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.
In a dynamic setting with demand following a random process, we ask how investment and operating decisions can be delegated to a manager with unknown time preferences. Only the manager observes the demand realization in each period and, therefore, has private information when choosing whether to acquire the productive asset and, subsequently, how to utilize it. We derive accrual accounting-based performance measures under which the manager will make the efficient decisions provided the investment date is exogenously given.
This paper examines the contribution of out-of-town second-house buyers to mispricing in the housing market. We show that demand from out-of-town second-house buyers during the mid 2000s predicted not only house-price appreciation rates but also implied-to-actual-rent-ratio appreciation rates, a proxy for mispricing. We then apply a novel identification strategy to address the issue of reverse causality.
I review the changing advertising landscape and suggest that the definition of advertising has inherently changed. Using the current advertising context, I develop research questions that consumer behavior scholars are well poised to address. This research agenda is rooted in real-world observations about advertising and can help us develop new theories about when, how, and why advertising influences and persuades consumers. A recurring theme in this article is that consumers may be misled due to information overload from multiple channels and sources.
Sandra Matz, Yin Wah Fiona Chan, and Michael Kosinsky survey models of personality. They cover a wide range of personality models including the most popular Five Factor Model (FFM). The authors stress the importance of the underlying assumptions, which lead to each model. The discussion includes also the relationships between the models and the suitability of the models for automatic detection of personality through digital footprints.
In contrast to decades of research reporting surprisingly weak relationships between consumption and happiness, recent findings suggest that money can indeed increase happiness if it is spent the "right way" (e.g., on experiences or on other people). Drawing on the concept of psychological fit, we extend this research by arguing that individual differences play a central role in determining the "right" type of spending to increase well-being.
The study of multicultural identity has gained prominence in recent decades and will be even more urgent as the mobility of individuals and social groups becomes the "new normal." This paper reviews the state-of-the-art theoretical advancements and empirical discoveries of multicultural identity processes at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and collective (e.g., organizational, societal) levels. First, biculturalism has more benefits for individuals’ psychological and sociocultural adjustment than monoculturalism.
We develop a tractable incomplete-markets model with an earnings process Y subject to permanent shocks and borrowing constraints. Financial frictions cause the marginal (certainty equivalent) value of wealth W to be greater than unity and decrease with liquidity w=W/Y. Additionally, financial frictions cause consumption to decrease with this endogenously determined marginal value of liquidity. Risk aversion and the elasticity of inter-temporal substitution play very different roles on consumption and the dispersion of w.
Delegation is a central feature of organizational design that theory suggests should be aligned with the intensity of incentives. We explore a specific form of delegation, namely price delegation, whereby firms allow sales people to offer a maximum discount from the list price to their customers. We develop a model of the price delegation decision based on information acquisition that relies on characteristics of our empirical context of industrial sales.
Consumers frequently evaluate their own traits before making consumption decisions (e.g., am I thin enough for skinny jeans?). The outcome of these self-evaluations depends on the standard consumers use and on whether they evaluate self in assimilation or contrast to that standard. Previous self-judgment research has focused on self-standards that arise from social aspects of the environment, including people and groups.
Firms often use both objective/verifiable and subjective/non-verifiable performance measures to provide employees with effort incentives. We study a principal/two-agent model in which an objective team-based performance measure and subjective individual performance measures are available for contracting. A problem with tying rewards to subjective measures is that the principal may have incentives to understate the realization of those measures in order to reduce compensation. We compare two mechanisms for overcoming this credibility problem: bonus pools and reputation.
An Expected Utility maximizer can be risk neutral over a set of non-degenerate multivariate distributions even though her NM (von Neumann Morgenstern) index is not linear. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for an individual with a concave NM utility to exhibit risk neutral behavior and characterize the regions of the choice space over which risk neutrality is exhibited. The least concave decomposition of the NM index introduced by Debreu [3] plays an important role in our analysis as do the notions of minimum concavity points and minimum concavity directions.
This paper examines the effects of employer social responsibility on the wages workers demand through randomized field experiments in two online labor marketplaces. Workers were recruited for short-term jobs and I manipulated whether or not they received information about the employer's social responsibility. I then observed the payment workers were willing to accept for the job.
People choose where to live and how much to invest in housing. Traditionally, the first decision has been the domain of spatial economics, while the second has been analyzed in finance. Spatial asset pricing is an attempt to combine equilibrium concepts from both disciplines. In the finance context, we show how spatial decisions can be framed as an expanded portfolio problem. Within spatial economics, we identify the consequences of hedging motives for location decisions.
Three high-power studies (N = 3,000 total) demonstrated that asking participants to recall an experience as a manipulation can have unintended consequences. Participants who recalled preoccupying secrets made more extreme judgments of an external environment, supporting the notion that secrecy is burdensome. This influence was found, however, only among a subset of participants (i.e., participants who successfully recalled secrets that corresponded to their condition). We introduce the concept of manipulation correspondence to understand these patterns of results.
