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.
This paper is concerned with the effects of capital risk on optimal individual savings decisions in a simple two-period setting. We investigate the respective roles played by risk and time preferences in answering the following related questions: Q1: Will savings increase, remain constant or decrease in response to an increase in capital risk? Q2: Is optimal saving in the presence of capital risk greater than, equal to or less than optimal saving in the certainty case where the rate of return equals the mean (uncertain) return?
This paper studies economic policy toward feed grain and livestock markets by applying optimal control theory to a quarterly microeconometric model.
This paper studies economic policy toward feed grain and livestock markets by applying optimal control theory to a quarterly microeconometric model.
In this paper we consider a set of denumerable stochastic matrices where the paramter set is a compact metric space. We give a number of simultaneous recurrence conditions on the stochastic matrices and establish equivalences between these conditions. The results obtained generalize corresponding results in Markov chain theory to a considerable extent and have applications in stochastic control problems.
A global portrait of the phase plane for a fishery model is obtained for any acceptable values of the parameters. Three different structures of the phase plane are recovered. The first predicts an eventual collapse of the fishery. The second predicts an unstable limit cycle and an eventual stability of solutions which start inside the limit cycle. The last structure predicts two possible stable equilibria, one with high catch rate, and the other with no catch. Each structure corresponds to a different domain in the parameter space.
This paper investigates the solutions to the functional equations that arise inter alia in Undiscounted Markov Renewal Programming. We show that the solution set is a connected, though possibly nonconvex set whose members are unique up to the n* constants, characterize n* and show that some of these n* degrees of freedom are locally rather than globally independent.
This paper is concerned with the properties of the value-iteration operator which arises in undiscounted Markov decision problems. We give both necessary and sufficient conditions for this operator to reduce to a contraction operator, in which case it is easy to show that the value-iteration method exhibits a uniform geometric convergence rate.
For problems involving choices over "certain x uncertain" consumption pairs, it is almost universally assumed that the decision maker's preferences can be represented by an expected TPC (two-period cardinal) utility function.
An example for undiscounted multichain Markov Renewal Programming shows that policies may exist such that the Policy Iteration Algorithm (PIA) can converge to these policies for some (but not all) choices of the additive constants in the relative values, and as a consequence that the PIA may cycle if the relative values are improperly determined.
This paper is concerned with the optimality equation for the average costs in a denumerable state semi-Markov decision model. It will be shown that under each of a number of recurrency conditions on the transition probability matrices associated with the stationary policies, the optimality equation has a bounded solution. This solution indeed yields a stationary policy which is optimal for a strong version of the average cost optimality criterion.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate relationships among three types of preferences and their associated utility representations in a two-period context.
Discusses how point-scoring systems used by credit grantors to weigh credit applications may be objective, but also enable creditors to discriminate arbitrarily against individuals. Advantages of using the point-scoring approach in screening credit applicants; Retailers' value allocation for two consumer characteristics.
This paper considers non-cooperative N-person stochastic games with a countable state space and compact metric action spaces. We concentrate upon the average return per unit time criterion for which the existence of an equilibrium policy is established under a number of recurrency conditions with respect to the transition probability matrices associated with the stationary policies.
Gillies showed that the core of a game depends only on the vital coalitions. We show that the essential coalitions--which include the vital coalitions--determine the nucleolus if the core is not empty.
This paper considers undiscounted Markov Decision Problems. For the general multichain case, we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions which guarantee that the maximal total expected reward for a planning horizon of n epochs minus n times the long run average expected reward has a finite limit as n approaches infinity for each initial state and each final reward vector. In addition, we obtain a characterization of the chain and periodicity structure of the set of one-step and J-step maximal gain policies.
This paper develops optimal portfolio choice and market equilibrium when investors behave according to a generalized lexicographic safety-first rule. We show that the mutual fund separation property holds for the optimal portfolio choice of a risk-averse safety-first investor. We also derive an explicit valuation formula for the equilibrium value of assets.
This paper provides a new approach for solving a wide class of Markov decision problems including problems in which the space is general and the system can be continuously controlled. The optimality criterion is the long-run average cost per unit time. We decompose the decision processes into a common underlying stochastic process and a sequence of interventions so that the decision processes can be embedded upon a reduced set of states.
In a preceding paper we have introduced a new approach for solving a wide class of Markov decision problems in which the state-space may be general and the system may be continuously controlled. The criterion is the average cost. This paper discusses two applications of this approach. The first application concerns a house-selling problem in which a constructor builds houses which may be sold at any stage of the construction and potential customers make offers depending on the stage of the construction.
Examines the impact of message to direct mail response on sales. Discussions on the Bales interaction process analysis; Analysis of variance; Correlation between the intention to purchase to attitude towards the magazine.
Examines the quantity-setting behavior under price uncertainty. Probability of loss; Use of the monotonicity property of distributions; Changes in fixed costs, price, and taxes.
Reprinted in Fred Lane, (ed.), <em>Current Issues in Public Administration</em> (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978), pp. 288- 301.
