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Economist Thomas Marschak, UC Berkeley researcher and teacher for 60 years, dies at 93
Professor Emeritus Thomas Marschak, an economist who influenced generations of students during almost 60 years of active research and teaching at Berkeley Haas, passed away Jan. 31 at his Oakland home. He was 93.
Marschak, the Cora Jane Flood Research Chair Emeritus, was known for his dry humor, his generous mentorship, and his research into the design of efficient organizations.
“In so many ways, Tom was way ahead of his time,” said Professor Rich Lyons, UC Berkeley Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation & Entrepreneurship and former dean of Berkeley Haas. “When you think about the center of gravity of his work—the informational and incentive aspects of the design of efficient organizations—you realize quickly that these topics are becoming ever more important.”
As a member of Haas’ Economic Analysis & Policy Group and Operations & IT Management group, Marschak continued his boundary-spanning research into his 10th decade. Just two weeks before his death, he had a paper accepted to the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics.
“Tom was one of the sharpest, most insightful, and most admirable economists I have ever seen,” said Dong Wei, PhD 20 (economics), an assistant professor of economics at UC Santa Cruz who co-authored the recent paper with Marschak. “He had a tremendously successful academic career, and at the age of 90, he was still developing novel research ideas, conducting economic analysis with advanced mathematical tools, and writing academic papers with extreme rigor and clarity.”
“In so many ways, Tom was way ahead of his time. When you think about the center of gravity of his work—the informational and incentive aspects of the design of efficient organizations—you realize quickly that these topics are becoming ever more important.” —Professor Rich Lyons
Fleeing Nazi Germany
Marschak was born in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1930. His father, Jacob, who was Jewish and from Kyiv, Ukraine (then part of Russia), was a notable figure: As a 19-year-old student opposed to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, he served as labor secretary in a separatist republic in the Caucasus that lasted less than a year. When the Bolsheviks prevailed, Jacob Marschak—who went on to become a prominent economist—fled to Berlin. There, he met Tom Marschak’s mother Marianne, a journalist who earned her PhD and became an influential psychologist, developing the Marschak Interaction Method for observing the relationship between caregivers and children.
Although Tom’s early life in Germany was sunny, the looming threat of Nazism cast a shadow. In 1933, when Tom was 4 years old, his father insisted they flee to the United Kingdom. It was a prescient move as the family escaped the horrors of the Holocaust.
Marschak spoke about his father’s foresight in an oral history he recorded in 2005. “That was amazing foresight because all the other Jewish people with that kind of position said, ‘It’ll pass, it’s nothing, it’s a civilized country,’” Marschak said in the oral history. “He knew better.”
In England, Jacob Marschak was made a fellow of All Souls College at Oxford University while young Tom and his sister were put into school—taught in English, a language he had to learn quickly. In 1939, as the war spread, the family decamped to the United States. As they were not British citizens, and Germany had withdrawn citizenship from Jews, they were stateless for a time. Still, with the help of Tom’s father’s academic friends, they settled in New York, where Jacob Marschak took a position at the New School for Social Research.
In 1943, the family moved to Chicago, where Marschak went to University High School—an experimental school attached to the University of Chicago where students could graduate high school in 10th grade and get a bachelor’s degree by 12th grade. The Marschak home during that period was host to a circle of prominent émigrés, including Leo Szilard, the physicist who discovered the nuclear chain reaction process; atomic physicist Hyman Goldsmith; violinist Isaac Stern; and Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb.
By age 17, Marschak was a college graduate, with honors. He landed on economics as his field of study and headed to Stanford for his doctorate, followed by a job at RAND Corp. in Santa Monica under Charlie Hitch (later president of the University of California).
In 1960, he was hired as an associate professor at Berkeley Haas. “Things were very different then,” he recalled later. “You dressed in a white shirt and a tie, I can’t believe that. I was one of the very first to grow a beard—almost unheard of.”
Marschak lived in Berkeley with his first wife, Dorothy, and their children Debbie, Madeline, and Timothy. In 1968, Marschak’s life was scarred by tragedy when his eldest daughter Debbie, age 10, died in a car accident.
In 1979, he remarried, and he and his wife Merideth had sons Anthony and Daniel. He was a devoted and deeply involved father. “He took us to film festivals, summer backpacking and river trips, enrolled us in summer programs, monitored our education, and kept us in close contact with his side of the family,” recalled daughter Madeline Marschak. “He offered all four of his children unconditional love and support equally. …Tom Marschak was my hero and the best father anyone could hope to have.”
Academic boundary spanner
Academically, Marschak made his mark in economics theory, studying information gathering, information technology, and network mechanisms—complex work that was ahead of its time, Lyons said.
“Tom was an intellectual boundary-spanner from the get-go, having spanned two academic groups at Haas and having spanned in his work even more areas than these two groups traditionally have done,” Lyons said. “His work covered IT, data science, use of data to drive enterprise value: These are some of the defining issues of our current time.”
Marschak was the co-winner of the Koç University prize in 1996. He was an elected fellow of the Econometric Society and the recipient of both a Fulbright-Hays research award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation faculty research fellowship.
“Much of Tom’s work addressed foundational issues of organizational design, such as how the degrees of hierarchy or decentralization affect an organization’s communication costs and ability to achieve its objectives,” said Professor Emeritus Michael Katz, Sarin Chair Emeritus in Strategy and Leadership. “Although this work was abstract, it has important implications for business organizations.”
‘Dry and delicious humor’
His colleagues at Haas remember him as a generous instructor with a wry sense of humor. “Tom taught microeconomics to a generation of Haas undergraduates,” said Professor Emeritus Jonathan Leonard, George Quist Chair in Business Ethics. “If you could get him to raise an eyebrow, you knew you had said something interesting.”
Merideth Marschak also recalled her husband’s “dry and delicious” humor, as well as his love for outdoor hiking adventures and walking the Bay Area hills up until his last months. He was “unbeatable at trivia and could summon up historic facts and arcane knowledge on request” and also loved to cook for friends and family. “A crowded dinner table was the best fun,” she added. He was delighted when he became a grandfather at age 88.
“He was incredibly generous with his insight and his kindness,” Merideth Marschak said. “He taught us all the value of slowing down, enjoying life, and keeping an open mind.”
Marschak is survived by his wife, Merideth; his children, Madeline, Timothy, Anthony, and Daniel; his granddaughters Lucy and Alice; and nieces Emily and Julie Jernberg. He was predeceased by his sister, Ann Jernberg.
