個案總覽

Today's society is characterized by a rapid state of change, and technological innovation plays a significant part in that. So how should one approach ethics at the technological frontier? This technical note discusses the challenges of our modern, highly innovative world; the muddled ethical lines this advancement can produce; and considerations to make and conversations to have around these new norms.

Ethics, in addition to being about principles and consequences, is about character: the individual traits and qualities that define what kind of person someone is and who they hope to become. This technical note poses a series of questions to help readers produce a vision of their character that can be shaped as they grow and progress as individuals and leaders.

In the 20th century, automobiles and airlines pushed rail into the background as an often-troubled and neglected mode. After a review of the long history of rail in the U.S., this paper examines the situation in the 21st century, including the rail market structure, and discusses key players like BNSF, CSX, and Norfolk Southern. Today, by most measures, freight rail is doing better than ever, while passenger rail faces significant challenges-though it is clear that numerous pain points and bottlenecks interfere with optimal use of rail to move both people and goods. This note offers a structured way of thinking through the issues facing rail transportation and discusses three recent freight rail infrastructure projects that hold promise for the future: the National Gateway, the Keystone Corridor, and the CREATE decongestion project in Chicago.

Traditional market research methods focus on understanding the average experiences of average consumers. This focus leads to gaps in our knowledge of consumer behavior and often fails to uncover insights that can drive revolutionary, rather than evolutionary innovation. This note outlines a process for studying extreme consumers-consumers who fall in both tails of a normal distribution of customers-with needs, behaviors, attitudes, and emotions atypical of the average customer. Different tactics for leveraging the power of the fringe, product category virgins, customers with constraints, and lovers, haters, and opt-outers are presented.

This note provides criteria to evaluate the power of a platform-mediated network. For a company considering building such a network or an investor considering funding such an effort, this analysis reveals the scope and desirability of the opportunity. Meanwhile, for a company doing business with such a network, as a supplier or as a customer, this note provides strategies to shift the split of surplus to the company's benefit.

Course overview of The Entrepreneurial Manager.

This technical note explores some of the legal implications that companies face when deciding how to price their goods. It focuses on the three main federal antitrust laws: the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Robinson-Patman Act. By learning the basics of these antitrust laws, those who read this note will have a better idea of how to avoid violating these laws.

Digital Marketing Strategy is the process by which firms employ, either partially or exclusively, digital tools, techniques, and tactics to create value for customers.

Multinational corporations and wealthy individuals often use so-called tax havens to establish subsidiaries or holding companies in order to rebalance profits across borders with the primary purpose of lowering their effective tax rate. This note describes the use of tax havens, the implications for the financial sector in tax havens, as well as the debate around the effect of tax havens on welfare in other jurisdictions.

This note provides a primer on paid search advertising, which is an important component of digital marketing. The mechanics of paid search is explained using the Google search engine platform. The note covers metrics for evaluating the performance of paid search, the strategic objective of paid search, the relationship between customer lifetime value and search ads, how to overcome sparse data problems using keyword clouds, and the nature of Google AdWords's enhanced campaigns.

This technical note presents the reason for using a binomial logic regression in marketing applications. It is used in Darden's "Big Data in Marketing" course elective. The issues surrounding the use of a linear regression model when the dependent variable is a dummy variable are identified. A consumer-utility-based behavioral rationale is presented for the applicability of the binomial logistic regression for modeling dummy variables. Simulated and real data examples are used to present the mechanics of the logistic regression and the interpretation of the outputs. The relationship between odds ratio and the logistic regression probabilities are presented. Application areas such as brand choice and customer retention are discussed.

This course is about one question: What is the proper role of the government in the market economy? We study the role of government as it plays out in the real world, using vivid case studies from many countries, decades, and policy angles. At the same time, we align these cases with a rigorous theoretical framework that clarifies the circumstances under which government intervention in the market can improve outcomes.

Motivating employees has long been a topic of fascination for business leaders. Psychologists have developed many useful insights that are helping businesses to accrue value from their workforces. Regulatory focus theory stands out as one of the newer theories that is gaining traction as well as substantial empirical support. The purpose of this reading is to explain the basic tenets of regulatory focus theory and to discuss how it can be used to enhance motivation and engagement in the workplace.

Intangible assets represent an accounting challenge due to their lack of physical substance. This note discusses the accounting treatment of intangible assets under International Financial Reporting Standards. The note examines the necessary characteristics of intangible assets, specifically, identifiability, control and future economic benefit. Also detailed are the origins of intangible assets through separate acquisition, business combination and internal generation. The initial recognition and ongoing measurement of intangibles are discussed, using both the cost model and revaluation model.

This document provides a step-by-step guide to the sequence of tasks involved in the strategy development process including the eight activities necessary for strategic planning.

This note provides an introduction to the process of loan syndication and the evolution of the leveraged loan market. The note emphasizes the role of banks as loan originators and the evolution of the institutional investors' entry into the leveraged loan market. In particular, the note discusses the role and incentives of collateralized loan obligations (CLOs).

This note offers an analysis of four fundamental strategic decisions and associated tradeoffs that set MSPs apart from other types of businesses (e.g. product firms) and that every MSP entrepreneur and investor should carefully consider. In the last section I also discuss an important boundary condition: when is the MSP business model dominated by related - but distinct - business models?

Young, and particularly high-growth ventures often need to raise significant external finance, since their internal cash flow is usually insufficient to support the investments needed to grow. Although raising equity from venture capital or angel investors is the most well-known source of external finance for high-growth ventures, many entrepreneurs, particularly small business owners, rely on debt and other non-equity sources of capital to finance their ventures, either because equity capital is not available to them or because they want to avoid the ownership dilution and governance constraints associated with equity investments. This note focuses on these non-equity sources of financing for entrepreneurs, paying particular attention to how the emergence of new technologies in risk assessment have expanded their availability for young firms.

This note discusses the capital structure often found in LBO transactions. Although the specifics of each capital structure vary case by case, in any given year, there is a great deal of similarity in the capital structure of these buyouts. These similarities exist because debt structure is largely determined by the deal size and market conditions. The note summarizes historic trends and practices related to the debt structure in the buyout space.