Strategy

We develop a model of customer channel migration and apply it to a retailer that markets over the Web and through catalogs. The model (1) identifies the key phenomena required to analyze customer migration, (2) shows how these phenomena can be modeled, and (3) develops an approach for estimating the model. The methodology is unique in its ability to accommodate heterogeneous customer responses to a large number of distinct marketing communications in a dynamic context.

The separation of ownership and control allows controlling shareholders to pursue private benefits. We develop an analytically tractable dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to study asset pricing and welfare implications of imperfect investor protection. Consistent with empirical evidence, the model predicts that countries with weaker investor protection have more incentives to overinvest, lower Tobin's q, higher return volatility, larger risk premia, and higher interest rate.

A German broker's clients place similar speculative trades and therefore tend to be on the same side of the market in a given stock during a given day, week, month, and quarter. Aggregate liquidity effects, short sale constraints, the systematic execution of limit orders (coordinated through price movements) or the correlated trading of other investors who pick off retail limit orders, do not fully explain why retail investors trade similarly. Correlated market orders lead returns, presumably due to persistent speculative price pressure.

The software application Golfmetrics was created to capture and store golfer shot data and to quantify differences in shot patterns between players of different skill levels. Across golfers it is shown, somewhat surprisingly, that longer hitters tend to be straighter than shorter hitters. Individual golfers can be measured relative to a benchmark to assess relative accuracy and to suggest whether to focus on increasing distance or decreasing directional errors. For amateur golfers, distance errors on short game and sand shots are shown to be about three times larger than direction errors.

Two Columbia Business School students have developed an idea for a shoe accessory. They believe that this product will sell and want to set up a company. What marketing-related questions should they address in order to increase their chance of success?

Michael Dwork and his team are developing a line of environmentally-friendly disposable dinnerware. They want to use conjoint analysis to determine consumers' preferences and willingness to pay. Would you modify their questionnaire in any way?

The economy of India is growing at a rate of 8 percent per year, and its exports of goods and services have more than doubled in the past three years. Considering these trends, economists, scholars, and political leaders across the globe are beginning to wonder whether India's growth can be sustained.

This paper compares centralized and decentralized price setting by a firm that sells a single product in two markets, but is constrained to set one price (e.g., due to arbitrage). Each market is characterized by a different linear demand function, and demand conditions are privately observed by a local manager. This manager only cares about profits in his own market and, as a result, communicates his information strategically. Our main results link organizational design to market demand.

We are currently experiencing a major shock to the financial system, initiated by problems in the subprime mortgage market, which spread to securitization products and credit markets more generally. Banks are being asked to increase the amount of risk that they absorb (by moving off-balance sheet assets onto their balance sheets), but losses that the banks have suffered limit their capacity to absorb those risky assets.