This paper is presented within the context of two streams of research which can be identified in the current literature of empirical accounting research. Both of these research areas deal with changes in accounting methods. The first deals with the motivation for changes in accounting methods, and the second area, attempts are made to discover the consequences of accounting changes in terms of the reaction of capital markets to the output of the accounting process.
This paper deals primarily with forecast disclosure rules, a topic that has attracted the attention of both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the accounting profession. We consider two fundamental and related aspects of such a rule: 1) the extent to which the type of information to be disclosed conveys information pertinent to valuing firms; and 2) the extent to which a rule requiring public forecast disclosure is consistent with Pareto optimal allocations of resources.
In recent years productivity bargaining has been heralded as a promising means of increasing productivity in government, particularly at state and local levels. However, analysis of the literature and practice of productivity bargaining indicates that certain inherent conceptual and implementational problems have not been adequately recognized by academics and practitioners. The central problem concerns the failure to recognize that productivity gains may be counterproductive if accompanied by excessive unit cost increases.
In his fundamental works and Douglas Vickers integrates the production, investment and financing decisions of the firm into a useful and illuminating model. He deals with uncertainty using risk-adjusted capitalization and interest rates, assumes constant business risk and treats financial risk as a function of leverage. This paper extends Vickers' analysis by allowing business risk to depend on production and investment decisions.
Can collective bargaining and the merit system co-exist in public employment? Many writers in the field think that concepts of merit must give way to seniority in government service, as it has in the private sector. The authors believe that view is incorrect. Indeed, by pressing for equity, and an end to patronage, unions may even be contributing to the strengthening of the merit system.
The article explores the increasing popularity and importance of interest arbitration with regard to resolving collective bargaining disputes in public sector labor relations in the U.S. In avoiding or terminating strikes that threaten basic public interest, the use of arbitration may pose the only practical means of dealing with the situation. Furthermore, third-party figures brought to negotiating disputes harbors a fairness concept that is often viewed an important ingredient of labor stability.
The purpose of this paper is to study consumer information processing within the context of attitude formation and change. Examination of the cognitive rules used by consumers in manipulating information presented in a persuasive communication seems quite relevant to understanding the impact of such communications. Persuasive communications can be viewed as presenting data to the consumer, who then manipulates and combines those data in the process of forming or changing an attitude.
During the past several years, one of the more intensively studied areas in marketing and consumer research has been multi-attribute models of attitude [36]. The basic proposition of these models is that consumers form attitudes toward products on the basis of product attributes, a formulation which has considerable implications for marketing strategies.
In a field experiment three salesman employed six alternative messages in attempting to sell a magazine subscription to student subjects randomly selected from the registrar's listing at a major university. Three conversational and three nonconversational messages, developed from Bales's Interaction Process Analysis, were employed in a telephone selling paradigm, designed to minimize extraneous nonverbal communication. Each salesman contacted prospective subjects (n = 78, 73, 118) until he had completed 42 sales attempts, 7 per message, for which a postquestionnaire was administered.
A distinction is drawn between the multiattribute attitude model as a measurement device and as a theory of attitude formation and change. Using an analysis of variance paradigm to investigate the underlying multiplicative and summative assumptions, Fishbein's multiattribute theory is found to demonstrate reasonably high construct validity. Individual differences in attribute combination rules are identified, and the issue of cognitive averaging vs. cognitive summation is raised.
With so many mathematically bowdlerized, and computerized, versions of the application of systems analysis abroad it is a pleasure to welcome this purely descriptive account of the application of decision system analysis (DSA) to four marketing decision systems. Professors Capon and Hulbert describe the application of DSA to pricing, forecasting, advertising, and new product development that they carried out with the cooperation of a large, multinational, British firm specialized in the marketing of processed raw materials to secondary processors.
With so many mathematically bowdlerized, and computerized, versions of the application of systems analysis abroad it is a pleasure to welcome this purely descriptive account of the application of decision system analysis (DSA) to four marketing decision systems. Professors Capon and Hulbert describe the application of DSA to pricing, forecasting, advertising, and new product development that they carried out with the cooperation of a large, multinational, British firm specialized in the marketing of processed raw materials to secondary processors.
This research paper presents an in-depth study of two systems developed by a British oligopolist's one system for sales volume forecasting, the other system for day-to-day decisions on pricing. The paper describes two decision systems employed by a firm in an industry characterized as undifferentiated oligopoly; the development of terms of trade to suit market conditions and of short-term expectations with regard to volumes.
This research paper presents an in-depth study of two systems developed by a British oligopolist's one system for sales volume forecasting, the other system for day-to-day decisions on pricing. The paper describes two decision systems employed by a firm in an industry characterized as undifferentiated oligopoly; the development of terms of trade to suit market conditions and of short-term expectations with regard to volumes.
Single-period portfolio selection deals with the allocation of an investor's initial wealth to a finite number of risky assets according to his preferences over random final wealth. The purpose of this paper is to study chance-constrained portfolio selection from the point of view of utility theory.
Article reprinted with permission from the Journal of Marketing Research, published by the American Marketing Association, Don Sexton, 11, no. 1 (February 1974), pp. 109-14.