Knowledge at Wharton

Sandeep Jauhar’s book Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation is the unsettling account of his medical residency at a New York hospital largely focused on his first year. It represents his take on his internship interweaving that experience with something of his childhood family history previous studies and work experiences. In the process Jauhar tells us about himself medical education and health care.

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In a year when airlines all over the world are reeling from the double whammy of high oil prices and a faltering economy Embraer -- the Brazil based aircraft maker -- doubled its net income in the second quarter. The company’s growth during difficult economic times offers an example of the way that companies from rapidly developing economies are reshaping global business say Harold L. Sirkin James W. Hemerling and Arindam K. Bhattacharya in their new book Globality: Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything. Sirkin and his co-authors identify 100 such ”challenger” firms that are expanding rapidly spell out the reasons why and analyze the implications for the way business will be done in the future.

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Scrabble -- the board game in which you compete with other players in making words -- has become a familiar household name since it was introduced in 1948. Its unofficial online double Scrabulous has become one of the most popular applications on Facebook since it was launched in July 2007. Now both games are making waves as Hasbro the copyright holder for Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada has filed a lawsuit against the creators of Scrabulous -- following which Scrabulous was yanked off Facebook in late July. But in today’s fast-changing social networking environment Hasbro’s lawsuit and its attempt to control its online image may not be the right move Wharton faculty say.

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Despite warnings of a bubble investors and entrepreneurs see long-term promise for firms that make efficient technology and alternative energy. Unlike the vaporware of the tech bubble that burst in 2001 these technologies are up running and proven say participants at a recent conference sponsored by Wharton’s Mack Center for Technological Innovation.

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After the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 2005 that Internet file-sharing sites Grokster and StreamCast had illegally aided their customers’ efforts to share pirated copies of copyrighted music and video files many commentators predicted the demise of businesses that depended on online file-sharing. But new start-ups say they have found ways to make peer-to-peer (often called P2P) file-sharing legal and perhaps profitable. Still their business plans need tweaking according to a paper published recently by Wharton professor Kartik Hosanagar and two University of Washington colleagues. One suggestion: The networks should sometimes be willing to pay more than they get for content.

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Many public funds don’t adhere to basic norms of modern money management and most don’t even appear to make an effort to match their investment strategies with their future financial obligations. ”As [sovereign wealth funds] have grown they appear to be demonstrating an increasing risk appetite very little transparency and virtually no clarity of objectives ” write three researchers including Wharton professor of insurance and risk management Olivia Mitchell in a soon-to be-published paper titled ”Managing Public Investment Funds: Best Practices and New Questions.”

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Managing the forces arrayed against them -- hostility against Islam in the Western world resistance to change among Muslims and hostility to the West among Muslim populations -- is no easy task for Muslim women in positions of leadership. As one of the participants in a recent leadership conference noted: ”A Muslim woman must prove not just that she is as good or better than a man but as good as a Western woman.” Two Wharton leadership experts were among the presenters at the three-week event.

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Retailers are in a tough situation locked between rising product costs and a limited ability to raise their prices. Even cost-savvy market leaders such as Costco are having a difficult time. But Wharton faculty say that handled carefully the current inflationary period may actually be a business opportunity for some companies. The key: Forgetting some of the old rules of retailing.

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Progress toward unfettered international commerce stumbled last week with the collapse of the World Trade Organization’s Doha talks a seven-year effort to establish new global trade rules. The lengthy talks were complicated by the rapid emergence of China and India as major economic powers with commercial and strategic interests to protect and the clout to do so.  Many observers say the talks’ collapse is a setback for poorer nations which need access to larger markets in order for their economies to grow. Wharton professors Stephen Kobrin whose research interests include globalization and Marshall Meyer an authority on China’s economy recently spoke to Knowledge at Wharton about the talks’ collapse global commerce and China’s interest in the rules governing trade.

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These days when the U.S. Department of Defense buys a fighter jet from Lockheed Martin it doesn’t simply pay Lockheed for the physical product. Instead the government has a ”performance-based contract” with the defense supplier according to Serguei Netessine professor of operations and information management at Wharton. This contract says in effect that the government’s reimbursement to Lockheed hinges on the jets’ performance -- that is how often the planes are able to fly. In this interview Netessine describes how performance-based contracts are becoming more common in a variety of industries.

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