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As e-waste streams grow, regulations are backfiring, study finds
E-waste is the world’s fastest-growing solid waste stream, and companies are struggling with a deluge of waste produced by their manufacturing processes and products. Some have been illegally exporting their e-waste—which may contain hazardous substances that need special treatment—or illegally dumping it in landfills closer to home.
In 2021, for example, Amazon was caught destroying some 130,000 unsold items in a U.K. warehouse over the course of one week. Among the trashed merchandise were smart TVs, laptops, drones, hairdryers, computer drives, and other electronic devices.
The company acted in line with financial incentives: It was cheaper to destroy these goods than store, repurpose, or properly recycle them.
Yet recovering useful materials like precious metals from discarded electronics can reduce mining and forest degradation. It can also allow many jurisdictions to reduce their dependence on raw materials imports from other countries.
These clashing incentives are causing waste processing systems to fall far short of best practices, according to a new paper co-authored by Assistant Professor Sytske Wijnsma and published in the journal Management Science. She and her fellow researchers—Dominique Olié Lauga of University of Cambridge and L. Beril Toktay of the Georgia Institute of Technology—considered the impacts of various policy interventions on waste treatment and disposal, and offered practical recommendations to help regulators better align incentives and improve ineffective laws.
“Research on these systems is important because they are highly complex and not very transparent,” Wijnsma says. “Often, well-intended policy interventions can backfire.”
Simulating waste streams
It’s estimated that 75% of e-waste globally is exported, typically from the EU or the U.S. to developing countries, where recycling is less regulated. Only slightly over a third of e-waste in the EU is handled in line with waste regulations.
To simulate the confounding dynamics within waste processing chains, Wijnsma and her colleagues constructed a model. They drew from real-life scenarios shared with Wijnsma by Europol, the European law enforcement agency responsible for recommending and enforcing several waste management policies in the EU. The model was intended to shed more light on where in the waste chain incentives are misaligned and at which stages waste can leak from the system through local dumping or export to developing countries.
The simulated waste chain contains two key actors: a manufacturer producing waste and a treatment operator responsible for undertaking waste treatment within a country.
Within the model, waste producers are either the sort that generate high-quality waste—which can create more revenue for the treatment operators because of the high resale value of its component parts—or low-quality waste, which comes with higher hazard levels and lower revenue post-treatment.
The simulated waste chain ferries waste producers and waste treatment operators through three stages, representing a common real-world progression. First, a treatment operator sets a price a treat a batch of waste from a producer. Importantly, the operator doesn’t necessarily know whether the waste will be of high or low quality—which has significant repercussions. If the quality is likely to be low, the operator can’t count on recouping any resale value and would want to charge a higher price to treat it. On the other hand, if the quality is expected to be high, the operator could charge a lower price to process and treat it because they will recoup some value.
Next, the waste producer considers the quoted price and decides whether to contract with the treatment operator or to export the waste—either legally or legally. Currently, many regulations prohibit the export of low-quality waste, while the export of higher-quality waste often remains legal. As a result, exporting high-quality waste is relatively straightforward and inexpensive, while exporting lower-quality junk requires an expensive and risky circumnavigation of laws. Most of the electronic waste currently leaks from the system through export.
Finally, if a treatment operator has been contracted, it can opt to either treat the waste or dump it illegally. The difficulty in that decision lies in the fact that treatment operators typically have to quote a price while the contents of the batch of waste are still mysterious to them.
“You can imagine that operators get containers full of waste and don’t necessarily know the exact quality,” Wijnsma says. “They could sort the waste, immobilize hazardous substances, and recover as much valuable materials as possible, but this is not a profitable endeavor if the waste turns out to be of low-quality.” The decision thus largely depends on a best guess, based on past experiences and market dynamics, Wijnsma explains: “If an operator thinks there’s a very high probability of only getting bad waste, they could be less inclined to properly treat it.”
Addressing system breakdowns
The model highlights two key reasons the waste treatment chain breaks down.
- First, it’s relatively easy for treatment operators to receive payment for treating waste while in fact dumping it—an example of moral hazard, i.e., when an actor faces little or no potential consequence for unwanted behavior.
- Second, export policy has focused primarily on only prohibiting the export of low-quality waste. This can create situations in which the more valuable, high-quality waste is sent abroad, where treatment is cheaper. The result is that local recycling programs and treatment operators are left with mostly low-quality waste, which creates cascading effects. Operators have a greater incentive to dump the waste they receive since it’s very likely not profitable to treat.
Wijnsma and her colleagues formulated this second dynamic into one of their key recommendations: Regulations that treat high- and low-quality waste dramatically differently are likely to backfire. She calls this pattern the “waste haven effect,” wherein waste exports tend to flow to the countries where regulations and costs are lowest.
“Because of that, there’s been a large focus on trying to even out regulations between countries,” Wijnsma explains. A similar phenomenon occurs when regulations focus on low-quality waste and leave high-quality waste unregulated. “If you strengthen regulations for one waste category too much compared to another, then you also create perverse incentives.”
Another of the research team’s policy recommendations seeks to address the moral hazard problem by holding waste producers responsible when their downstream waste is disposed of improperly.
Notably, new laws in the EU and some U.S. states are trying to enforce that very shift. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations place responsibility for the proper management of post-use products that contain hazardous materials with the producers that made them. In practice, this has required producers to simply contract with treatment operators to deal with their waste. But Wijnsma says that the paper’s findings suggest the laws should go even further.
“A still-nascent practice…is fining the manufacturers when they contract with treatment operators who are found to be engaged in dumping,” Wijnsma says. In other words, producers must be held accountable for not only contracting with a treatment operator, but for contracting with a trustworthy one. “Our results support expanding regulations where the producer can be held (partially) responsible for downstream violations,” she says.
Read the paper:
“Treat, Dump, or Export? How Domestic and International Waste Management Policies Shape Waste Chain Outcomes”
By Sytske Wijnsma, Dominique Olié Lauga, and L. Beril Toktay
Management Science, December 2023
Laura Clayton McDonnell, JD MBA 85 – The Importance of Having a Personal Philosophy
Augmented Intelligence
The generative artificial intelligence revolution is already happening in the workplace—and it looks nothing like you’d expect.
Since ChatGPT went mainstream this year, many of the news stories about generative artificial intelligence have been full of gloom, if not outright panic. Cautionary tales abound of large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, stealing intellectual property or dumbing down creativity, if not putting people out of work entirely. Other news has emphasized the dangers of generative AI—which is capable of responding to queries by generating text, images, and more based on data it’s trained on—such as its propensity to “hallucinate” wrong information or inject bias and toxic content into chats, a potential legal and PR nightmare.
