Media

For generations, the Pritzkers, one of the wealthiest and most philanthropic families in the United States, primarily managed their assets in order to enrich the family as a whole, as opposed to generating wealth for individual family members. The Pritzkers were historically publicity shy, but their saga gained much media attention in the early 2000s when some family members questioned the asset distribution and leadership requests of their forefathers.

Markets for information products exhibit varying degrees of competition on both the supply and the demand side. This paper studies the potential complementarity of information products, equilibrium information buying behaviors and information price setting in such markets. Our game-theoretic model consists of two information providers selling imperfect information to two competing clients and allows for different information quality levels as well as varying degrees of client competition.

We present a method that dynamically designs elicitation questions for estimating preferences, focusing on the parameters of cumulative prospect theory and time discounting models. Typically these parameters are elicited by presenting decision makers with a series of choices between alternatives, gambles or delayed payments. The method dynamically (i.e., adaptively) designs such choices to optimize the information provided by each choice, while leveraging the distribution of the parameters across decision makers (heterogeneity) and capturing response error.

We empirically study the motivations of users to contribute content to social media in the context of the popular microblogging site Twitter. We focus on non-commercial users who do not benefit financially from their contributions. Previous literature suggests two main possible sources of motivation to post content for these users: intrinsic motivation and image-related motivation. We leverage the fact that these two types of motivation give rise to different predictions as to whether users should increase their contributions when their number of followers (audience size) increases.

It is often claimed that we live in an information age. This has many implications for decision makers in general and business leaders in particular. For most businesses nowadays, increasingly, it is superior information that is at the origin of competitive advantage. The prime challenge in this new environment does not start with data analysis. Rather, the most important issue for the firm is to understand its information needs: what information, if it were available, would make a real difference for value creation and competitive advantage?

An interview with Gilles Fontaine, deputy chief executive officer (CEO) of IDATE, and economics professor Eli Noam of Columbia Business School is presented. When asked to define cord-cutting from a U.S. or European perspective, Noam says it refers to the dropping by consumers of expensive cable television (TV) subscriptions in exchange for online TV access. Fontaine explains why cord-cutting is not happening in Europe. Noam discusses his outlook for the triple-play model of cable firms.

Web 2.0 provides gathering places for internet users in blogs, forums, and chat rooms. These gathering places leave footprints in the form of colossal amounts of data regarding consumers' thoughts, beliefs, experiences, and even interactions. In this paper, we propose an approach for firms to explore online user-generated content and "listen" to what customers write about their and the competitors' products. Our objective is to convert the user-generated content to market structures and competitive landscape insights.