Chicago Booth Review Podcast

It’s that time when we start to think about what we want to achieve in the coming year. What can you do to make sure that this year you stay motivated and focused on your goals? We ask two experts for advice: Chicago Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach, author of Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation, and Wharton’s Katy Milkman, author of How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.

Evangelists of Bitcoin say its strength is the distributed ledger that no one institution controls. But as it turns out, that makes it open to sabotage, a vulnerability that will prevent it from replacing real currencies. Chicago Booth’s Eric Budish has spent his career thinking about market design and proposing fixes to flaws— work that has earned him the niche title of “the LeBron James of batch auctions.” According to Budish, the cost of securing Bitcoin at a really large scale is too high, and that will always limit its growth.

Crafting an effective startup pitch is hard. Entrepreneurs have a short amount of time to convey the problem they’re trying to solve, establish the size of the market, cover their business plan, establish their credentials, and come across as likeable and easy to work with. We get advice from Chicago Booth’s James Janega, a former journalist who now works as a Managing Partner at Growth Innovation Strategy Group and teaches storytelling to MBA students and executives at Booth.

In recent decades, stock markets have increasingly been speeding up, with large numbers of high-frequency traders executing trades at speeds up to billionths of a second. Does that reward the most powerful computers at the expense of retail investors? Chicago Booth’s Eric Budish, who argues that the incentives for high-speed trading stem from the flaws in the way financial markets are designed. At the same time, it’s become cumbersome and complicated for institutional investors to execute trades as they would like to. With both challenges in mind, Budish outlines two simple ideas from his research that could transform stock markets for the better.

Impact investing aims to serve two purposes: creating both profit and positive social outcomes. But is that possible? Is there always a trade-off between profits and impact? In the second of our two conversations with Chicago Booth’s Priya Parrish—author of the new book The Little Book of Impact Investing: Aligning Profit and Purpose to Change the World—we discuss whether it’s possible to make healthy returns on your investments while pursuing your social goals.

Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election took many pundits by surprise. Voters consistently said the economy was their top issue, but even though the US economy is currently the world’s top performer, they nevertheless voted for a change in government. That led many observers to claim that Trump’s supporters had a warped view of the economy, concentrating more on inflation than on growth. Chicago Booth’s Lubos Pastor disagrees. His research suggests that voters knew the economy was growing, and that was, in fact, the very reason why they wanted a change of government. Pastor’s model is relatively simple: when the economy is strong economy, more voters opt for the Republican candidate in elections, while a weak economy favors Democrats. This pattern has held since 1927, regardless of the candidates or the incumbents. The reason has to do with how the economy shapes people’s attitudes to risk, which is also explains another phenomenon: the stock market performs much better under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.

Impact investing accounts for more than $1 trillion under management, and is expected to continue growing at a double-digit rate annually for the next decade. It’s attracted a backlash, with activists successfully pushing companies to cut back on their commitment to diversity and inclusion. We hear from Chicago Booth’s Priya Parrish, author of the new book The Little Book of Impact Investing: Aligning Profit and Purpose to Change the World, about what the critics get wrong.

Most managers would agree that communication is important, and many would also agree that it’s a skill that many workers are far from mastering. Yet organizations typically spend next to no time training their employees how to improve their writing. Melissa Harris wants to change that. She’s an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth, a former Chicago Tribune journalist, and the co-author of the new book Everybody Needs an Editor: The Essential Guide to Clear and Effective Writing.

In September, Amazon announced the end of hybrid work, saying it wanted employees in the office five days a week. To many, it seemed like the end of an era, with management having concluded that hybrid work just doesn’t work for them – even if employees like it. We talk to Chicago Booth’s Mike Gibbs, about what the data tell us about hybrid work, and if we’re heading into a post-hybrid working world.

In September, Kalshi, a US financial exchange and prediction market, won a legal victory enabling it to let people bet on outcomes such as which party will control Congress after the November elections. Is the return of political betting a good thing, or were regulators right to try to limit it? And do the same concerns about manipulation in political prediction markets apply to the stock market? We hear from Chicago Booth’s John Birge on whether trading on insider information might sometimes be positive.

Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker is a frank and ugly behind-the-scenes account of life as a young associate in the world of Wall St finance. The book is 35 years old, but the basic dilemma at its heart – whether follow your conscience or your bank balance—remains pertinent. In this episode, Chicago Booth’s John Paul Rollert reflects on what the book tells us about ourselves and our professional choices. How long can you stay in a poisonous environment before you become part of it?

The COVID 19 pandemic caused perhaps the fastest ever shift in working patterns. One day, many of us were working in offices, the next we were working remotely – and would be for years. What effect did that have on our performance? We talk with Chicago Booth’s Mike Gibbs, an expert on quantitative research, about the consequences of remote work.

Companies track our every move on the internet, and many people are concerned that their data is being used and misused without their permission. The European Union and 13 US states have passed data privacy laws. Are these rules really helping us and making us safer? In this episode, we hear from Chicago Booth’s Jean-Pierre Dube, who argues that data privacy comes with a cost – it can further marginalize low-income consumers and hurt small businesses.

Are American companies any good at hiring CEOs? When a company is searching for its next CEO, what skills are they looking for? And are those the same skills that make CEOs successful in the job? We talk with Chicago Booth’s Steve Kaplan, who’s spent decades analyzing C-suite hiring practices and CEO performance. His research finds that candidates who get hired as CEOs are different from other C-suite executives, but also that hiring practices do not guarantee that the person who wows the hiring committee will succeed in the top job.

We tend to think of leaders in terms of personality types or set ways of behaving. But can you learn to be a better leader? And can you choose when to act like a leader? In this episode, we hear from Chicago Booth’s Linda Ginzel, who presents two ideas: first, that we can become better leaders by being diligent about how we learn from our experiences; and second, that we should think of leadership and management as verbs, rather than nouns.

In some countries, fines change according to income, but so far US cities have been reluctant to try it out. Chicago Booth’s Jean Pierre Dube thinks that’s a mistake. He says uniform fines are regressive, don’t act as a deterrent, and that personalized fines could bring in more revenue for cities. So why are US cities so reluctant to do it?

Private equity has a PR problem. If you heard that your company was being taken over by a private-equity firm, you might well start worrying that job cuts would be coming soon and the quality of work would be sacrificed in order to squeeze out more profit. But is that accurate? Chicago Booth’s Steve Kaplan, an expert on private equity, says that private-equity firms frequently invest and grow companies more effectively than other owners. But does that justify their big fees? And could companies take the same actions without being taken over by private equity?

Is the customer always right? In a world in which all sales are final, some buyers are bound to get duped. But if the customer’s always right, what can retailers do about unreasonable customers? In this episode we hear from Chicago Booth’s John Paul Rollert looks for a balance between honoring customers and indulging them.

Would you accept a promotion without a pay increase? This episode is part of Business Practice series, where we asked people to script what they would say in a challenging workplace scenario. Chicago Booth’s George Wu analyzes the results.

The US federal government is suing Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation, in part over what it says are excessive or junk fees. One feature of these fees is that they’re hidden – you only find out at the end what the true price is. There’s an irony in the case, says Chicago Booth’s Jean Pierre Dube, since government itself is a keen user of hidden fees. In this episode, we talk to Dube about how retailers use hidden fees to obfuscate prices and avoid transparency. Why do hidden fees work? And what’s the solution?