Beyond these legitimate fears, however, many companies are adopting generative AI at a fast clip—and uses inside firms look different from the dire predictions. Companies experimenting with AI have discovered a powerful tool in sales, software development, customer service, and other fields.
On the leading edge of this new frontier, many Berkeley Haas faculty and alumni are discovering how it can augment human intelligence rather than replace human workers, aiming toward increased innovation, creativity, and productivity.
“We’re used to thinking of AI as something that can take repetitive tasks, things humans can do, and just do them a little faster and better,” says Jonathan Heyne, MBA 15, chief operating officer of DeepLearning.AI, an edtech company focused on AI training, who also teaches entrepreneurship at Haas. “But generative AI has the ability to create things that don’t exist—and do it through natural language, so not only software programmers or data scientists can interact with it. That makes it a much more powerful tool.”
More jobs, new jobs
Those capabilities make gen AI ideal for summarizing information, extracting insights from data, and quickly suggesting next steps. A report by a team of researchers from OpenAI, OpenResearch, and the University of Pennsylvania concluded that for 80% of workers, LLMs could affect at least 10% of their tasks, while 20% of workers could see at least 50% of their tasks impacted. Another report by Goldman Sachs predicts two-thirds of jobs could see some degree of AI automation, with gen AI in particular performing a quarter of current work, costing up to 300 million jobs in the U.S. and Europe alone. Yet, the report adds, worker displacement for automation “has historically been offset by creation of new jobs, and the emergence of new occupations following technological innovations accounts for the vast majority of long-run employment growth.”
That’s in line with the findings of Assistant Professor Anastassia Fedyk, whose research has found that AI has been leading to increased sales and employment. In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Financial Economics, Fedyk and colleagues found that firms’ use of AI led to increased growth for companies through more innovation and creation of new products, which increased both sales and hiring.
Fedyk says that industries with particularly AI-related tasks, such as auditing, could see reductions in workforce over time. For most fields, however, she predicts that the workforce will stay steady but its composition will change. Her new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper studying employment at companies investing in AI found that they were looking for a workforce that was even more highly skilled, highly educated, and technical than other firms. “We’re seeing a lot of growth in jobs like product manager—jobs that help to manage the increase in product varieties and increase in sales,” Fedyk says.
An explosion of possibilities
Company conversations about gen AI exploded this spring, says Amit Paka, MBA 11, founder and COO of Fiddler AI, a five-year-old startup that helps firms build trust into AI by monitoring its operation and explaining its black-box decisions. “Generative AI became a board-level conversation,” he says, “even if folks in the market don’t know how they’ll actually implement it.” For now, firms seem more comfortable using gen AI internally rather than in customer-facing roles where it could open them up to liability if something goes wrong.
Obvious applications are creative—for example, using it to generate marketing copy or press releases. But the most common implementations, says Paka, are internal chatbots to help workers access company data, such as human resources policies or industry-specific knowledge bases. More sophisticated implementations are models trained from scratch on a set of data, like Google’s Med-PaLM, an LLM to answer medical questions, and Bloomberg’s BloombergGPT, trained on 40 years of financial data to answer finance questions. Deciding what type of LLM to implement in a company is a matter of first figuring out the problem you need to solve, Paka says. “You have to find a use case where you have a pain point and where an LLM will give you value.”
For now, firms seem more comfortable using gen AI internally rather than in customer- facing roles where it could open them up to liability if something goes wrong.
The power of video
While many companies are already using gen AI to analyze and generate text, video applications are next. Sunny Nguyen, MBA 18, is lead product manager for multimodal AI at TwelveLabs, which recently launched Pegasus, a video-language foundation model that uses gen AI to understand video and turn its content into summary, highlights, or a customized output. “Video understanding is an extremely complex problem due to the multimodality aspect, and lots of companies still treat videos as a bunch of images and text,” Nguyen says. “Our proprietary multimodal AI is aimed at solving this challenge and powering many applications.” For example, sports leagues could use the technology to generate game highlights for fan engagement; online-learning publishers could generate chapters or highlights instantly; and police officers could get accurate, real-time reports of suspicious activity.
TwelveLabs is launching an interactive chat interface where users could ask questions in an ongoing dialogue about a video. “Just like ChatGPT but for video,” Nguyen says.
Norberto Guimaraes, MBA 09, cofounder and CEO of Talka AI, is focusing video analysis on business-to-business sales conversations, using gen AI to analyze not just verbal content but nonverbal cues as well. Guimaraes says nonverbal factors can account for up to 80% of the impact made in a conversation. Talka’s technology uses AI to analyze 80 different signals, including facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice to judge whether a conversation is achieving its purpose, usually of completing a sale.
Guimaraes says the technology could be used to train salespeople to communicate more effectively and discern clients’ needs. “We’ll be better able to understand what are the key frustrations from your customer, whether you’re taking into account what they’re saying, and whether or not the conversation is landing,” he says.
Computer programmers have begun implementing more formal techniques in a new field called AI fairness, which employs mathematical frameworks based on social sciences to de-bias embedded data.
Talka AI is currently testing the technology with a “very large” company that is “one of the best known for sales,” Guimaraes says. It currently has 70,000 conversations in its system and has been able to successfully predict whether a sale will occur 85% of the time.
Sales and service
Companies are also exploring the use of AI to take part in simple sales. Faculty member Holly Schroth, a distinguished teaching fellow who studies negotiations and influence, has consulted with the company Pactum, which has been working on an AI tool to manage low-level sales—repetitive negotiations that have just a few different issues such as length of contract, quantity, and price. In initial studies, Pactum has found that people prefer talking to AI versus a human. “People like talking with a bot because it’s kinder and friendlier,” says Schroth, “because it can be programmed that way.”
Specifically, AI bots can be programmed to use language that acknowledges what the other side is saying. “Humans sometimes get frustrated and may not be aware of the language they use that may be offensive,” says Schroth. “For example, ‘with all due respect’ is at the top of the rude list.” People may feel like they can get a better deal with AI, she says, since the bot will work to maximize value for both sides, while a human may not be able to calculate best value or may let emotions interfere.
AI is also perfectly positioned to be a coach, says Assistant Professor Park Sinchaisri. He’s explored ways AI can help people work more efficiently whether they are Uber drivers or physicians. In today’s hybrid environment, where workers are often remote without the benefit of on-the-job training or peer-to-peer learning, a bot can learn best practices from colleagues and identify useful advice to share with others. AI could also help human workers redistribute tasks when a team member leaves. However, Sinchaisri has found that while AI provides good suggestions, humans can struggle to adopt them. In his working paper on AI for human decision-making, workers accepted only 40% of machine-generated suggestions compared to 80% of advice from other humans, citing they did not believe the AI advice to be effective or understand how to incorporate it into their workflow.
