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 article offers the authors' views on expatriate management programs and the benefits from executives interacting with the people and institutions of the host country. The idea that international experience or interaction between foreign managers and local people will help managers become more creative, entrepreneurial, and successful is discussed. The concept of integrative complexity in bi-cultural managers which enhances job performance is mentioned.
The Kidney Case is multi-person exercise that involves the allocation of a single kidney. Students read profiles of eight candidates for the kidney and make a first allocation decision. Each candidate was designed to be high on some allocation principles but low or unknown on others (e.g., best, match, time in cue, age, personal responsibility for disease, future benefits to society, etc.). Then, students are put into groups and assigned to advocate for one of the candidates. Each group will prepare and give a 3-minute presentation on why their candidate should receive the kidney.
Emissions abatement alone cannot address the consequences of global warming for weather disasters. We model how society adapts to manage disaster risks to capital stock. Optimal adaptation — a mix of firm-level efforts and public spending — varies as society learns about the adverse consequences of global warming for disaster arrivals. Taxes on capital are needed alongside those on carbon to achieve the first best.
What are the sources of the returns to education? We study the allocation of higher education graduates from public institutions in Ohio across firms. We present three results. First, we confirm findings in the earlier literature of large pay differences across degrees. Second, we show that up to one quarter of pay premiums for higher degrees are explained by between-firm pay differences. Third, higher education degrees are associated with greater representation at the best-paying firms.
This article focuses on the role of threats in negotiations. Broadly speaking, a threat is a proposition that issues demands and warns of the costs of noncompliance. Even if neither party resorts to them, potential threats shadow most negotiations. Researchers have found that people actually evaluate their counterparts more favorably when they combine promises with threats rather than extend promises alone. Whereas promises encourage exploitation, the threat of punishment motivates cooperation.
Individuals that consume different baskets of goods are differentially affected by relative price changes caused by international trade. We develop a methodology to measure the unequal gains from trade across consumers within countries. The approach requires data on aggregate expenditures and parameters estimated from a non-homothetic gravity equation. We find that trade typically favors the poor, who concentrate spending in more traded sectors.
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.
In the value-based approach to business strategy, a firm’s value creation with a buyer—i.e., its value gap—is an important measure. In many formal and informal results, firm profitability depends on whether the firm can identify buyer segments in which it has the largest value gap—namely, a value-gap advantage. These results typically assume, either explicitly or implicitly, that firms have constant marginal costs.
Conventional research in organizational theory highlights the role of board interlocks in facilitating business collective action. In this article, I propose that business collective action affects the evolutionary path of interlock networks. In particular, large market players’ response after a collective action to the classic problem of the "exploitation" of the great by the small provides a mechanism for interlocks to evolve.
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.
In the experiments reported here, we integrated work on hierarchy, culture, and the enforcement of group cooperation by examining patterns of punishment. Studies in Western contexts have shown that having high status can temper acts of dominance, suggesting that high status may decrease punishment by the powerful. We predicted that high status would have the opposite effect in Asian cultures because vertical collectivism permits the use of dominance to reinforce the existing hierarchical order.
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.
Leaders would be better served to focus on recruiting, compensation and other related facets of talent management rather than diversity training.
In the last two decades, organized retailing has transformed the retailing landscape in emerging economies, where unorganized retailing has traditionally been dominant. In this paper, we build a theoretical model of unorganized and organized retailing in emerging economies by carefully modeling key characteristics of the retailing environment, the retailers, the consumers, and product categories.
In this essay, we criticize how the performativity thesis, as described and exemplified in Do Economists Make Markets, has focused primarily on the field of economics generally and business school–based financial economics consequently. By doing so the performativity literature has ignored whether, when, and how financial economics outperforms, or might be outperformed by, other business school sciences, such as management.
Prior research suggests that stress can be harmful in high-stakes contexts such as negotiations. However, few studies actually measure stress physiologically during negotiations, nor do studies offer interventions to combat the potential negative effects of heightened physiological responses in negotiation contexts. In the current research, we offer evidence that the negative effects of cortisol increases on negotiation performance can be reduced through a reappraisal of anxiety manipulation.
