Knowledge at Wharton

Carl Icahn’s battle for Time Warner has just intensified. Icahn the corporate takeover specialist attempting to win control of the media giant held a press conference yesterday to announce a plan to break Time Warner into four separate companies and buy back $20 billion in stock -- all part of his crusade to oust management for the benefit of shareholders. His press conference followed a speech la...

The disclosure that author James Frey lied in his best-selling book A Million Little Pieces and the furor that followed raise numerous questions about truth in advertising trust between sellers and buyers brand image and reputation as well as two themes that Frey himself focused on in his now-discredited memoir of recovery from substance abuse -- suffering and redemption. How widespread is decepti...

At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos last month the extraordinary optimism of Asian -- especially Chinese and Indian -- leaders held center stage. For Michael Useem director of Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change it all felt very déjà vu: In the late 1990s a similarly exuberant spirit surrounded American business leaders. But the hubris of unbounded optimism can be dan...

Apple’s iPod again ruled beneath the Christmas tree in 2005 after the latest model of the iconic music player was outfitted with a video screen. And as the new year begins a long-anticipated era of convergence in consumer technology products draws closer according to Wharton faculty and technology analysts. Meanwhile cell phones that play video e-mail delivered to handheld computers telephone conv...

Compensation for American CEOs has soared over the past decade far exceeding inflation and wage gains of ordinary workers -- and leading critics to charge that self-serving insiders have tilted the playing field at shareholders’ expense. In response the Securities and Exchange Commission on January 17 took the first step toward adopting rules to better show shareholders how much their top executiv...

Walt Disney announced yesterday that it is acquiring Pixar the animated film studio that has made such hits as The Incredibles Finding Nemo and Toy Story. As part of the $7.4 billion deal Pixar’s founder Steve Jobs will become a Disney board member and also its biggest shareholder. In an audio-only interview Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader speaks with Mukul Pandya editor-in-chief of Knowle...

Would you like to go on an Internet auction site and know how much to bid for a certain item -- and also know that you didn’t overpay for that item? How about when you sell an item in an online auction: Would you like to know what price to set that ensures you don’t leave money on the online table? Wharton marketing and statistics professor Eric T. Bradlow can’t provide specific answers. But he do...

When the door to a TLA Entertainment video store swings open the primary question facing most consumers shuffling inside is relatively simple: ”What movie will I take home tonight?” But to Wharton marketing professor Jehoshua Eliashberg and Wharton doctoral candidate George Knox the key question surrounding the burgeoning $12 billion home-video market goes at least one step further: Which consumer...

Although it has one of the most dynamic economies in Africa Botswana also has one of the world’s highest known rates of HIV-AIDS infection. In response the Botswana government along with the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania and Wharton’s Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center is helping develop a more efficient system to manage and monitor HIV/AIDS therapy. According to Ian...

IBM. Verizon. Sears. Hewlett-Packard. Motorola. The list of corporations that have put a halt to guaranteed pension plans comes as a jolt to Baby Boom employees entering what they thought would be their peak pension-building years. At the same time new accounting rules and Congressional legislation are being drafted to close the U.S. pension-funding gap now estimated at $450 billion. While some pr...

Big media players are accustomed to watching the ratings for the most popular music video and book content but perhaps they should pay more attention to how consumers feel about three letters at the bottom of most charts -- DRM which stands for digital rights management. Broadly defined DRM encompasses multiple technologies that control the use of software music movies or any other piece of digita...

China’s securities industry is just one of the sectors moving ahead at a dizzying pace as the country readies itself for full entry into the World Trade Organization this year according to participants in the recent Wharton Global Business Forum’s Asia Conference. Not surprisingly China dominated discussion at the conference with many speakers noting the speed with which the country is advancing....

The turmoil and uncertainty among auto manufacturers and their suppliers have left people wondering when a shakeout can be expected. According to Wharton management professor John Paul MacDuffie and Christopher Benko director of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Automotive Institute in Detroit consolidation will take place among suppliers to a much greater extent than among carmakers which may not experi...