Sinchaisri is studying ways to make coaching more effective—either by training the AI to give only as much advice as the person might accept or by allowing for human nature. “Research has shown that humans tend to take more advice if they can modify and deviate from it a little,” he says. “Good advice is often counterintuitive, meaning it is difficult for humans to figure it out on their own; AI needs to learn how to effectively deliver such advice to humans to reap its full potential.”
Bias and ethics
As powerful and versatile as AI can be, the warnings are real. Trained on the vastness of the internet, large language models pick up toxic content and racist and sexist language. Then there’s the real problem of hallucinations, in which AI output seems believable but includes false information.
Biases are baked into LLMs, says Merrick Osborne, a postdoc at Haas studying racial equity in business. In a new paper on bias and AI, Osborne explores how biased information results not only from the data a model is trained on but also from the engineers themselves, with their natural biases, and from the human annotators whom engineers employ to fine-tune and subjectively label data.
“You need to create a culture of accepting that generative AI is useful in many stages of work and encouraging people to be transparent with their co-workers about how they’re using it.”
—David Evan Harris
Certainly more diversity in the field of engineering would help. But it’s important, Osborne argues, that engineers and annotators undergo diversity training to make them more aware of their own biases, which in turn could help them train models that are more sensitive to equal representation among groups. Computer programmers have begun implementing more formal techniques in a new field called AI fairness, which employs mathematical frameworks based on social sciences to de-bias embedded data. “We aren’t born knowing how to create a fair machine-learning model,” Osborne says. “It’s knowledge we have to acquire.”
Another way Osborne suggests addressing both bias and hallucinations is to call in outside help. Vijay Karunamurthy, MBA 11, is doing just that as field CTO at Scale AI, a seven-year-old startup that’s worked to make models safer and fairer. “People understand that models come out of the box without any sensitivity or human values, so these base models are pretty dangerous,” he says. Scale AI employs teams of outside experts, including cognitive psychologists with backgrounds in health and safety, who can help decide what information would be too dangerous to include in an LLM—everything from teaching how to build a bomb to telling a minor how to illegally buy alcohol. The company also employs social psychologists, who can spot bias, and subject experts, such as PhDs in history and philosophy, to help correct hallucinations.
Of course, it’s not feasible to have hundreds of PhDs constantly correcting models, so the company uses the information to create what’s called a critique model, which can train the original model and make the whole system self-correcting.
For companies adopting AI, it’s important to develop internal processes to help guide ethical use by employees. One of those guidelines, says faculty member David Evan Harris, a chancellor’s public scholar, is disclosure. “People have a right to know when they’re seeing or interacting with generative AI content,” says Harris, who was formerly on the civic integrity, misinformation, and responsible AI teams at Meta. That goes for both internal use and external use with customers. “When you receive content from a human you probably have more reason to trust it than when it’s coming from AI because of the propensity of the current generation of AI to hallucinate.” That’s especially true, he says, when dealing with sensitive data, like financial or medical information.
Companies may also want to control how gen AI is used internally. For example, Harris says there have been numerous cases in Silicon Valley of managers using it to write peer reviews for regular performance evaluations. While a tempting shortcut, it could result in boilerplate verbiage or, worse, wrong information. Harris says it’s better to come up with new strictures for writing reviews, such as using bullet points. On the other hand, banning AI is unlikely to work. “You need to create a culture of accepting that generative AI is useful in many stages of work and encouraging people to be transparent with their co-workers about how they’re using it,” he says.
One practice to avoid when crafting internal policies around gen AI is to limit governance programs to the letter of the law—since it tends to lag behind ethics, says Ruby Zefo, BS 85, chief privacy officer at Uber. “The law should be the low bar—because you want to do what’s right,” says Zefo. “You have to create policies and programs and documentation that will put you on the right side of the laws you know are coming but aren’t yet here.”
For one, that means developing guidelines around personal or confidential data—both being sure to recognize and refrain from using other’s personal or proprietary information to train the model and to refrain from feeding such information into a model that is or might become public. When running algorithms on personal data for customers, she adds, it’s important to allow for human review. Companies should also control access to internal gen AI models to only those who have a legitimate purpose. More than anything, Zefo says, flexibility is key while the technology is still being developed. “You have to have a process where you’re always evaluating your guidelines, always looking to define what’s the highest risk.”
Planning for the future
That need to stay nimble extends to the workforce as well, says Heyne. In the past, AI was mostly used by technical workers programming models—but gen AI will be used by myriad employees, including creative, sales, and customer-service workers. As gen AI develops, their day-to-day work will likely change. For example, a sales agent interacting with a bot one day may be overseeing a bot negotiating with an AI counterpart the next. In other words, sales or procurement functions in an organization will remain but will look different. “We have to constantly think about the tasks we need to train for now to get the value that is the goal at the end,” Heyne says. “It’s a strategic imperative for any company that wants to stay in business.”
“The law should be the low bar—because you want to do what’s right. You have to create policies and programs and documentation that will put you on the right side of the laws you know are coming but aren’t yet here.”
—Ruby Zefo, BS 85
It’s also an education that needs to start much earlier in life, says Dimple Malkani, BS 98. She founded Glow Up Tech to prepare teenage girls for the tech industry by introducing them to successful female leaders in Silicon Valley. The skills necessary to succeed in a gen AI world aren’t necessarily those emphasized previously in tech, or even in previous iterations of AI, says Malkani, who spent decades working in marketing and business development. “The core skills these girls should be getting when they go to college aren’t just data science but strategy and creativity as well—to figure out what new product innovation we should create,” she says.
One thing she’s sure of as she talks with the next generation about gen AI is that, unlike current workers, they are ready to dive in. “Gen Z is very comfortable using gen AI,” she says. “In fact, they’ve already embraced it and expect it to be part of their working futures.”
Nick Sonnenberg, MFE 07
CEO and Founder, Leverage
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed with work, you’re not alone. Nick Sonnenberg heard the complaint so often that he wrote a book to solve the problem: Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work.
It provides a framework for eliminating unnecessary tasks and focusing instead on work that drives results. Along with his operational efficiency platform, Leverage, Sonnenberg is reinventing the way people get things done.