In recent years, online retailers (also called e-tailers) have started allowing manufacturers direct access to their customers while charging a fee for providing this access, a format commonly referred to as agency selling. In this paper, we use a stylized theoretical model to answer a key question that e-tailers are facing: When should they use an agency selling format instead of using the more conventional reselling format?
Objectives: To employ automated bed data to examine whether ICU occupancy influences ICU admission decisions and patient outcomes.
Design: Retrospective study using an instrumental variable to remove biases from unobserved differences in illness severity for patients admitted to ICU.
Setting: Fifteen hospitals in an integrated healthcare delivery system in California.
Patients: Seventy thousand one hundred thirty-three episodes involving patients admitted via emergency departments to a medical service over a 1-year period between 2008 and 2009.
We conduct a first comprehensive empirical study of the bank contingent convertible (CoCo) issues market. Two main findings emerge from our study. First, the impact of CoCo issuance on CDS spreads is negative and statistically significant, indicating that CoCo issuance reduces banksícredit risk. The reduction in CDS spreads is much larger for mandatory conversion (MC) CoCos than for principal write-down (PWD) issues.
Prior research has shown that an individual's hormonal profile can influence the individual's social standing within a group. We introduce a different construct — a collective hormonal profile — which describes a group's hormonal make-up. We test whether a group's collective hormonal profile is related to its performance. Analysis of 370 individuals randomly assigned to work in 74 groups of three to six individuals revealed that group-level concentrations of testosterone and cortisol interact to predict a group's standing across groups.
The notion that effort and hard work yield desired outcomes is ingrained in many cultures and affects our thinking and behavior. However, could valuing effort complicate our lives? In the present article, the authors demonstrate that individuals with a stronger tendency to link effort with positive outcomes end up complicating what should be easy decisions. People distort their preferences and the information they search and recall in a manner that intensifies the choice conflict and decisional effort they experience before finalizing their choice.
The removal of “conservatism” as a qualitative characteristic from the Conceptual Framework of the IFRS has met with considerable resistance. This paper argues that conservatism has a role in accounting, but not as a qualitative characteristic. Rather, it serves as a defining principle for how accounting is to be done. It is thus central to resolving “recognition” and “measurement” issues in the Conceptual Framework, issues that determine what actually goes into the balance sheet and income statement but issues on which the Framework is particularly weak.
This research examines the relationship between desire for control and acceptance of new products. We hypothesize that desire for control — the need to personally control outcomes in one's life — acts as a barrier to new product acceptance. Three experiments provide support for this hypothesis. This effect holds when desire for control is high as a dispositional trait (Studies 1 and 3) and when it is situationally induced (Study 2). We also identify an intervention to increase new product acceptance based on the idea that new products threaten one's sense of control.
We address a critical question that many firms are facing today: Can customer data be stored and analyzed in an easy-to-manage and scalable manner without significantly compromising the inferences that can be made about the customers' transaction activity? We address this question in the context of customer-base analysis. A number of researchers have developed customer-base analysis models that perform very well given detailed individual-level data.
The U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent upwards of $18 billion on marketing drugs in 2007. Detailing and drug sampling activities account for the bulk of this spending. To stay competitive, pharmaceutical managers need to maximize the return on these marketing investments by determining which physicians to target, when, and how to target them. In this paper, we present a two-stage approach for dynamically allocating detailing and sampling activities across physicians to maximize long-run profitability.
This paper investigates financial attention using novel panel data on daily investor online account logins. We find support for selective attention to portfolio information. Account logins fall by 9.5% after market declines. Investors also pay less attention when the VIX volatility index is high. The level of attention and the attention/return correlation are strongly related to investor demographics (gender, age) and financial position (wealth, holdings). Using a new statistical decomposition, we show how aggregate and individual household trading are related to investor attention.
