Experience Stern | News

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "We have learned a lot about the nature of humankind since the 1950s. In his best-selling book "The Righteous Mind," social psychologist Jonathan Haidt likens the human mind to a rider (reason) on an elephant (intuition). Back in the 1950s we thought that the rider was in charge, or ought to be. Evidence is accumulating from several fields that this view is wrong; the elephant is in charge and the rider is a much better rationalizer in hindsight than a reasoner in prospect. It seems that, with our limited conscious mental capacity, our minds have evolved to make fast 'good enough' decisions under pressure of time and conditions of uncertainty. Sometimes, especially in evolutionarily unfamiliar contexts, these intuitions play us false, but most of the time they work just fine and we couldn’t live without them."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Psychologists have long known that different cultures tend to think differently. In China and Japan, people think more communally, in terms of relationships. By contrast, people are more individualistic in what psychologist Joseph Henrich, in commenting on the new paper, calls 'WEIRD cultures.' WEIRD stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. Dr. Henrich's point is that cultures like these are actually a tiny minority of all human societies, both geographically and historically. But almost all psychologists study only these WEIRD folks."

Excerpt from WIRED UK -- "The next time someone says that Twitter is worth $50 billion because it's going to have $100 billion in advertising revenue, stop them and ask, 'Well, if it's going to have $100 billion in ad revenue, then who's losing? Because it can't be coming from The New York Times, as most newspapers are penny change in this market. It's got to be coming from Facebook or Google. So if you have Twitter, Facebook and Google in your portfolio and you're telling me that each of these companies is going to be collecting enormous revenues, then I have a problem. Because you have all winners and no losers. It's not a zero-sum game; at some point for every winner there have to be some losers."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'I think the central bank is making occasional interventions to make traders understand that this [the yuan] can go up or down. It does look like tactical maneuvering more than anything else,' Michael Spence, professor of economics, at the NYU Stern School of Business, said on CNBC, with regards to whether the central bank was deliberately guiding the yuan lower in order to support the economy."

Excerpt from Mashable -- "'I've noticed that in cities where Uber competes with Lyft, the pricing is substantially lower than in markets where they don't compete,' said Arun Sundararajan, professor of Information, operations and management sciences at New York University. 'New York is one of the markets where they don't compete with Lyft.'"

Excerpt from mbaMission -- "An expert on game theory and its practical application to business strategy, Adam Brandenburger ('Game Theory and Business Strategy') was voted the NYU Stern MBA Professor of the Year in 2006, and in 2008 received an NYU Excellence in Teaching award in recognition of his teaching and course development work."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "It looks like China is not scheduled for any kind of hard landing as far as I can see, and they're really just nervous because they're waiting for the household sector to kick in and sort of help out because the export sector is contributing next to nothing to growth and they don't want to overuse the investment lever."

Excerpt from Ecommerce Times -- "'In the case of Zappos, because it is about prospective job candidates, people are going to be very measured and selective about what they say and do on these internal forums,' Ghose told the E-Commerce Times. 'They would want to give the best possible impression to prospective recruiters, and so their content will be very carefully curated.'"

Excerpt from Forbes -- "One theoretical economical model that comes to mind that supports Kelly’s belief is Michael Spence’s signalling model of education. In this model, a person with high ability, ability that cannot be directly observed by prospective employers, looks for some way to signal that ability to differentiate himself from lower ability competitors."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "I think the best way I can explain [the difference between price and value] is with an analogy. Let's suppose you go to look at a house that you want to buy. Your realtor points to the house. She names a price, or he names a price, and you say, 'Where did you come up with that number?' And the reality is, he or she came up with that number by looking at other houses in the neighborhood and what they sold for. A lot of people invest the same way. If you ask them, why are you paying $50 for Twitter or $600 for Apple, the reality is they haven't valued the company in any real sense, they've priced the company by looking at what other people are paying for the stock. That's the essence of the difference. Price is based on what other people pay. Value is based on what you think you can get back in cash flows from investor."