Before he became an efficiency expert, Sonnenberg was barely staying afloat himself. He’d originally started a freelancer marketplace called Leverage that scaled very quickly. Then, his business partner walked out, jeopardizing the company’s future. Sonnenberg soldiered on, quickly noticing how much inefficiency there was, specifically in three areas: communication, planning, and resources.
“To have any chance of saving the company, I needed to get some time back,” he says. “Focusing on those buckets, things started turning around.”
Soon, people began contacting him for organizational advice. Eventually, he pivoted the company to become an efficiency training firm.
Sonnenberg says his success with Leverage wasn’t a case of getting lucky when his back was against the wall. He credits his MFE training and his years as a high-frequency trader, where he learned every second matters.
“Being a financial engineer, I’m programmed to find pattern recognition,” Sonnenberg says. “I started connecting the dots that there was this big opportunity to help a lot of people hopefully save millions of hours by teaching best practices of how to leverage all these amazing systems and tools, like Slack and Asana.”
Keeping Company
Know your gig workers to retain them
When done right, the gig economy can mutually benefit companies and workers. Companies can tap into deep and vast labor pools, and workers can create their own schedules. But such flexibility challenges gig platforms in committing to a service capacity. What incentives, then, can entice workers to work more hours more often?
A recent study co-authored by Assistant Professor Park Sinchaisri and published in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management sought to answer that question.
The researchers utilized data from a U.S.-based ride-hailing company that included 358 days of driving activities and financial incentives for thousands of New York City drivers between 2016 and 2017. Perhaps not surprisingly, they found that drivers work toward their income goals and are less likely to work after meeting them.
More surprisingly, Sinchaisri found that workers who have previously worked longer shifts are more likely to start a new shift or work longer than drivers who have worked less. This finding goes against previous research on taxi drivers, who have more of a “time-targeting behavior.”
Sinchaisri says that gig platforms should ask what specific goals workers have and make targeted adjustments. “Once you know your workers’ goals, you can think of better ways to incentivize them,” he says.
There’s No Place Like Work
How place identity enhances engagement
Post-pandemic workspaces have become increasingly fluid, and companies are trying out hot desks and hoteling spaces as they struggle to entice workers back to the office. But new research suggests that leaders wanting to build employee engagement should think less about rearranging the furniture and more about how employees relate the office space to their own work.
“When people feel a sense of self-esteem and distinctiveness derived from their workspace, we found it enhances their engagement,” says professional faculty member Brandi Pearce. “It also increases collaboration and their commitment to the organization.”
Pearce and colleagues from Stanford and Pepperdine universities studied “place identity,” as they refer to this sense of connection, at a software company transitioning workers at sites worldwide from traditional offices to open-plan innovation centers.
The research, published in Organizational Dynamics, found that whether people accepted or rejected the innovation centers didn’t align with their work functions or professional backgrounds, nor with age, gender, location, or other factors. “What seemed to matter more than the space itself was how people felt the space connected to them personally, positively differentiated them, and reflected a sense of belonging to something meaningful to them,” Pearce says.
“When people feel a sense of self-esteem and distinctiveness derived from their workspace…it enhances their engagement.”
What’s more, workers with a distinctive sense of place identity collaborated more actively with one another and were more engaged and committed to the organization.
So how can leaders cultivate place identity? Whether the setting is physical, hybrid, or virtual, Pearce suggests three best practices:
Broadcast the vision.
No matter the setup, leaders should clearly communicate the purpose of the space and what kinds of work are best done in the various workplaces: brainstorming sessions, workshops, and other collaborative tasks in work offices, for example, and focused time in home offices. To help define virtual workspaces, leaders can state whether video conferences are meant for efficiency or connection.
Model Enthusiasm.
Equally critical to visioning is the way leaders convey a positive attitude about space. In a hybrid setting, leaders can express enthusiasm by holding in-person meetings on in-office days and visibly blocking calendar time during remote-work days for solitary work.
Empower employees.
The researchers found place identity was highest when employees were encouraged to tailor their spaces to suit their needs and preferences. In one location, for example, employees were given resources to co-create furniture and other artifacts, enhancing their personal connection to the office. Remote workers could be given materials to customize their home spaces to create a connection to their team or organization, or—if they do visit the office—to create something with co-workers to bring home.
Scarcity as Strategy: Innovative Business Models for a Resilient Future
Points of Pride
Moments showcasing Haas’ pioneering impact on the business world
From its outset, business at Berkeley has proved trailblazing. Launched by a gift from Cora Jane Flood in 1898, Berkeley Haas—previously called the College of Commerce and the School of Business—is the only leading business school founded by a woman, the first founded at a public university, and the second-oldest in the U.S. It was launched, in part, to help California expand economically, with the forward-looking goal of enriching trade and cultural exchange in the Pacific Rim. Throughout the twentieth century, business schools—and Berkeley Haas in particular—took on evermore prominent roles in shaping the world economy and the character of business itself. In this, our 125th year, we celebrate some of Haas’ pivotal moments reimagining business and business education.
Pioneering the study of social impact…
Professor Earl Cheit ushered in the study of corporate social responsibility via his research and teaching starting in the late 1950s. The future dean also organized the first national CSR symposium in 1964. New coursework, with support from Professors Dow Votaw and Edwin Epstein, became the model for leading business schools. Today, Haas prepares students to become ethical, socially focused leaders via myriad courses, experiential learning opportunities, and co-curricular activities.
…helped pandemic-ravaged small businesses.
Professors Adair Morse and Laura Tyson worked with the State of California and the nonprofit and banking sectors to create a public-private partnership as a small business loan fund for vulnerable companies. They then launched the California Rebuilding Fund for small businesses in under-resourced communities.
…created a competitive advantage.
The Center for Responsible Business, founded by faculty member Kellie McElhaney in 2002, brought Haas to the forefront of the corporate social responsibility and business sustainability movements. The Wall Street Journal ranked Haas the No. 2 b-school for CSR in 2006 and 2007. The Financial Times rated Haas No. 1 worldwide in 2008.
…launched the first and largest student-led SRI fund.
Debuting in 2008 and featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Socially Responsible Investment Fund (now called the Sustainable Investment Fund) offers MBA students real-world experience in delivering strong financial returns and positive social impact. Student fund managers have grown the $1 million investment to over $4 million.
…prioritized socially conscious entrepreneurship worldwide.
The Global Social Venture Competition, launched in 1999 by five Haas MBA students, turned the nascent idea of creating viable companies with social impact into a global triumph. In its 20 years of existence, the GSVC distributed more than $1 million in prize money and helped more than 7,000 teams better the world.
