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.
Differentiated product models are predicated on the belief that a product's utility can be derived from the summation of utilities for its individual attributes. In one framed field experiment and two natural field experiments, we test this assumption by experimentally manipulating the order of attribute presentation in the product customization process of custom-made suits and automobiles.
The standard analysis of the efficient management of income taxes and debt assumes a benevolent government and ignores potential distortions arising from rent-seeking politicians. This paper departs from this framework by assuming that a rent-seeking politician chooses policies. If the politician chooses extractive policies, citizens throw him out of power. We analyze the efficient sustainable equilibrium. Unlike in the standard economy, temporary economic shocks generate volatile and persistent changes in taxes along the equilibrium path.
We examine how cheap talk communication between managers within the same firm depends on the type of decisions that the firm makes. A firm consists of a headquarters and two operating divisions. Headquarters is unbiased but does not know the demand conditions in the divisions’ markets. Each division manager knows the demand conditions in his market but is also biased towards his division. The division managers communicate with headquarters, which then sets either the prices or quantities for each division.
We study a dynamic overlapping generations model where the population growth rate is stochastic, or can experience gradual but persistent changes. This leads to changes in the demographic makeup of the economy across the young, middle aged (who do the principal saving) and the old (who sell their assets to finance consumption).
This paper examines the so far unexplored relationship between short selling and news. It starts with a theoretical analysis of short selling's potentially beneficial and harmful effects, a brief history of its regulation and a review of the existing empirical literature. The study that follows uses daily NYSE short sale trading data representing a total of 2.3 million firm days and a measure negativity of firm news based on a content analysis of the Dow Jones Newswires.
Because the level of uncertainty experienced by the two parties differs, operating autonomy in Chinese joint ventures (JVs) can be predicted with asymmetrical accuracy. Resource contributions, ownership structure, and strategic intent of partners all contribute to autonomy in their quality-, market-, and import/export- related decisions. Results indicate that the foreign partner’s control tendency is easier to predict than the Chinese partner’s control tendency which is consistent with the resource dependence framework.
Becoming part of the euro zone was a big commitment for Greece. It meant abandoning its control of the printing press, which can be a perpetual means of financing government deficits (spending in excess of taxation). But, after making that commitment, the Greek government ran its fiscal affairs in a profligate manner, not just during the recent crisis, but continually, even during the boom years of 2004–2006.
This study presents a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between diversification and performance in private equity. It pioneers the view of industry diversification in private equity firms on a firm level rather than on the level of individual funds, providing the first analysis for comparison with traditional multi-business firms. The study not only draws on a broad range of established research methodologies from the strategic management and finance discipline, it also extends them as a weighted least squares regression is applied in order to account for heteroscedasticity.
Because of its evolutionary roots, the affective system of evaluation is inherently more ordinal in its architecture than the cognitive system. That is, the affective system focuses more on the relative ranking of target objects on the evaluative dimension than on their absolute values on the same dimension.
This paper analyzes China's experience under U.S. apparel and textile quotas. It makes use of a new database that tracks U.S. trading partners' performance under the quota regimes established by the global Multifiber Arrangement (1974 to 1995) and subsequent Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (1995 to 2005). We find that China was relatively more constrained under these regimes than other countries and that, as quotas were lifted, China's exports grew disproportionately. When the ATC finally ended in 2005, China's exports surged while those from nearly all other regions fell.
In less than three decades, China has grown from playing a negligible role in world trade to being one of the world's largest exporters, a substantial importer of raw materials, intermediate outputs, and other goods, and both a recipient and source of foreign investment. Not surprisingly, China's economic dynamism has generated considerable attention and concern in the United States and beyond.
Infinitely repeated games is the pre-dominant paradigm within which economists study long-term strategic interaction. The standard framework allows players to condition their strategies on all past actions; that is, assumes that they have unbounded memory. That is clearly a convenient simplification that is at odds with reality. In this paper we restrict attention to one-period memory and characterize all totally mixed equilibria. In particular, we focus on strongly mixed equilibria. We provide conditions that are necessary and sufficient for a game to have such an equilibrium.
We present a tractable, linear model for the simultaneous pricing of stock and bond returns that incorporates stochastic risk aversion. In this model, analytic solutions for endogenous stock and bond prices and returns are readily calculated. After estimating the parameters of the model by the general method of moments, we investigate a series of classic puzzles of the empirical asset pricing literature.
The present studies aimed to extend Regulatory Fit Theory in the domain of persuasive communication by (a) using printed advertisement images without any verbal claim, instead of purely or mostly verbal messages; (b) selecting the images to fit the distinct orientations of regulatory mode rather than regulatory focus; and (c) priming regulatory mode orientation instead of relying on chronic prevalence of either locomotion or assessment orientation.
In The Art of Choosing, Columbia Business School professor Sheena Iyengar, a leading expert on choice, sets herself the Herculean task of helping us become better choosers. She asks fascinating questions: Is the desire for choice innate or created by culture? Why do we sometimes choose against our best interests? How much control do we really have over what we choose? Ultimately, she offers unexpected and profound answers, drawn from her award-winning, discipline-spanning research.
We study a family of stylized assortment planning problems, where arriving customers make purchase decisions among offered products based on maximizing their utility. Given limited display capacity and no a priori information on consumers' utility, the retailer must select which subset of products to offer. By offering different assortments and observing the resulting purchase behavior, the retailer learns about consumer preferences, but this experimentation should be balanced with the goal of maximizing revenues.
