of the formalization of pay systems suggest that it helps reduce inequality, some recent studies suggest the opposite. The present study draws on social identity theory to shift this debate from whether formalization reduces inequality to when, or under what conditions, less formalized pay systems may also serve to reduce inequality. Specifically, I consider both the gender of the decision maker and the job of the employee being evaluated.
Despite lab-based evidence supporting the argument that double standards — by which one group is unfairly held to stricter standards than another — explain observed gender differences in evaluations, it remains unclear whether double standards also affect evaluations in organization and market contexts, where competitive pressures create a disincentive to discriminate.
We explore captain-ownership and vessel performance in eighteenth-century transatlantic shipping. Although contingent compensation often aligned incentives between captains and ship owners, one difficult-to-contract hazard was threat of capture during wartime. We exploit variation across time and routes to study the relationship between capture threat and captain-ownership. Vessels were more likely to have captain-owners when undertaking wartime voyages on routes susceptible to privateers.
The goal of this research was to test whether including an inexpensive nonfood item (toy) with a smaller-sized meal bundle (420 calories), but not with the regular-sized meal bundle version (580 calories), would incentivize children to choose the smaller-sized meal bundle, even among children with overweight and obesity. Logistic regression was used to evaluate the effect in a between-subjects field experiment of a toy on smaller-sized meal choice (here, a binary choice between a smaller-sized or regular-sized meal bundles).
Couples appear to help each other remember outstanding tasks ("to-dos") by issuing reminders. We examine if women and men differ in the frequency with which they offer this form of mnemonic assistance. Five studies measure how heterosexual couples coordinate mnemonic work in romantic relationships. The first two studies demonstrate that men are assumed to do less of this form of mnemonic work (Study 1) and experience less societal pressure to do so than women do (Study 2).
Recent bank regulations have imposed large compliance costs on banks of all sizes, and have increased the costs of borrowing to both consumers and companies. But in this summary of his recent book, the author argues that the problems with banking system regulation go well beyond the excessive costs. Indeed, Dodd-Frank and other post-crisis regulatory reforms have failed to address the major shortcomings that produced the crisis of 2007–2009. Most importantly, excessive housing finance risk was not dealt with adequately, and is already on the rise again.
We study an international law firm that changed its compensation plan for team leaders to address a multitasking problem: team leaders were focusing their effort on billable hours and not spending sufficient time on "leadership" activities to build the firm. Compensation was changed to provide greater incentives for the leadership activities and weaker incentives for billable hours. The effect of this change on the task allocation of the firm's team leaders is large and robust; team leaders increase their non-billable hours and shift billable hours to team members.
We demonstrate a novel link between relationship-specific investments and risk in a setting where division managers operate under moral hazard and collaborate on joint projects. Specific investments increase efficiency at the margin. This expands the scale of operations and thereby adds to the compensation risk borne by the managers. Accounting for this investment/risk link overturns key findings from prior incomplete contracting studies.
This article investigates the cost and feasibility of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from 2005 levels by 2050. The United States has stated in its Paris Conference of the Parties (COP) 21 submission that this is its aspiration. I suggest that this goal can be reached at a net cost in the range of $37 to $135 billion/year. I assume that the goal is to be reached by extensive use of solar photovoltaic and wind energy (66 percent of generating capacity), in which case the cost of energy storage will play a key role in the overall cost.
We find important differences in dollar-based and dollar-neutral G10 carry trades. Dollar-neutral trades have positive average returns, are highly negatively skewed, are correlated with risk factors, and exhibit considerable downside risk. In contrast, a diversified dollar-carry portfolio has a higher average excess return, a higher Sharpe ratio, minimal skewness, is unconditionally uncorrelated with standard risk-factors, and exhibits no downside risk.
We find important differences in dollar-based and dollar-neutral G10 carry trades. Dollar-neutral trades have positive average returns, are highly negatively skewed, are correlated with risk factors, and exhibit considerable downside risk. In contrast, a diversified dollar-carry portfolio has a higher average excess return, a higher Sharpe ratio, minimal skewness, is unconditionally uncorrelated with standard risk-factors, and exhibits no downside risk.
While it is generally believed that insulating cost allocations help managers focus their attention on their own actions and shield them from the actions of others, non-insulating schemes can have appeal by encouraging teamwork and/or mutual monitoring among divisions. In this paper, we demonstrate that non-insulating allocations can induce fruitful cooperation among parties even when teamwork and mutual monitoring are nonissues.
Shopping is sometimes a source of stress, leading to avoidance coping behavior by consumers. Prior research suggests that store-induced stress makes shopping an adverse experience and thus negatively affects consumers' purchase likelihood. We propose that consumers' response to shopping stress depends on their motivational orientation. The greater the in-store stress, the more likely task-oriented consumers are to abandon the trip without making purchases. However, recreation-oriented consumers will be, up to a point, less likely to end the trip.
This research considers how marketers can encourage or 'nudge' consumers to transmit word of mouth (WOM), such as referrals or recommendations to friends, in a manner that helps reach, inform, or influence large numbers of consumers quickly, which is an outcome referred to as faster diffusion. Building on studies showing diffusion is faster when higher-connectivity people are involved; the authors propose a mechanism based on network externalities that encourages regular customers to select receivers who have higher levels of social connectivity.