Codifying our culture…
Our Defining Leadership Principles Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself had been latently capturing Haas’ essence for generations. In 2010, spearheaded by then-Dean Rich Lyons, BS 82, and anchored by the organizational culture research of Professor Jennifer Chatman, we took them public.
…distinguishes us from other prestigious business schools.
Our DLPs are a source of competitive advantage as well as pride and engagement. They are also our leadership brand, defining our graduates as Berkeley Leaders who practice responsible business. In 2018, Poets&Quants deemed us “the archetype for a values-driven MBA program.”
…positions Haas as the powerhouse for culture research.
Our new Berkeley Culture Center, founded and led by Professors Chatman, PhD 88, and Sameer Srivastava, helps business leaders create and nurture healthy and effective workplace cultures and is a hub for connections between academic research and corporate best practices. An annual conference convenes leaders from industry and academia to discuss new research and explore how to help organizations function more effectively. Chatman and Srivastava will soon launch the Culture Fix podcast to offer solutions to work dilemmas.
…cultivates community.
Since 1994, the alumni relations program at Haas has flourished in its mission to connect alumni to the school and to one another by adding traditions and signature events, expanding regional chapters and affinity/identity groups, developing career resources, creating a volunteer pipeline, providing mentorship opportunities for students and alumni, and much more.
Catalyzing the study of innovation…
The groundbreaking theories of dynamic capabilities, created by Professor David Teece in 1997, and open innovation, created by Adjunct Professor Henry Chesbrough, PhD 97, in 2003, led Haas to become one of the top business schools for innovation management and strategy.
…changed business education.
Previously, common belief held that established corporate structures were poorly suited for innovation, but Teece’s dynamic capabilities framework explains how large organizations can be entrepreneurial too. He also launched interdisciplinary programs with Berkeley’s engineering and law schools to help infuse innovation deep into research and teaching at Haas and to apply innovation management principles in private and public settings, including in the management of universities.
…facilitates global companies sharing innovative solutions.
Haas’ Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation helps companies expand markets, manage innovation, and facilitate strategic alliances via the membership-based Berkeley Innovation Forum. The World Open Innovation Conference, founded by Chesbrough and now hosted by a university in the Netherlands, allowed Haas to play a key role in bringing novel ideas to market.
…commercializes cleantech advancements.
The Cleantech to Market accelerator program pairs students with entrepreneurs to help bring promising climate tech innovations to market—more than 120 since its launch 15 years ago.
…helps students make innovation a competitive advantage.
The semester-long Haas@Work course acts as a faculty-run/student-staffed innovation agency—with teams of MBAs using a variety of innovation methodologies to assist corporate partners in developing and testing novel solutions to key challenges.
…inspires changemakers.
The Berkeley Changemaker initiative, established in 2020 and inspired by Lecturer Alex Budak’s Becoming a Changemaker course (later a book), has helped thousands of incoming students identify their passions and use their leadership traits to transform Berkeley and the world. Offered through the College of Letters and Science and Haas, the class is part of the campuswide initiative led by Laura Hassner, EMBA 18, and supported by former Dean Rich Lyons, BS 82, Berkeley’s chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer.
Early teaching of entrepreneurship…
Begun in 1970 (six years before Apple Computer was founded), Dean Richard Holton initiated one of the nation’s first courses in entrepreneurship, which he team-taught with Leo Helzel, MBA 68, for many years. It was likely the only such class that provided students direct contact with entrepreneurs. When the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation opened in 1991, Executive Director Jerome Engel continued building Haas’ renowned entrepreneurship curriculum by partnering with the venture capital community, creating career opportunities for students, and training faculty worldwide.
…allowed Haas to pioneer the Lean LaunchPad method.
Created in 2011 by Lecturer Steve Blank and now taught worldwide, Lean LaunchPad was an entirely new way to teach entrepreneurship. Inspired by a Haas MBA course, it challenges students to develop business models rather than business plans and to iterate their models frequently based on customer feedback.
…inspires unlikely entrepreneurs.
Professor Toby Stuart changed entrepreneurship teaching at Haas by restructuring the full-time MBA entrepreneurship course, gearing it not only to students with startup ideas but to students investigating entrepreneurship as a career as well. He also created a star-studded, career-changing Silicon Valley Immersion Week for the Berkeley MBA for Executives Program.
…positions Haas as the campus entrepreneurship hub.
A new entrepreneurship and innovation initiative, spearheaded by Dean Ann Harrison, is enhancing Haas’ efforts on three fronts: endowing thought leadership through faculty chairs, expanding programming, and creating a three-floor Entrepreneurship Hub for all of campus. Renovation has begun on the Hub, which is adjacent to Haas and features spaces for students to gather and work.
Dominating in finance…
In the late 1960s, when students were requesting courses providing creative approaches to financial markets and investment theory (thanks to new technologies), Berkeley embraced an innovative and highly quantitative approach to finance, becoming a national leader with its analytical quantitative curriculum.
…prompted insights into financial markets.
In the 1970s, Professor Emeritus Mark Garman pioneered early stock exchange simulations and studied market microstructures, minute trading activity in asset markets that today play a role in algorithmic and electronic trading.
…changed how financial assets are created and priced.
In 1979, the late Professor Emeritus Mark Rubinstein developed the binomial options pricing model (aka the Cox-Ross-Rubinstein model), which can be used to price a range of complex options. It remains one of Wall Street’s most important valuation tools and no doubt contributed to the subsequent growth of derivatives. In the early 1990s, Rubinstein, Professor Hayne Leland, and Adjunct Professor John O’Brien launched the SuperTrust, an S&P 500-based fund that traded as a single security, essentially the first exchange-traded fund.
…allowed us to take the lead in the crowdfunding revolution.
In 2008, Danae Ringelmann and Eric Schell, both MBA 08, co-founded Indiegogo, one of the world’s first crowdfunding sites, democratizing access to capital and entrepreneurship while navigating unchartered regulatory waters. In 2015, Haas, the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership, and the Kauffman Foundation partnered to establish CrowdBerkeley, a premier hub of education and research on crowdfunding.
Championing new teaching modalities…
As business evolved, Haas adapted its teaching to respond to challenges and opportunities taking shape worldwide, often blazing new academic trails. In 1959, when the famous Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation reports criticized most of American business education for its overall low standards and overly strong vocational bent, both cited Berkeley’s program, which was broader and more rigorous, as an excellent model.
…led to the first MFE Program at a business school.
The Master of Financial Engineering Program was launched in 2001 to prepare students to use skills in math, theoretical finance, and computer programming to make technically complex financial decisions. Today, it consistently ranks first among programs nationwide. The program recently added a data science curriculum that’s supported by a high-tech lab offering students and faculty access to real-time financial data and leading analytical software.
