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.
Why companies have had difficulties determining marketing ROI and how they should approach evaluating marketing ROI. (Reprinted from Columbia Ideas at Work, "Many Happy Returns on Marketing," 8/31/2009, pp. 1-2.)
In every period, an aggressive country seeks concessions from a non-aggressive country with private information about their cost. The aggressive country can force concessions via war, and both countries suffer from limited commitment.We characterize the efficient sequential equilibria. We show that war is necessary to sustain peace and that temporary wars can emerge because of the coarseness of public information. In the long run, temporary wars can be sustained only if countries are patient, if the cost of war is large, and if the cost of concessions is low.
We investigate whether accounting discretion is (i) abused by opportunistic managers who exploit lax governance structures, or (ii) used by managers in a manner consistent with efficient contracting and shareholder value-maximization. Prior research documents an association between accounting discretion and poor governance quality and concludes that such evidence is consistent with abuse of the latitude allowed by accounting rules.
The corporate advantage paradigm of Collis & Montgomery (2005) is expanded and operationalized using six acid tests of corporate strategy that facilitate efficacy comparisons across diversified firms. The best corporate strategy is balanced on all dimensions and creates the desirable outcomes of superior competitive advantage for the firm’s business units, operating synergies across family members and a robust resource renewal process that provides appropriate resources for the firm’s future success.
Identity movements rely on a shared "we-feeling" amongst a community of participants. In turn, such shared identities are possible when movement participants can self-categorize themselves as belonging to one group. We address a debate as to whether community diversity enhances or impedes such protests, and investigate the role of racial diversity since it is a simple, accessible, and visible basis of community diversity and social categorization.
In this chapter, DeVoe and Iyengar argue that the perceived fairness of different allocation norms (e.g., equity and equality) depends on the resource being allocated. In particular, they argue that people have a greater preference for allocating resources equitably when the resource to be allocated is money (or other easily monetized goods) relative to nonmonetized goods.
Financial crises appear to be a common and fairly constant feature of the economic cycle. Banking crises, a distinct subset of financial crises, consist either of panics, moments of temporary confusion about the unobservable incidence across the financial system of observable aggregate shocks, or severe waves of bank failures which result in aggregate negative net worth of failed banks in excess of one percent of GDP.
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.
Since Max Barenbrug and Eduard Zanen founded Bugaboo, a baby stroller company, in 1995, the company had grown into a global corporation with over 800 people worldwide. Such rapid growth and accretion of brand equity presented Bugaboo with both opportunities and challenges. Max's vision was to become "the leading mobility brand in the world." To achieve this vision, the company would have to introduce new products in categories outside of strollers. How could the company capture and replicate the essence of what drove its initial success?
We study a capacity sizing problem in a service system that is modeled as a single-class queue with multiple servers and where customers may renege while waiting for service. A salient feature of the model is that the mean arrival rate of work is random (in practice this is a typical consequence of forecasting errors). The paper elucidates the impact of uncertainty on the nature of capacity prescriptions, and relates these to well established rules-of-thumb such as the square root safety staffing principle.
We study scheduling of multimedia traffic on the downlink of a wireless communication system. We examine a scenario where multimedia packets are associated with strict deadlines and are equivalent to lost packets if they arrive after their associated deadlines. Lost packets result in degradation of playout quality at the receiver, which is quantified in terms of the "distortion cost" associated with each packet. Our goal is to design a scheduler which minimizes the aggregate distortion cost over all receivers. We study the scheduling problem in a dynamic programming (DP) framework.
Discrete choice models are appealing for airline revenue management (RM) because they offer a means to profitably exploit preferences for attributes such as time of day, routing, brand, and price. They are also good at modeling demand for unrestricted fare class structures, which are widespread throughout the industry. However, there is little empirical research on the practicality and effectiveness of choice-based RM models. Toward this end, we report the results of a study of choice-based RM conducted with a major U.S. airline.
Using data on repurchase agreements by primary securities dealers, we show that three classes of securities (Treasury securities, securities issued by government-sponsored agencies, and mortgage-backed securities) can be formally ranked in terms of their collateral values in the general collateral (GC) market.
Four studies examined the relationship between counterfactual origins — thoughts about how the beginning of organizations, countries, and social connections might have turned out differently — and increased feelings of commitment to those institutions and connections. Study 1 found that counterfactually reflecting on the origins of one's country increases patriotism. Study 2 extended this finding to organizational commitment and examined the mediating role of poignancy.
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.
The intensity of modern business has increased pressure for innovation, which places greater emphasis on creativity. This article explores one of the central sites of creativity in the American corporate world, the advertising agency. We examine how creativity in agencies is managed, controlled, and channeled to produce advertisements. We contend that the brand advertised and the agency’s creative collaborations have properties of ritual symbols and that rituals mediate tension inherent in two forces, stability and change, which define the brand and the advertising collaboration.