Although there is a good deal of speculation surrounding the role of pharmaceutical innovation in late 20th century mortality improvements in the United States, there is little empirical evidence on the topic and there remains a good deal of doubt regarding whether pharmaceuticals matter at all for mortality.
In this paper, we postulate a general class of price competition models with Mixed Multi Nomial Logit demand functions under affine cost functions. We characterize the equilibrium behavior of this class of models starting with the case where each product in the market is sold by a separate, independent firm. Here we identify a natural upper bound for the price levels.
In October 2003, leading Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn slashed prices up to 30% on more than 1,000 items to counter a loss in market share caused by consumer perception of high prices. AH continued the strategy for the ensuing three years, forcing competing supermarkets to match the markdowns or risk customer defections. Game theory adherents and analysts questioned the strategy, noting price wars often jeopardize profits of both individual companies and their industries.
In 1999, Carly Fiorina became Hewlett-Packard's first chief executive from outside the company, ushering in a period marked both by transformation as well as division within the board and between directors and the CEO. The relationship between Fiorina, who was also appointed to chair the board soon after her hire, and HP's other board members was at first mutually supportive.
This article explains how the metric, Customer Value Added (CVA), can be applied to develop effective marketing and branding strategies. Strategies that are successful against competitors should focus on creating CVA that is greater than those produced by competitors. To do so, one must first regularly measure and monitor CVA by examining its components, perceived value and variable costs per unit. Next, one must develop strategies and tactics to increase CVA effectively and efficiently. In the long run, the organization that succeeds in achieving and maintaining the highest CVA wins.
This paper explores the link between financial conditions and economic activity. We first review existing measures, including both single indicators and composite financial conditions indexes (FCIs). We then build a new FCI that features three key innovations. First, besides interest rates and asset prices, it includes a broad range of quantitative and survey-based indicators. Second, our use of unbalanced panel estimation techniques results in a longer time series (back to 1970) than available for other indexes.
Organized groups face a fundamental problem of how to distribute resources fairly. We found people view it as less fair to distribute resources equally when the allocated resource invokes the market by being a medium of exchange than when the allocated resource is a good that holds value in use. These differences in fairness can be attributed to being a medium of exchange, and not to other essential properties of money (i.e., being a unit of account or a store of value).
The authors propose that gender differences in negotiations reflect women's contextually contingent impression management strategies. They argue that the same behavior, bargaining assertively, is construed as congruent with female gender roles in some contexts yet incongruent in other contexts. Further, women take this contextual variation into account, adjusting their bargaining behavior to manage social impressions. A particularly important contextual variable is advocacy—whether bargaining on one's own behalf versus on another's behalf.
This article complements the structural New Keynesian macro framework with a no-arbitrage affine term structure model. Whereas our methodology is general, we focus on an extended macro model with unobservable processes for the inflation target and the natural rate of output that are filtered from macro and term structure data. We find that term structure information helps generate large and significant parameters governing the monetary policy transmission mechanism. Our model also delivers strong contemporaneous responses of the entire term structure to various macroeconomic shocks.
After decades of research highlighting the fallibility of first impressions, recent years have featured reports of valid impressions based on surprisingly limited information, such as photos and short videos. Yet beneath mean levels of accuracy lies tremendous variance—some snap judgments are well-founded, others wrongheaded. An essential question for perceivers, therefore, is whether and when to trust their initial intuitions about others.
The actions of different agents sometimes reinforce each other. Examples are network effects and the threshold models used by sociologists as well as Harvey Leibensteins's "bandwagon effects." We model such situations as a game with increasing differences, and show that tipping of equilibria, cascading and clubs with entrapment are natural consequences of this mutual reinforcement. If there are several equilibria, one of which Pareto dominates, then the inefficient equilibria can be tipped to the efficient one, a result of interest in the context of coordination problems.
Timely access to care is a key component of high quality health care. Yet, patient delays are prevalent throughout the health-care system resulting in dissatisfaction and adverse clinical consequences for patients as well as potentially higher costs and wasted capacity for providers. For this reason, the Institute of Medicine has identified "timeliness" as one of the six keys in "aims for improvement" in its health-care quality initiative.
Frederic Mishkin responds to the Brookings Institution paper "Understanding Inflation-Indexed Bond Markets" by John Campbell, Robert Shiller, and Luis Viceira. Drawing from his experience as a former governor of the Federal Reserve, Mishkin discusses why their analysis is so important for policymakers.
Each day we face countless decisions that test our self-control : order greasy pizza or a healthy salad for lunch? Buy a new pair of shoes or put that money in the bank? Surf the Internet or buckle down and finish the project? We don?t always make the "best" choices for ourselves, and we often realize that we should find a way to reduce temptation.
Oikonomia is a Greek word with multiple meanings, or rather, one meaning that has different aspects, and applies to various levels of human organization (individual, family, community, and society). Nemein means to manage or control and oikos is a house. The concept can have a purely individual connotation: "the rules which control a person's manner of living," or "making the most of one's resources." The management of a household is the most literal translation.
Motivated by applications in financial services, we consider a seller who offers prices sequentially to a stream of potential customers, observing either success or failure in each sales attempt. The parameters of the underlying demand model are initially unknown, so each price decision involves a trade-off between learning and earning. Attention is restricted to the simplest kind of model uncertainty, where one of two demand models is known to apply, and we focus initially on performance of the myopic Bayesian policy (MBP), variants of which are commonly used in practice.