…created one of the few international management consulting programs.
Our International Business Development course debuted in 1992, assigning teams of MBA students to real-world consulting projects that include several weeks overseas, mostly in developing economies. IBD has since dispatched more than 1,800 students to work in 89 countries, helping organizations worldwide redefine how they do business.
…made Haas the first Top 10 b-school to offer a remote MBA.
In 2021, Haas announced its Flex cohort for the evening & weekend program. Students take live, virtual core courses from Haas professors teaching in new state-of-the-art video classrooms and can choose to take their electives virtually or on campus. (See sidebar, Linking Up.)
…offers unprecedented education of cross-sector leaders.
The Center for Social Sector Leadership, founded by Nora Silver, who serves as faculty director, pioneered three unique experiential b-school programs to prepare students for the nonprofit and public sectors. Social Sector Solutions, a professional management consulting partnership between Haas and McKinsey, launched in 2006 and has involved over 900 students who have served 170 nonprofits and public/social enterprises. Philanthropy Fellows, begun in 2008, is a partnership with the David and Lucile Packard Foundation that places recent MBAs with program officers at the foundation for two years—allowing new grads to enter a foundation at a professional (rather than administrative) level. Impact CFO, created with Assistant Professor Omri Even-Tov, will launch this fall with 15–20 alumni to help meet the market demand for chief financial officers in social impact organizations.
…integrated problem framing and solving approaches into a business curriculum.
Teaching Professor Sara Beckman developed three pioneering b-school courses: Managing the New Product Development Process and Design as a Strategic Business Issue (both in 1993), and Problem Finding, Problem Solving, which was part of the MBA core starting in 2012. PFPS, which included everything from systems thinking to human-centered design approaches, taught students how to think about complex business problems. Since 2017, undergrads can pursue the Berkeley Certificate in Design Innovation, a first-ever collaboration among Haas, the College of Engineering, the College of Environmental Design, and the College of Letters and Science’s Arts & Humanities Division.
Embracing behavioral economics…
Behavioral economics was born at UC Berkeley in 1987 with an interdisciplinary PhD course taught by two future Nobelists: economist George Akerlof and psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Professor Terrance Odean, MS 92, PhD 97, was encouraged by Kahneman to be the first at Haas to research behavioral finance, an area that was fertile ground for psychological analysis in an era of asset bubbles and market crises.
…established the vanguard of a new generation of behavioral economics researchers.
Haas faculty have since propelled the discipline into the mainstream while taking it into the future. Associate Professor David Sraer has investigated investor behavior and speculative bubbles. The late Professor John Morgan, who founded Haas’ Experimental Social Science Laboratory (XLab) for conducting experiment-based research, focused some of his work on inattention to shipping costs in eBay auctions and on behavioral biases in voting. Professor Ulrike Malmendier, the only woman ever to have won the prestigious Fischer Black Prize, has researched how individual biases affect corporate decisions, stock prices, and markets in general. She and Professor Stefano DellaVigna will lead the new O’Donnell Center for Behavioral Economics, which launches this fall, and will continue to make Berkeley the epicenter of behavioral economics research and a beacon for the brightest intellectual talent in the field.
Committing to diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging…
Socioeconomic mobility is core to both the UC Berkeley and Haas missions. The 2018 DEI strategic plan—the first such action plan at a major business school—translated aspirations for inclusion into intentional and comprehensive action at all levels of Haas. As a result, Haas has made substantive changes over the past six years to increase diversity and representation, engender lifelong learning around equity and inclusion, and cultivate belonging. Haas was also the first leading b-school to publicly share its DEI demographic data.
…created a unique and robust DEIJB team.
Dean Ann Harrison quickly made DEIJB a priority when she began her tenure in 2019. She met with student leaders; significantly increased scholarship funding for the incoming class; diversified the demographics of the Haas School Board, faculty, and senior leadership teams; modified the core MBA curriculum to require a course on leadership communications in diverse work environments; and appointed one of the first chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officers at a leading business school. Today, CDEIO Élida Bautista oversees a team of four focusing on admissions, student experience, staff community and capacity-building, and, uniquely, faculty support (see sidebar, Teaching Aid).
…advances gender and diversity in policy and business.
Research by Professor Laura Kray, a leading expert on the social-psychological barriers influencing women’s career attainment, has debunked popular gender stereotypes. Kray’s work has shown that the popular perception that men outperfom women as negotiators is false and hurts pay equity efforts. The Center for Equity, Gender & Leadership, founded in 2017 by faculty member Kellie McElhaney, develops “equity fluent” leaders to drive positive change and build an inclusive and equitable world. EGAL does this via hands-on education and learning opportunities, resources (like playbooks), and support for academic research. Kray is EGAL’s faculty director.
…improves access to Haas.
During the pandemic, Haas launched two programs to expand, diversify, and strengthen access to the school. Accelerated Access allows students who wish to pre-commit to business school while acquiring important work experience to apply to Haas in their senior year of college and gain conditional acceptance. Cal Advantage offers talented University of California undergraduates a streamlined application process.
…enriches the diversity of the venture community.
The Black Venture Institute, created by Berkeley Executive Education in collaboration with BLCK VC and Salesforce Ventures, teaches Black executives the foundational elements to become angel, scout, and venture investors.
…provides social mobility opportunities for local youths.
In 1989, Dean Raymond Miles started the Boost@BerkeleyHaas program—formerly known as the East Bay Outreach Program then Young Entrepreneurs at Haas (YEAH)—to teach business and academic skills to under-resourced high school students. It is one of the only university-based youth entrepreneur programs to support teens from disadvantaged communities throughout their entire high school career. Since its founding, the program has helped more than 1,200 students (many first-generation) go to college.
…supports alumni professional development.
Alumni may enroll in a three-part, self-paced online DEI workshop featuring CDEIO Bautista that focuses on best practices for creating and promoting a diverse and inclusive workplace culture. Since 2021, alumni committed to DEIJB have gleaned insights from top industry leaders at the annual virtual Alumni Diversity Symposium.
…expands partnerships with HBCUs.
Haas recently launched an HBCU MBA Fellowship with founding gifts from five alumni. The first-of-its-kind endowment will provide tuition support to MBA students who have attended a Historically Black College or University.