We introduce a tractable dynamic monitoring technology into a continuous-time moral hazard problem and study the optimal long-term contract between principal and agent. Monitoring adds value by allowing the principal to reduce the intensity of performance-based incentives, reducing the likelihood of costly termination. We present a novel characterization of optimal dynamic incentive provision when performance-based incentives may decline continuously to zero. Termination happens in equilibrium only if its costs are relatively low.
A monopolist offers a product to a market of consumers with heterogeneous quality preferences. Although initially uninformed about the product quality, they learn by observing past purchase decisions and reviews of other consumers. Our goal is to analyze the social learning mechanism and its effect on the seller's pricing decision. This analysis borrows from the literature on social learning and on pricing and revenue management.
People are more generous toward single than toward multiple beneficiaries, and encouraging greater giving to multiple targets is challenging. We identify one factor, perceived efficacy, which enhances generosity toward multiple beneficiaries. We investigate relationships between perceived self-efficacy (believing one can take steps to make an impact), response efficacy (believing those steps will be effective), and charitable giving.
Contemporary consumer behavior research largely conceptualizes post-decision evaluation processes in terms of decision confidence, anticipated regret and satisfaction, and decision and consumption satisfaction. The current research broadens this view, arguing that people additionally experience varying degrees of decision comfort that are distinct from other post-decision evaluations.
Investigations of the basic risk-return trade-off for the market return typically use maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) with a monthly or quarterly horizon and data sampled to match the horizon even though daily data are available. We develop an overlapping data inference methodology for such models that uses all of the data while maintaining the monthly or quarterly forecasting period. Our approach recognizes that the first order conditions of MLE can be used as orthogonality conditions of the generalized method of moments (GMM).
The literature assessing whether mutual fund managers have skill typically regards market timing or stock picking skills as immutable attributes of a manager or fund. Yet, measures of these skills appear to vary over the business cycle. This paper offers a rational explanation, arguing that timing and picking are tasks. A skilled manager can choose how much of each task to attend to. Using tools from the rational inattention literature, we show that in booms, a manger should pick stocks and in recessions, he should pay more attention to his market timing.
The literature assessing whether mutual fund managers have skill typically regards market timing or stock picking skills as immutable attributes of a manager or fund. Yet, measures of these skills appear to vary over the business cycle. This paper offers a rational explanation, arguing that timing and picking are tasks. A skilled manager can choose how much of each task to attend to. Using tools from the rational inattention literature, we show that in booms, a manger should pick stocks and in recessions, he should pay more attention to his market timing.
This paper investigates citations of influential papers in the marketing and management area. These papers are successful in terms of the direct citations they receive (i.e., primary citations). To be truly influential, however, the papers citing them must in turn be used and cited by subsequent papers (i.e., have secondary citations) to demonstrate their long-run relevance. We propose a measure of enduring impact that takes into account (1) both primary and secondary citations and (2) the number of citations in the bibliography.
This paper examines how prices, markups and marginal costs respond to trade liberalization. We develop a framework to estimate markups from production data with multi-product firms. This approach does not require assumptions on the market structure or demand curves faced by firms, nor assumptions on how firms allocate their inputs across products. We exploit quantity and price information to disentangle markups from quantity-based productivity, and then compute marginal costs by dividing observed prices by the estimated markups.
The role of assortment planning and pricing in shaping sales and profits of retailers is well documented and studied in monopolistic settings. However, such a role remains relatively unexplored in competitive environments. In this paper, we study equilibrium behavior of competing retailers in two settings: i.) when prices are exogenously fixed, and retailers compete in assortments only; and ii.) when retailers compete jointly in assortment and prices.
Researchers have debated whether a person’s behavior can be predicted from his or her face. In particular, it is unclear whether people’s trustworthiness can be predicted from their facial appearance. In the present study, we implemented conceptual and methodological advances in this area of inquiry, taking a new approach to capturing trustworthy behavior and measuring targets’ own self-expectations as a mediator between consensual appearance-based judgments and the trustworthiness of targets’ behavior.
Researchers have debated whether a person’s behavior can be predicted from his or her face. In particular, it is unclear whether people’s trustworthiness can be predicted from their facial appearance. In the present study, we implemented conceptual and methodological advances in this area of inquiry, taking a new approach to capturing trustworthy behavior and measuring targets’ own self-expectations as a mediator between consensual appearance-based judgments and the trustworthiness of targets’ behavior.
A new class of online services allows internet media sites to direct users from articles they are currently reading to other content they may be interested in. This process creates a "browsing path'' along which there is potential for repeated interaction between the user and the provider, giving rise to a dynamic optimization problem. A key metric that often underlies this recommendation process is the click-through rate (CTR) of candidate articles.
A new class of online services allows internet media sites to direct users from articles they are currently reading to other content they may be interested in. This process creates a "browsing path'' along which there is potential for repeated interaction between the user and the provider, giving rise to a dynamic optimization problem. A key metric that often underlies this recommendation process is the click-through rate (CTR) of candidate articles.