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.
This study proposes and tests a theoretical framework that relates a firm’s imitation strategy and its interaction with R&D resources to incremental and radical innovation. The analysis of a panel dataset of 1381 Chinese manufacturing firms in the period 2008–2014 shows that imitation strategy is positively related to incremental innovation but has an inverted U-shaped relationship with radical innovation.
The psycho-cultural barriers women face are hard to overcome because they are not obvious.
The ongoing convergence of technology, media, and telecommunications has not only transformed the media industry, but also the management practices. This chapter outlines specific challenges for the management of media companies and discusses what convergence means from the perspective of managing media firms.
We study optimal savings policies when there is a dual concern about under-saving for retirement and income inequality. Agents differ in time preferences and earnings ability, both unobservable to a planner with paternalistic and redistributive motives. We characterize the solution to this two-dimensional screening problem and provide a decentralization using realistic policy instruments: forced savings at low incomes — similar to Social Security — but a choice between savings accounts with different subsidies and caps at high incomes — like 401(k) and IRA accounts in the US.
This appendix provides a contrast to the variance decomposition approach for identifying the two types of news in accounting data. This approach, explained in Callen (2009), assumes the Vuolteenaho (2002) model, implemented in a vector autoregressive (VAR) scheme to capture the linear dependencies among multiple time series of indicator variables.
This paper modifies the standard returns-earnings regression in accounting research to show that financial reports convey both cash-flow news and discount-rate (expected-return) news. The paper points to the realization principle, associated as it is with the resolution of risk, as the accounting feature that conveys expected-return news. The modified returns-earnings regressions indicate that the information so conveyed pertains to priced risk.
This article provides a critical review of what is known about affect regulation in relation to consumption behavior. Based on numerous findings from psychology, communication research, and consumer research, we identify a core set of general principles of affect regulation in consumer behavior. First, we define affect regulation, clarify its relations to the concepts of coping and compensatory consumption, and refine the emerging concept of “displaced coping.” We then review the generic strategies used in the regulation of general negative affective states.
We develop theory on how a contentious moral market can develop, and we test it with data from a study of the commercialization of Buddhist temples in China from 2006 to 2016, as local government officials try to boost the local economy by transforming temples into tourist enterprises that charge admission fees. The practice is resisted by monks and the public such that the central government, which values public appearances of social justice, is pressured to support their resistance to local officials’ economic demands.
Maintenance service plans (MSPs) are contracts for the provision of maintenance by a service provider to an equipment operator. These plans can have different payment structures and risk allocations, which induce various types of incentives for agents in the service chain. How do such structures affect service performance and service chain value? We provide an empirical answer to this question by using a unique panel data covering the sales and service records of more than 700 diagnostic body scanners.
Firms exhibit heterogeneity in size, productivity, and internal structure, and this is true even within the same industry. It has been thought since the time of Adam Smith that a firm's internal structure affects its productivity through the channel of gains from specialization. Our paper provides evidence of a link between an organization's culture — specifically the trust environment — and its internal structure. We show experimentally that exogenously imposed culture endogenously leads to variation in organizational form.
Across a field study and four experiments, we examine how social norms and scrutiny affect decisions about adding members of underrepresented populations (e.g., women, racial minorities) to groups. When groups are scrutinized, we theorize that decision makers strive to match the diversity observed in peer groups due to impression management concerns, thereby conforming to the descriptive social norm. We examine this first in the context of U.S. corporate boards, where firms face pressure to increase gender diversity.
We study the dynamic mechanism design problem of a seller that repeatedly auctions independent items over a discrete time horizon to buyers that face a cumulative budget constraint. A driving motivation behind our model is the emergence of real-time bidding markets for online display advertising in which such budgets are prevalent. We assume the seller has a strong form of limited commitment: she commits to the rules of the current auction but cannot commit to those of future auctions.
The authors propose a quantitative approach for describing entertainment products, in a way that allows for improving the predictive performance of consumer choice models for these products. Their approach is based on the media psychology literature, which suggests that people’s consumption of entertainment products is influenced by the psychological themes featured in these products. They classify psychological themes on the basis of the “character strengths” taxonomy from the positive psychology literature (Peterson and Seligman 2004).
Novel measures of technology popularity and usage were constructed and tested to assess the returns available from patenting within mainstream versus more-exotic technology-classification codes (or pairs of codes). <em>Popularity</em> suggested the frequency density with which technological codes (pairs) were most frequently found among competitors' patents. <em>Usage</em> measured whether firms dominated particular technology codes (or pairs of codes) relative to competitors.
