Knowledge at Wharton

After a terrible August when the U.S. stock market appeared to be headed for the pits October 1 saw a massive rally that sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average soaring above 14 000. The following day however stocks began to fall again mainly due to a sharp drop in home sales. In short Wall Street still seems to be sending out mixed signals. What will be the long-term effects of the Fed’s decision to cut interest rates? Will the U.S. economy move past the sub-prime mortgage mess? How will these developments affect the European market? Knowledge at Wharton spoke with Wharton finance professor Jeremy Siegel and Jacob Wallenberg chairman of the board of Investor AB and vice chairman of Sweden-based SEB.

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When Apple dropped the price of its iPhone by a third after only two months on the market even its most loyal buyers complained bitterly forcing CEO Steve Jobs to apologize and offer a partial rebate. According to Wharton faculty and analysts the iPhone episode reflects an evolving marketplace where innovation fierce competition and globalization are changing strategic approaches to pricing. Meanwhile pricing is gaining new interest as management looks for ways to increase revenues after years of focusing their attention on downsizing and cost-cutting.

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CBS launches an online editing studio called EyeLab so fans can edit short versions of video programming. ABC distributes full versions of its television shows on its own site and via AOL for free. NBC Universal teams up with Amazon.com to distribute its shows. The frenetic wheeling and dealing for digital distribution of TV programs -- just as the fall season is gearing up -- reflects the television networks’ attempts to find Internet business models that can be profitable and still protect both their intellectual property and brand identity.

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After an unusually long 23-year tenure as chief executive Reuben Mark who is still chairman of Colgate-Palmolive sees corporate leadership like a baseball game that is won not by spectacular homeruns but by singles and doubles. In a recent Wharton leadership lecture titled ”The Essence of Colgate’s Leadership Training ” Mark said effective leadership at the $12.2 billion consumer products company pays off in incremental and consistent gains. ”The essence of leadership is the idea of continuous improvement. No matter what you can always coach people to do a little better and if everyone does that the whole organization moves up.”

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Forget what you learned about markets in your introductory economics class. In a new book titled The Tyranny of the Market: Why You Can’t Always Get What You Want Wharton professor Joel Waldfogel challenges the conventional thinking that markets will provide adequately if left to their own devices. His book makes the case that while markets do a good job of offering products that a majority of people desire they can fall short in meeting the needs of consumers with less prevalent preferences. Potentially left by the wayside are African Americans Hispanics people with unusual medical conditions and residents of remote areas among others.

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When the Internet was young pioneering online job recruitment firm Monster.com rocked the way people look for work. Now Monster itself has hit a rocky patch marked by the resignation of three top officers a major security breach and the rise of new competitors including Craigslist. According to Wharton faculty and analysts Monster is confronting the ”middle age” that all veteran firms of the Internet’s early days must face. The company remains a force in employment advertising they say but as it settles into maturity Monster must find new ways to protect its established markets and expand overseas.

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Online retailers may be shooting themselves in the tail -- the long tail that is according to Kartik Hosanagar Wharton professor of operations and information management and Dan Fleder a Wharton doctoral candidate in new research on the ”recommenders” that many of these retailers use on their websites. Recommenders -- perhaps the best known is Amazon’s -- tend to drive consumers to concentrate their purchases among popular items rather than allow them to explore and buy whatever piques their curiosity the two scholars suggest in a working paper titled ”Blockbuster Culture’s Next Rise or Fall: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity.”

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The 57 members of AHRMIO the Association for Human Resources Management in International Organizations range from the UN UNICEF and OECD to the World Health Organization the World Bank and the International Labour Organization. Mary Jane Peters executive director and Roger Eggleston president emeritus were at Wharton recently for the group’s 7th annual conference. They talked with Knowledge at Wharton about their successes -- such as the introduction of paternity leave and policies regarding sexual harassment -- as well as their major challenges starting with the lack of qualified young people to carry out the missions of AHRMIO’s member organizations.

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When mortgage default rates started to climb earlier this year many experts thought the damage would be confined to the minority of issuers that had binged on subprime lending. It hasn’t turned out that way. Consumer spending is off the credit crunch is spreading and the housing market is in a slump. ”The degree and the extent of the harm done were not expected. It surprised me. But the fact that this would end badly was not surprising ” says Wharton real estate and finance professor Susan Wachter. Wachter and colleague Richard K. Green trace the evolution of the home-financing market over the past decades in a new paper titled ”The Housing Finance Revolution.”

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Among the U.S. auto industry’s many challenges are the ongoing negotiations between General Motors and the United Automobile Workers union aimed at coming up with a new contract to replace the one that expired on September 15; the recent takeover of Chrysler by private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management; and a possible slowdown in consumer spending as a result of fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis. Meanwhile industry watchers are awaiting the outcome of reported efforts by India’s Tata Motors to take over two of financially plagued Ford Motor’s luxury brands Jaguar and Land Rover. Wharton management professor John Paul MacDuffie co-director of the International Motor Vehicle Program spoke with Knowledge at Wharton about these and other issues.

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