894 Posts Found

The “scientific model” of management, as Warren Bennis and Jim O’Toole called it, emphasized conceptual knowledge and tools and techniques – what Greek philosophers would have called episteme and techne. It was assumed that organizations could be studied by detached “objective” observers and that management science could be “values-free” – just like the natural sciences. More generally this scientific model has resulted in a misanthropic … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: David K. Hurst | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Capitalism, Education, Leadership, Management, Mission

An economist falls apart and turns into a blubbing puddle on the floor if you take away the concept of trade-offs because they all started in the same place: the societal trade-off between guns and butter. Trade-offs are a sacred article of faith for economists. You simply can’t be an economist if you don’t consider trade-offs to be a central feature of your worldview.

Content: Quotation | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Economics

Economics is not about your taste. Economics, once people have risen above basic needs into the middle class, is about the tastes of other people, whether you like it or not.

It’s hard to say how much of the present-day economy is based on taste instead of need, since, as Abraham Maslow pointed out, the line shifts. At the very least, not only entertainment, but … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Economics

There is most emphatically a Free Agent Nation today. The thing is, not all of the 9.3 million self-employed asked for citizenship: Downsizing turned many of them into refugees. Some of those who left secure, if staid, jobs for the freedom of free agency now find themselves struggling to pay the rent or offering to do the same work for the companies they left–for less … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jennifer Reingold | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Career, Economics, Work

Entrepreneurship can be personally rewarding and good for the economy, if we wipe the stardust from our eyes.

Content: Article | Authors: George Foster, Lee Simmons | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Economics, Entrepreneurship

The economist who won a Nobel Prize for advancing our understanding of technology looks at the past and future of productivity-led growth.

Editor’s Note: more interesting than the description would indicate

Content: Thought Leader | Author: Robert Solow | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Economics

How does behavioral economics impact our decision making process?

Content: Multimedia Content | Authors: Francesca Gino, John Beshears | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Economics, Organizational Behavior

A look at a set of theoretical frameworks that attempt to go beyond the production function approach that dominates textbook discussions of economic organization, with a focus on the capability approach, drawing heavily on the work of Frank Knight and Hendrik Houthakker. (Knight identified the fundamental problem of economic organization as the search for and coordination of different capabilities that are dispersed throughout the larger … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Giampaolo Garzarelli | Subject: Economics

In 1970, in “Efficient Capital Markets: a Review of Theory and Empirical Work,” Gene Fama defined a market to be “informationally efficient” if prices at each moment incorporate all available information about future values. Informational efficiency is a natural consequence of competition, relatively free entry, and low costs of information. If there is a signal, not incorporated in market prices, that future values will be … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: John H. Cochrane | Source: Capital Ideas | Subjects: Economics, Finance

There is no shortage of money managers who claim they can beat market benchmarks, some with impressive track records. And one stream of research suggests that some people can identify and profit from mispriced securities in the stock market. Chicago Booth Professor Lubos Pastor believes that money managers are not only skilled, but becoming ever more skilled over time. So should you dump your index … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Ronald Fink | Source: Capital Ideas | Subjects: Economics, Finance

Late Chicago Booth Professor (and Nobel Laureate) George Stigler pioneered the concept of regulatory capture. In simple words, regulatory capture exists when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, ends up advancing interests of the industry it is charged with regulating. Since Stigler, when economists talk about regulatory capture, they do not imply that regulators are corrupt or lack integrity. In fact, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Luigi Zingales | Source: Capital Ideas | Subject: Economics

Abundance breaks more things than scarcity. Society’s really good at managing scarcity. If something is really valuable but hard to do, we develop a profession and we have all these pricing models. Once something becomes so cheap that it’s not worth metering anymore, that’s when real social change happens.

Content: Quotation | Author: Clay Shirky | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Business Rules, Economics

When making a decision, does happiness win out over all? It’s important —even for decisions with implications that go far beyond simply achieving contentment, says Wharton operations and information management professor Alex Rees-Jones. But, as the saying goes, happiness isn’t everything. Often people knowingly forego the choice that will give them the most pleasure for one that satisfies other ideals or factors that are important … [ Read more ]

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Alex Rees-Jones | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Economics, Marketing / Sales

The globalization of trade is so established that it has lost the power to astound us. Yet the global economy is not as integrated or efficient as is widely believed, according to A. Kerem Cosar, assistant professor of economics at Chicago Booth, because getting goods from their point of origin to international shipping centers within the same country can be expensive—sometimes more expensive than shipping … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Samantha Stainburn | Source: Capital Ideas | Subjects: Economics, International

Finance and economics are the means by which companies operate. To get senior leaders to tune in, the […] conversation must be focused on financial outcomes. If you start the conversation with methods, tools, and techniques, they’ll tune you out.

Content: Quotation | Author: John Timmerman | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Communication, Economics, Finance, Organizational Behavior

We economists specialize in what we do. So economists think we’re the gods of income; we tend to think about well-being in terms of income, and we don’t worry too much about the other things that contribute to well-being, such as health, education, or participating in a democratic society. […] When we think about well-being, we can’t just think about wealth. That’s one of the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Gallup Management Journal | Subject: Economics

The reality is that capitalism has to be seen in the broader social context and not defined just by economic capital but also by human and social capital.

Content: Quotation | Author: Marc Benioff | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Capitalism, Social Responsibility (ESG)

Simon Kuznets, winner of the third Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1971, helped transform the field of economics into an empirically-based social science. An excerpt from Robert Fogel’s book on the great economist.

Content: Thought Leader | Author: Robert William Fogel | Source: Capital Ideas | Subjects: Economics, History

In the 1950s, few economists thought of phenomena such as racial discrimination as under their purview. That changed in 1957, when Gary S. Becker, Professor of Economics and of Sociology at the University of Chicago and at Chicago Booth before his death in 2014, published The Economics of Discrimination, a book based on his 1955 PhD thesis.

Becker’s analysis would extend the reach of economics, and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Gary S. Becker, Kevin M. Murphy | Source: Capital Ideas | Subjects: Economics, History

strategy+business presents their 14th annual best business books special section with picks from seven eminent reviewers.

Editor’s Note: As usual, these pieces offer more than just listings of recommended books. In particular, I recommend you read the entries on strategy and economics.

Content: Article | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Economics, Management, Organizational Behavior, Social Responsibility (ESG), Strategy