Stay ConnectedThe Knowledge at Wharton feed features standout episodes from across the Wharton Podcast Network. Discover timely conversations and expert insights on business, markets, leadership, innovation, and the forces shaping the global economy.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Copyright: © 2013 The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
With their combination of low fees tax efficiency and simple autopilot investing style index funds seem to have captivated American investors. At the same time however many investors still hold trillions of dollars in high-fee funds despite well-publicized evidence that low-fee alternatives offer higher returns over the long run. ”It struck us that most people just don’t know what mutual fund fees are. So we set out to actually test that ” says Brigitte C. Madrian professor of business and public policy at Wharton. The result is a paper titled ”Why Does the Law of One Price Fail? An Experiment on Index Mutual Funds ” by Madrian Yale professor James J. Choi and Harvard economics professor David Laibson.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hospice care occupies a specialized and growing niche in the healthcare economy as a comfort to the dying and their families and a potential cost-saver for Medicare. With baby boomers now hitting their seventh decade hospice is expected to become an even more important part of the healthcare landscape according to Wharton faculty and industry analysts. How profitable are hospice-providers what is their long-term business outlook and what are the unique challenges that hospice companies face given strict government regulation amid increasing demand for their services?
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
With more and more advertising vehicles crowding today’s marketing environment -- including traditional print television and radio ads product placements Internet buzz viral campaigns and cell phone messaging -- marketers have new opportunities to reach vast pools of potential customers. But the tangle of options also requires any successful marketing plan to take into account the nature of the product its durability in the public’s mind and the advertising budget needed to make it all work. As Wharton professor David Bell notes: It’s very hard to find ”the one big lever that can reach a whole lot of people in a way that is cost-effective.” Knowledge at Wharton asked four Wharton marketing professors how they would go about launching two hypothetical products a summer blockbuster movie and a cell phone.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the late 1980s as part of an effort to beef up its core IT business Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) began to hire specialist strategy consultants from outside the company. These consultants were more experienced than the usual Andersen employees and they were accustomed to ”much more aggressive individual performance incentives” than was the norm among Andersen’s existing IT staff according to Wharton management professor Sarah Kaplan author of a recent paper titled ”Inertia and Incentives: Bridging Organizational Economics and Organizational Theory.” In the paper co-authored with Rebecca Henderson from MIT’s Sloan School of Management the two researchers use Andersen Consulting Kodak and other organizations to study conflict especially with regard to incentive systems that results when companies undergo major change such as adopting new technologies or shifting into new markets.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When Lou Gerstner became chief executive of IBM in the early 1990s Big Blue was on a course to be broken up into smaller companies each responsible for separate IBM business units such as PCs software and the like. But Gerstner concluded the strategy was ”wrong-headed” because it was contrary to the wishes of customers according to Wharton marketing professor George Day. Rather than assemble their computer systems from a variety of vendors customers wanted help putting everything together. So IBM embarked on a multi-year journey to align its organization with the marketplace. For IBM the experiment was successful. But in a forthcoming paper titled ”Aligning the Organization with the Market ” Day reports on a survey that found only mixed results among 347 medium- to large-size firms that attempted customer-focused reorganizations.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) broke out in Hong Kong in 2003 some media outlets predicted economic calamity for the city. But by one financial measure -- real estate prices -- Hong Kong hardly suffered according to research by Grace Wong a Wharton real estate professor. In two papers titled ”Has SARS Infected the Property Market? Evidence from Hong Kong” and ”Is SARS a Poor Man’s Disease? Socioeconomic Status and Risk Factors for SARS Transmission ” Wong looks at SARS’ impact on real estate values and analyzes the role of income in determining who contracted the disease. Underlying her research is the recognition that in a global economy infectious diseases such as SARS will likely spread farther and faster as people travel all over the world in search of new business opportunities.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Microsoft announces that it will spend about $2 billion to fend off rivals such as Google and thwart Sony’s video game ambitions and the company loses more than $30 billion in market capitalization in a day. Fair trade or overreaction? Probably a little of both according to experts at Wharton. Microsoft certainly isn’t hurting financially. The company reported net income of $2.98 billion on revenues of $10.9 billion for the quarter ending March 31. But the big question is whether that performance will be maintained over the next decade. One issue say Wharton faculty and others is whether Microsoft has grown too big to be nimble enough to compete with its long list of rivals on many fronts: Google in Internet search and advertising; Sony in video games with the launch of its Playstation 3 on November 17; Linux inside the corporation; and Apple Computer in digital media to name just a few. By extending its reach into new markets such as mobile communications and digital entertainment is Microsoft in danger of stretching itself too thin?
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
With this spring’s criminal trial of former Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling the public was again seeing accounts of Raptors Chewco and Osprey -- some of the shadowy ”special purpose vehicles” the energy company used for improper purposes such as concealing its mushrooming debt. But while much of Enron’s SPV use was illegal most SPVs are proper and they can serve a variety of functions. Many are separate business-financing operations whose transactions do not appear on the parent company’s books. They can be used to create easily traded asset-backed securities that allow their ”sponsor” companies to convert cash flows expected over many years into immediate lump-sum payments according to Wharton finance professor Gary B. Gorton who with colleague Nicholas Souleles has written a paper on the topic titled ”Special Purpose Vehicles and Securitization.”
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The Pentagon recently invited a group of 43 civilians including Michael Useem director of Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management to witness the management and leadership of its Central Command which is responsible for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Useem and his colleagues -- who included executives private equity investors media commentators and academics -- traveled to the Middle East to observe troops and operations in Kuwait Bahrain and the Arabian Sea. In this report written literally from the frontlines Useem takes ”a look at the execution of American military policy -- not the policy itself -- a subject of continuing and increasingly intense national debate .... From even this brief foray into their world it is evident that the U.S. armed services have built what many private companies strive for: a culture of readiness and commitment cross-service and cross-national integration and pragmatic flexibility.”
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Lawton Burns is a professor of health care systems and management director of the Wharton Center for Health Management and Economics and author of a new book entitled The Business of Healthcare Innovation. While much has been written about doctors and hospitals government regulations and medical insurance issues Burns’ book looks at an area of healthcare that has not gotten much attention -- the producers of healthcare products ranging from pharmaceuticals and biotechnology to medical devices and information technology. Yet Burns would argue that a focus on the producer side of the healthcare equation is critical -- not just because we are increasingly more reliant on medical technology but also because of the ever escalating costs of advances in these areas. Burns talked to Knowledge at Wharton’s Mukul Pandya and Robbie Shell about the issues raised in his new book.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