We show that venture capitalists' (VCs) on-site involvement with their portfolio companies leads to an increase in (1) innovation and (2) the likelihood of a successful exit. We rule out selection effects by exploiting an exogenous source of variation in VC involvement: the introduction of new airline routes that reduce VCs' travel times to their existing portfolio companies.
Does making the first offer increase or impair a negotiator's outcomes? Past research has found evidence supporting both claims. To reconcile these contradictory findings, we developed and tested an integrative model — the Information-Anchoring Model of First Offers. The model predicts when and why making the first offer helps versus hurts. We suggest that first offers have 2 effects. First, they serve as anchors that pull final settlements toward the initial first-offer value; this anchor function often produces a first-mover advantage.
In the past two decades, pricing research has paid increasing attention to instances where a product's price is divided into a base price and one or more mandatory surcharges, a practice termed partitioned pricing. Recently, partitioned pricing strategies in the marketplace have become more pervasive and complex, raising concerns that consumers do not always fully attend to or process all price information, and underestimate total prices, which in turn influences their purchasing behavior.
The market’s expansion into the traditional nonmarket sphere often provokes fierce opposition, and while past research has studied cultural barrier as a bar to market expansion, this paper considers the role of political forces in shaping the boundary of market. The state plays an important role in defining what kinds of goods can be traded and what kinds of organizations can be legitimate players in markets. But the state does not do so randomly, and it uses markets to fulfil the need for state building.
This paper examines the role of a hospital Step-Down Unit (SDU) on patient flows and patient outcomes. An SDU provides an intermediate level of care for semi-critically ill patients who are not sick enough to require intensive care but not stable enough to be treated in the general medical/surgical ward (ward). Using data from 10 hospitals from a single hospital network, we use an instrumental variable approach to estimate the impact on patient outcomes of routing patients to the SDU following Intensive Care Unit (ICU) discharge.
Under accounting principles, the recognition of earnings is path-dependent and the path depends on risk and its resolution: under the so-called realization principle, earnings are not booked until uncertainty is resolved. In asset pricing terms, the principle means that earnings cannot be recognized until the firm can book a low-beta asset such as cash or a near-cash discounted receivable. If the risk to which this accounting responds is priced risk, the accounting indicates the expected return.
This research investigates the link between rivalry and unethical behavior. We propose that people will be more willing and likely to engage in unethical behavior when competing against their rivals than when competing against non-rival competitors. Further, we argue that rivalry may act as a mindset such that mere exposure to one’s rivals can be enough to incite unethical behavior even in domains unrelated to that rivalrous relationship.
Media concentration has been an issue around the world. To some observers the power of large corporations has never been higher. To others, the Internet has brought openness and diversity. What perspective is correct? The answer has significant implications for politics, business, culture, regulation, and innovation. It addresses a highly contentious subject of public debate in many countries around the world. In this discussion, one side fears the emergence of media empires that can sway public opinion and endanger democracy.
Perspective taking is a crucial leadership skill, yet Galinsky and Schweitzer contend that it becomes more difficult the higher you rise in an organization. Gaining perspective helps to motivate others, communicate more clearly, and navigate difficult or tense situations. Their article includes research they conducted with psychologists at the University of Iowa, the University of California-Los Angeles, and New York University, as well as an anecdote about President John F. Kennedy and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
We document that contractual disclosures by intermediaries during the sale of mortgages contained false information about the borrower's housing equity in 7–14% of loans. The rate of misrepresented loan default was 70% higher than for similar loans. These misrepresentations likely occurred late in the intermediation and exist among securities sold by all reputable intermediaries. Investors — including large institutions — holding securities with misrepresented collateral suffered severe losses due to loan defaults, price declines, and ratings downgrades.
Sialkot, Pakistan is the world center of hand-stitched soccer-ball production, home to roughly 130 firms, which produce for all major brands (Atkin et al 2015a, 2015b). At first blush, the existence of this cluster is puzzling. Pakistanis’ sporting passion is cricket; soccer has always been of marginal interest in the country. One might be tempted to dismiss the existence of a cluster where there is no apparent local demand as an anomaly, curious in itself but not indicative of a deeper pattern. But the phenomenon is not uncommon.
Is the perceived value of things an absolute measurable quantity, as in economists’ notion of “cardinal utility,” or a relative assessment of the various objects being evaluated, as in economists’ notion of “ordinal utility”? We believe that the answer depends in part upon which judgment system underlies the evaluation. Specifically, we advance the proposition that due to its distant evolutionary roots, the affective system of judgment is inherently more ordinal (less cardinal) than the cognitive system.