We argue that differences between the landscapes of influence situations in Indian and American societies induce Indians to accommodate to others more often than Americans. To investigate cultural differences in situation-scapes, we sampled interpersonal influence situations occurring in India and the United States from both the influencee's (Study 1) and the influencer's (Study 2) perspectives. We found that Indian influence situations were dramatically more likely than U.S. situations to feature other-serving motives and to result in positive consequences for the relationship.
Cultural influences on individual judgment and decision making are increasingly understood in terms of dynamic constructive processing and the structures in social environments that shape distinct processing styles, directing initial attentional foci, activating particular judgment schemas and decision strategies, and ultimately reinforcing some judgment and decision making (JDM) patterns over others.
A fundamental challenge facing social perceivers is identifying the cause underlying other people’s behavior. Evidence indicates that East Asian perceivers are more likely than Western perceivers to reference the social context when attributing a cause to a target person’s actions. One outstanding question is whether this reflects a culture’s influence on automatic or on controlled components of causal attribution.
The authors test methods, based on cognitively simple decision rules, that predict which products consumers select for their consideration sets. Drawing on qualitative research, the authors propose disjunctions-of-conjunctions (DOC) decision rules that generalize well-studied decision models, such as disjunctive, conjunctive, lexicographic, and subset conjunctive rules. They propose two machine-learning methods to estimate cognitively simple DOC rules. They observe consumers' consideration sets for global positioning systems for both calibration and validation data.
Urban success increasingly has taken two different forms in the post-war era. One involves very high house price growth with relatively little population growth. The other pairs strong population expansion with mild house price appreciation. We document the heterogeneity across MSAs in the long-run house price growth rate and show that house price growth and housing unit growth tend to be inversely related. Income growth, too, varies widely across MSAs and high house price growth markets experience both high income growth and a right-shift of their entire income distribution.
By reducing the threat of a hostile takeover, business combination (BC) laws weaken corporate governance and increase the opportunity for managerial slack. Consistent with the notion that competition mitigates managerial slack, we find that while firms in non-competitive industries experience a significant drop in operating performance after the laws' passage, firms in competitive industries experience no significant effect. When we examine which agency problem competition mitigates, we find evidence in support of a "quiet-life" hypothesis.
Purpose: To assess whether perspective-taking, which researchers in other fields have shown to induce empathy, improves patient satisfaction in encounters between student–clinicians and standardized patients (SPs).
Automobile manufacturers in the U.S. supply chain exhibit significant differences in their days-of-supply of finished vehicles (average inventory divided by average daily sales rate). For example, from 1995 to 2004, Toyota consistently carried approximately 30 fewer days-of-supply than General Motors. This suggests that Toyota's well-documented advantage in manufacturing efficiency, product design and upstream supply chain management extends to their finished-goods inventory in their downstream supply chain from their assembly plants to their dealerships.
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.
Consider a firm that owns a fixed capacity of a resource that is consumed in the production or delivery of multiple products. The firm strives to maximize its total expected revenues over a finite horizon, either by choosing a dynamic pricing strategy for each product or, if prices are fixed, by selecting a dynamic rule that controls the allocation of capacity to requests for the different products.
This chapter reviews multiproduct dynamic pricing models for a revenue maximizing monopolist firm. The baseline model studied in this article is of a seller that owns a fixed capacity of a resource that is consumed in the production or delivery of some type of product. The seller selects a dynamic pricing strategy for the offered product so as to maximize its total expected revenues over a finite time horizon.
This article examines how managers' tendency to discuss new ideas with others in their professional networks depends on the density of shared ties surrounding a given relationship. Consistent with prior research which found that embeddedness enhances information flow, an egocentric network survey of mid-level executives shows that managers tend to discuss new ideas with those who are densely embedded in their professional networks. More specifically, embeddedness increases the likelihood to discuss new ideas by engendering affect-based trust, as opposed to cognition-based trust.
This article examines how managers' tendency to discuss new ideas with others in their professional networks depends on the density of shared ties surrounding a given relationship. Consistent with prior research which found that embeddedness enhances information flow, an egocentric network survey of mid-level executives shows that managers tend to discuss new ideas with those who are densely embedded in their professional networks. More specifically, embeddedness increases the likelihood to discuss new ideas by engendering affect-based trust, as opposed to cognition-based trust.
We develop a dynamic incomplete-markets model of entrepreneurial firms, and demonstrate the implications of nondiversifiable risks for entrepreneurs' interdependent consumption, portfolio allocation, financing, investment, and business exit decisions. We characterize the optimal capital structure via a generalized tradeoff model where risky debt provides significant diversification benefits.
This paper studies the connection between risk taking and executive compensation in financial institutions.