As the Gulf Coast attempts to recover from the emotional and physical scars of Hurricane Katrina the nation’s most expensive natural disaster Wharton and University of Pennsylvania faculty are raising questions about how society should assess and perceive risk and how it should compensate victims when disaster strikes. A new book entitled On Risk and Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina by Uni...

Can an industry that has spent a fortune on TV ads featuring mud wrestlers and talking frogs suddenly change its stripes to appeal to the wine-and-cheese single-malt Scotch crowd? The makers of Budweiser and other brands of beer hope so. Anheuser-Busch and its competitors are developing an industry-wide marketing campaign aimed at overhauling the image of the humble beer and staunching its declini...

It’s not easy being Wikipedia a free web encyclopedia created and edited by anonymous contributors. Just ask founder Jimmy Wales who has seen his creation come under fire in just a few short months as the site fends off vandalism and charges of inaccurate entries. But Wikipedia founded in 2001 as a non-profit organization has become a big enough presence that it raises a number of interesting ques...

The chairman of the largest software house in Ghana spoke approvingly of the ”Wild West” aspects of doing business there. One of that country’s cabinet ministers saw signs that ”constitutional democracies are gaining roots” on the African continent. A prominent Nigerian lawyer spoke of profit margins all but impossible in the United States or Europe. These three panelists appeared recently at the...

David Sirota co-author of The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want (Wharton School Publishing) believes far too many managers stifle employee enthusiasm across the board by using bureaucratic or punitive techniques that should be reserved for a troublesome few. Yet his book written with Louis A. Mischkind and Michael Irwin Meltzer finds that firms where empl...

For nearly 30 years Wharton management professor Lawrence G. Hrebiniak has taken the art of business strategy and put it under a microscope. Over time he has brought one critical element into irrefutable focus: Creating strategy is easy but implementing it is very difficult. In his new book Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change (Wharton School Publishing) Hrebiniak presents...

When Carleton (Carly) S. Fiorina joined Hewlett-Packard as its chairman and CEO in 1999 she was widely regarded as a charismatic leader who would help HP get out of its high-tech rut. Six years later however Fiorina has been forced out of her position at HP’s helm and the company is still languishing. What happened? According to Wharton professors while Fiorina has several strengths the merger she...

In his 1994 best seller Stocks for the Long Run Wharton finance professor Jeremy Siegel showed investors that stocks rather than bonds or cash are the most profitable long-term investments and he endorsed index-style investing. But investors wanted to know more. ”I gave scores of talks across the country on Stocks for the Long Run ” Siegel recalled recently. ”The two questions I received most were...

The days when an executive could look forward to a leisurely retirement out on the golf course are over thanks to a possible looming job shortage a graying population low savings rates and an insecure Social Security system. The impact of these factors on both workers and companies was the subject of the Symposium on Older Workers co-sponsored recently by the AARP Global Aging Program along with W...

The stock market rises and falls based on investors’ perceptions about how the economy is doing. CEOs make investment decisions -- opening a new plant hiring more workers -- based on their expectations about how markets will perform in the future. How can they keep tabs on whether their expectations are realistic? Bernard Baumohl author of The Secrets of Economic Indicators provides some insights...

In a new study that compares Fortune 100 executives in 1980 with their counterparts in 2001 Peter Cappelli director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources and colleague Monika Hamori document what many CEOs and other senior managers have no doubt already witnessed: The road to the executive suite and the characteristics of the executives who get there have changed significantly over the last two...

There’s a new marketing catchphrase that’s getting rave word-of-mouth reviews. From articles in the popular press to conversations in the classroom huge companies to boutique marketing firms suddenly it seems you can’t talk about new products without addressing ’buzz marketing.’ ”People are buzzing about buzzing ” says Wharton marketing professor Barbara Kahn who adds along with others that word-o...