Insight Team
In early 2013, ten Kellogg School faculty members visited China, meeting with executives from local and multinational companies. In the following roundtable discussion—part two in a series of four (read part one)—our faculty discusses the Chinese obsession with luxury brands, how multinational corporations are adapting their products... More →
Insight Team
In early 2013, Dean Sally Blount and Senior Associate Dean Thomas Hubbard, in partnership with Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, arranged for ten Kellogg School faculty members to visit companies in China and meet with executives from both local and multinational companies. In the first of four discussions... More →
Jessica Love
It seems that wealthy Disney tourists can hire disabled “guides” to help them cut in line. For $130 an hour, according to a recent report, a guide will pretend to be a member of your family, letting your entire party bypass long lines. The scheme—not quite what... More →
Jeffrey Brennan
The Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA), which recently passed the Senate, carries bipartisan support as it heads to the House of Representatives. It is also supported by some of the nation’s biggest retail companies, including Walmart, Target and Best Buy. Still, the debate over the MFA is heating up. ... More →
Mitchell Petersen
If you are an Apple shareholder, have you been cheating on your taxes? Probably not. As an Apple shareholder, you do not pay personal taxes each time Apple makes money. Under current U.S. tax law, you do not have to pay taxes until you receive your share of the... More →
Jessica Love
At its core, Dell has always been about customization. We tell Dell what we want from our hardware, and Dell delivers. In the company’s heyday in the late 1990s, its direct-to-consumer retail strategy—which put the right products in the right hands quickly and affordably—was... More →
Harry M. Jansen Kraemer, Jr.
Apple CEO Tim Cook made headlines this week when he publicly apologized to customers in China for complaints over its customer service policies. What’s more, that apology was accompanied by very real changes to improve those policies. This is actually the second public apology he’s made... More →
Jessica Love
Deep in the footnotes of Facebook’s financial statements, where few casual investors dare to tread, Anup Srivastava, an assistant professor of accounting information and management at the Kellogg School, has found some perfectly legal—yet to his mind troublingly inscrutable—accounting maneuvers. Some Background When companies... More →
Jessica Love
“Every organization needs the right balance of caves and commons,” writes Leigh Thompson, the J. Jay Gerber Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, in a recent blog post. When Marissa Mayer announced an end to telecommuting at Yahoo, she engendered a vibrant... More →
Jessica Love
Though Cyprus’s predicament is nothing out of the ordinary for a member of the troubled eurozone, recent developments in the small nation have nonetheless managed to take economists by surprise. Cyprus was originally offered a ten billion euro bailout to stave off bankruptcy, but the money came with... More →
Jessica Love
These days, corporate America is doing some soul-searching. Are corporations really only accountable to their shareholders? And, if so, should they be? Last week the Kellogg School’s Public-Private Initiative, together with the Aspen Institute, hosted a conference about the purpose of the corporation—hence last week&rsquo... More →
Jessica Love
It is fair to say that Sandeep Baliga, a professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at the Kellogg School, and Jeffrey Ely, a professor of economics at Northwestern, do not stop thinking like economists when they leave the office. Last year, Baliga and Ely noticed that the new Chicago... More →
Jessica Love
Banking and politics often mix in insidious ways. Paola Sapienza, a professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management, has shown that politics can influence the lending practices of state-owned banks: Italian banks where top executives are affiliated with a political party actually charge lower interest rates to... More →
Jessica Love
Last week one overheated; the week before one caught fire. Concerns about the Boeing 787's lithium-ion batteries eventually led safety regulators to ground the entire fleet. As the days pass, it appears increasingly unlikely that this current round of malfunctions will prove to be mere “teething problems" for the... More →
Jessica Love
Oh the irony! First introduced in 1979, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter’s Five Forces analysis of competitiveness has continued to make its mark. The forces—which include the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of customers, the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitute products, and the... More →
Patricia Ledesma
Gianfranco Zaccai, the designer of the Swiffer, in FastCompany: Focus groups aren’t useless. They can be insightful for fine-tuning something for the short term. But true innovation is about more than just incremental improvement, it’s about revolutionizing a product or a service; in fact, it should... More →
Patricia Ledesma
From an article in the New England Journal of Medicine: Chocolate consumption enhances cognitive function, which is a sine qua non for winning the Nobel Prize, and it closely correlates with the number of Nobel laureates in each country. It remains to be determined whether the consumption of chocolate is... More →
Patricia Ledesma
Left: Lloyd Shapley (left) and Ehud Kalai, ca. 2004 (Photo courtesy of Ehud Kalai). Right: Alvin Roth during the 2010 Nancy L. Schwartz Memorial Lecture (Photo © Nathan Mandell). Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth were awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics this week. Even though the Kellogg/NU poll did not predict... More →
Patricia Ledesma
Nobel Prize season is upon us. For the fourth year, we polled faculty members in the Kellogg School of Management as well as the Economics Department in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences at Northwestern University about their predictions for this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics. In... More →
Patricia Ledesma
Over the last two months, some of our marketing faculty has published thought provoking articles in the Sloan Management Review and in strategy + business. Most recently, Kellogg School Professors of Marketing Philip Kotler and Bobby Calder coauthored an article in the Sloan Management Review with Edward Malthouse (a Professor at... More →
Tim De Chant
As an American, I sometimes eye with envy people who hold a passport from a European Union country— with one, it’s so easy to travel to, from, and within the continent. But an EU passport also represents far more mobility than just the tourist kind. Citizens of EU countries... More →