Until fairly recently, the main approach to getting business to respond to climate change has been top-down efforts to regulate emissions and enact various forms of "carbon pricing." The aim of such efforts has been to make businesses "internalize" the costs associated with greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Governments are expected to set the environmental protection rules for companies in their respective countries, and markets are expected to adjust to the new regulations and carbon prices.
In this commentary, we reflect on several important issues and questions provoked by Murphy and Dweck's target article. First, we define a mindset as a frame of mind that affects the selection, encoding, and retrieval of information as well as the types of evaluations and responses an individual gives. As such, we suggest that while studying fixed versus growth mindsets is important, it is critical to explore and understand how a variety of mindsets affect consumer behavior, including regulatory focus, construal level, implementation versus deliberation, and power.
Regulatory changes are transforming the multitrillion dollar swaps market from a network of bilateral contracts to one in which swaps are cleared through central counterparties (CCPs). The stability of the new framework depends on the CCPs’ resilience. Margin requirements are a CCP’s first line of defense against the default of a counterparty. To capture liquidity costs at default, margin requirements need to increase superlinearly in position size.
Past research finds foreign visitors who accommodate their behavior to local norms to a moderate degree are appreciated more than those who accommodate little, but more extreme accommodation does not always evoke positive evaluations. To understand why high accommodation is appreciated more in some contexts than others, we investigate the role of diversity ideologies, proposing that differing responses follow from multiculturalism (that cultural traditions are unique, separate legacies) versus polyculturalism (that cultures are interacting systems which contribute to each other).
The present research examined whether possessing multiple social identities (i.e., groups relevant to one’s sense of self) is associated with creativity. In Study 1, the more identities individuals reported having, the more names they generated for a new commercial product (i.e., greater idea fluency). In Study 2, multiple identities were associated with greater fluency and originality (mediated by cognitive flexibility, but not by persistence). Study 3 validated these findings using a highly powered sample.
Norm violations engender both negative reactions and perceptions of power from observers. We addressed this paradox by examining whether observers' tendency to grant power to norm followers versus norm violators is moderated by the observer's position in the hierarchy. Because norm violations threaten the status quo, we hypothesized that individuals higher in a hierarchy (high verticality) would be less likely to grant power to norm violators compared to individuals lower in the hierarchy (low verticality).
Following the financial crisis of 2008–2009, a large literature has emerged that attempts to quantify and measure systemic risk. In this paper we focus on some of the more popular systemic risk indicators from this literature and ask how well they work, in the following sense: At the aggregate level, what information above that which is readily observable in the market do we learn from these systemic risk indicators?
We study the impact of limited inventory on optimal sales-force compensation contracts. We adopt a principal-agent framework, characterized by limited liability and rent sharing with the agent. A commonly invoked assumption in the inventory management literature is that the demand distribution satisfies the increasing failure rate (IFR) property. Under this assumption, however, past research has established that a quota-bonus contract—a widely adopted sales-force compensation contract in the practice—cannot sustain in equilibrium.
Improvisation is informing new models for strategy and organization design and determining how improvisation can create more productive interactions between individuals in an organization. Management research offers something to the study of improvisation in the form of evidence that groups that combine access to diverse ideas with internal cohesion are more creative and better able to develop those ideas into effective products and performances.
In sponsored search advertising, advertisers bid to be displayed in response to a keyword search. The operational activities associated with participating in an auction, i.e., submitting the bid and the ad copy, customizing bids and ad copies based on various factors (such as the geographical region from which the query originated, the time of day and the season, the characteristics of the searcher), and continuously measuring outcomes, involve considerable effort. We call the costs that arise from such activities keyword management costs.
Reviewing a fascinating range of evidence, Y. Jenny Xiao, Geraldine Coppin, and Jay J. Van Bavel (this issue) propose reciprocal links between intergroup psychology and perception. In so doing they consolidate an emerging body which resurrects and refreshes the “New Look” stance that social needs and expectations have a top-down influence on perceptions, not only social perceptions but also perceptions of the physical world.