In 2024, Tuck professor Daniel Feiler had a series of confidential conversations with executives of numerous NBA teams. As an expert in the psychology of judgment and decision making, Feiler was curious how these executives were using the proliferation of in-game data to make decisions about which players to trade, recruit, and draft. He found that, like managers in any organizational environment, NBA executives were prone to making biased decisions without even realizing it. They evaluated players using differing standards, or they didn’t fully account for the context of players’ performance, or they over-weighted how certain players performed against them.

In this podcast, Feiler discusses how he worked with NBA teams, and what he learned about decision biases that can apply to other corporate settings.

All businesses must endure a crisis every now and then. But not all businesses are digital platforms, such as Facebook, Uber, and eBay. What sets these businesses apart is their role as an intermediary between sellers and buyers, two stakeholders who are crucial to the business model but who can react to a crisis in very different ways, and with different consequences.

In this episode, Tuck marketing professor Prasad Vana talks about a new paper that takes an in-depth look at platforms in crisis. The paper is titled “When Crisis Hits the Platform Economy: The Effects on Supply, Demand, and Spillovers.” In it, Vana studies two crises that the platform Kickstarter went through, and the impact those crises had on people looking to fund projects and the backers of those projects. He finds that the crises had bigger effects on the supply side stakeholders than on the backers, and that projects that relied on a fan base—such as art and culture-related efforts—were especially likely to respond negatively to crises.

If the 20th century business landscape was populated by behemoth corporations like GE, Berkshire Hathaway, and Siemens, the 21st century is the era of technology titans such as Apple, Amazon, and Tesla. But these huge firms are separated by more than the border line of Y2K.

As Tuck professor Gordon Phillips explains in this episode of the Knowledge in Practice podcast, the modern tech giants achieved their status not by gobbling up firms in various industries and putting them under one big roof; they did it by developing technologies that have applications in numerous, related sectors. In a new paper, Phillips identifies these companies as “21st century firms” and shows that they have used R&D to increase the scope of their operations by 60 percent between 1989 and 2017. This has resulted in increased valuations, and a significant boost to the markets overall.

“One of our major findings is that valuations go up as scope goes up,” Phillips says. “This is the opposite of the old line conglomerate literature. What’s interesting is that on a per-dollar-of-sales basis, the market is liking these increases in scope.”