We use five years of bidding data to examine the reaction of advertisers to widely disseminated press on the lack of effectiveness of brand search advertising (queries that contain the firm's name) found in a large experiment run by eBay (Blake, Nosko and Tadelis, 2015). We estimate that 11% of firms that did not face competing ads on their brand keywords, matching the case of eBay, discontinued the practice of brand search advertising.
In May 2013 Nicolas Beytout launched L’Opinion, a news organization that published a daily newspaper, with a robust digital presence. L’Opinion was opinion-focused, with Libéral economic thought pieces and analysis at the heart of its content. The media industry had changed drastically in the decade preceding, with brutal competition among the traditional media and new entrants like the platforms Google and Facebook. The political environment was also a moving target, with anti-European nationalism on the rise.
As a result of the digital revolution, new topics and themes have entered consumer research, and, as the digital revolution enters a new phase, additional new concepts and research questions will emerge. To illustrate the variety of themes on digital technology that consumer researchers have studied, I am presenting a collection of five articles that represent this active new research area. Moreover, I will look into the future and propose a research agenda to address key consumer behavior issues occurring during the next phase of the digital transformation.
Using data on the entire population of businesses registered in the states of California and Massachusetts between 1995 and 2011, we decompose the well-established gender gap in entrepreneurship. We show that female-led ventures are 63 percentage points less likely than male-led ventures to obtain external funding (i.e., venture capital). However, investors' gendered preferences can, at most, explain about 35 percent of this differential (or 22 percentage points).
While the study of high-growth firms focuses predominantly on venture-financed startups, the majority of IPOs and acquisitions are achieved without venture capital. This paper uses a predictive analytics approach to shed light on these "missing" growth firms.
In the modern fast-paced workplace, employees are required to be creative under various levels of stress. In understanding the relationship between stress and creativity, organizational scholars and practitioners have largely focused on how stress affects cognition, while overlooking the role that physiological responses to stress might play in creative performance.
This article studies contracts between a principal and an agent that are robust to information asymmetries about measurement quality. Our main result is that an information asymmetry about measurement quality not only reduces the usefulness of a given performance measure for stewardship purposes, it also qualitatively changes the way the performance measure is used if the information asymmetry is sufficiently large.
Logos serve a fundamental role in branding as the visual figurehead of the brand. Yet, due to the difficulty of using unstructured image data, prior research on logo design has been largely limited to non-quantitative studies. In this work, we explore logo design from a data-driven perspective. In particular, we aim to answer several key questions:first, to what degree can logos represent a brand's personality? Second, what are the key visual elements in logos that elicit brand and firm relevant associations, such as brand personality traits?
The aim of this paper is to examine how an acquirer’s diversification strategy shapes the multiple dimensions of inventive activity. Differing from prior research, we use a set of indicators to investigate this phenomenon. In particular, we consider three different but complementary dimensions of inventive quality: technological impact, originality of the synthesized knowledge streams, and generality of applicability across different technological domains.
What does it take for success in the media business? Creativity, innovation, and performance, of course. Plus experience and good judgment. However, it also requires an understanding of the principles and tools of management. This book summarizes the major dimensions of a business school curriculum and applies them to the entire media, media-tech, and digital sectors. Its chapters cover—in a jargonless, non-technical way—the major management functions.
Advances in information technology have enabled consumers to connect and communicate as they never have before. This chapter conceptualizes information and the digital machines that enable contemporary connection and communication as being part of a “Moveable Feast.” A brief historical review tracing the impact and evolution of information technology on consumers’ lives and the marketplace is first provided.
We introduce a novel approach to measure the founding strategic differentiation of startups and its relationship to follow-on performance. We use natural language processing and historical websites to estimate the similarity between the founding website of an individual startup, the historical website of public firms at the startup's founding year, and the founding website of other startups founded in the same year. We propose that distance in the value proposition stated in these websites represents differentiation in the market.
Being a successful manager or entrepreneur in the media and digital sector requires creativity, innovation, and performance. It also requires an understanding of the principles and tools of management. Aimed at the college market, this book is a short, foundational volume on media management. It summarizes the major dimensions of a business school curriculum and applies them to the entire media, media-tech, and digital sector. Its chapters cover—in a jargonless, non-technical way—the major functions of management.