Pioneering the study of urban economics…
The Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics was founded in 1950, one of the first such university centers nationwide. It allowed Professors Sherman Maisel and Albert Schaaf to author the first major study of the structure of the California real estate industry, looking at the role of race and gender and finding a rising trend of women employed in the field. Later, Maisel would help create the current national U.S. mortgage market that relies on bond financing rather than on the strength and liquidity of local banks.
…advanced an unprecedented analysis of real estate markets and risk management.
Professor Nancy Wallace and researchers at the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics mapped the massive mortgage market and built groundbreakingly accurate housing price indices that monitor the characteristic dynamics of the housing stock. Wallace and Professor Richard Stanton, along with Paulo Issler, MBA 98, PhD 13, and Carles Vergara-Alert, MFE 04, PhD 08, recently combined these comprehensive databases with wildfire prediction models to estimate residential real estate value-at-risk in California.
…led to a renowned gathering of experts and a legendary forecast.
The Fisher Center hosts an annual Real Estate and Economics Symposium, a high-powered event known for the reputation of the speakers—and for Professor Emeritus Ken Rosen’s revered economic and real estate forecasts for California.
Our commitment to sustainability…
No other business school matches the breadth of Haas’ work in sustainability. The new Office of Sustainability and Climate Change, led by climate finance expert Michele de Nevers, coordinates curriculum and activities in five key areas: energy, food and agriculture, the built environment, sustainable and impact finance, and corporate responsibility.
…launched the preeminent university research center on energy economics.
Ever since Professor Severin Borenstein began leading the Energy Institute at Haas in 1994, it has been a place where serious academic researchers influence public policy at the state and federal levels, where the curriculum in energy and cleantech evolves to meet student and marketplace needs, and where collaboration flourishes. No other business school has as much depth, breadth, or influence in the energy field as Haas. Borenstein also co-developed the unique—and indispensable—Energy and Environmental Markets course and the energy market simulations used in the class. The course was the first of its kind at a top b-school and has been emulated at many peer institutions.
…allows Haas to pioneer green architecture and operations.
Chou Hall, which opened in 2017, is the nation’s greenest academic building, having earned LEED Platinum certification for its energy efficient design and operation, TRUE Zero Waste certification at the highest level after more than a year of efforts to divert over 90% of landfill waste, and WELL Gold, which is given to buildings that promote user health and well-being. Haas recently appointed its first full-time director of campus sustainability to oversee numerous initiatives—such as the campus renewable energy transition and elimination of single use plastic—to move Haas to carbon neutrality by 2025.
…inspired an unrivaled array of sustainability courses.
In 2021, Professor Nancy Wallace shifted the focus of the real estate program to consider high-efficiency, mixed-use development and financing strategies to fund real estate sustainability. Haas faculty members are now retooling all core MBA courses to address climate change and other sustainability challenges in various business disciplines. The revamped Sustainable and Impact Finance program keeps pace with rapid changes in climate finance and impact investing to best prepare students for careers. One focus for the Center for Responsible Business is reimagining capitalism and Executive Director Robert Strand, who teaches a course called Sustainable Capitalism in the Nordics?, is now the executive director of the new UC Berkeley Nordic Center.
…led to new degrees and certificates.
With Berkeley’s Rausser College of Natural Resources, Haas offers an undergraduate minor in sustainability and is developing a dual MBA/master’s in climate solutions. Haas also offers the Michaels Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Business.
Our faculty’s public service work…
Since its earliest days, Haas faculty have applied their insights to issues advancing the public good. Our first dean, Carl Copping Plehn, is credited as one of the fathers of the California tax system. Professor Lincoln Hutchinson, an expert in South America and Russia, left Berkeley in 1922 to become one of the State Department’s earliest commercial attachés. In the 1930s, Dean E.T. Grether lent his expertise of markets and pricing structures to the Great Depression’s wave of business regulations—among many others.
…guides national economic policy in groundbreaking ways.
Professor Emeritus Janet Yellen is the first person to have served in the nation’s three top economic roles: treasury secretary, head of the Federal Reserve, and chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (during the Clinton administration). Her four years as Fed chair were considered near perfect, marked by job and wage growth amid low interest rates. Former dean Laura Tyson was the first woman to chair the Council of Economic Advisers (1993–95) and to direct the National Economic Council (1995–96), among other roles.
…helped navigate e-commerce, communications, and horizontal mergers.
As the chief economist for the Federal Communications Commission in the mid-1990’s, Professor Emeritus Michael Katz informed an important revision of cable television price regulations. He later addressed Congress about how to allow consumers to safely make payments via phones. Professor Emeritus Carl Shapiro played a central role in the first big update in almost 20 years of the guidelines on horizontal mergers as the chief economist in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (2009–11). Both men continue to serve as expert witnesses in the country’s most high-profile antitrust cases.
…advances global gender parity.
As a longtime co-author of the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, Tyson helped quantify the magnitude of gender-based disparities and develop initiatives for change. She also served as lead author in 2016 for two reports for the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment that included action-oriented recommendations to hasten improved economic outcomes for women.
…gives voice to the voiceless.
A former World Bank director, Dean Ann Harrison has earned international acclaim for her research on foreign direct investment and multinational firms. In proving that job losses in U.S. manufacturing are driven primarily by labor-saving technology such as investments by U.S. multinationals in automation, she has shown that free-trade economists miscalculated the costs of globalization and failed to ensure that policies were in place to compensate the losers, including many workers in rural communities.
Assoc. Professor Andrew Shogan
Operations research expert
Associate Professor Andrew W. Shogan, 74, an expert in operations research, died on May 30 in Orinda, Calif. Shogan joined Berkeley Haas in 1974 and spent his entire professional career at the school until his retirement in 2007. He was beloved by faculty and staff alike. His passion for teaching and advancing the use of mathematical models to formulate and solve problems arising in business, industry, and government earned him several teaching awards, including the Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching—the highest honor given to faculty by students.
In addition to teaching, Shogan served as associate dean for instruction for 16 years from 1991 to 2007, where he oversaw the growth of all six degree programs and introduced innovations to the MBA program, including the creation of a shared virtual classroom with MBA students from Haas, Darden, and Michigan Ross. In recognition for his contributions to Haas, Shogan earned the Chancellor’s Distinguished Service Award in 2007.
Donations in his memory may be made to the Haas School of Business Undergraduate Program. Visit our giving site and note “in honor of Andrew Shogan.” Read his full obituary.
IN MEMORIAM
Herbert Ems, BS 47
Terry Haws, BS 49
Robert Hake, BS 50
Robert Elder, BS 51
Frank Corona, BS 53
Edward De Matei, BS 56
Beryl Robinson, BS 57
Richard Emerson, BS 59
Will Gassett, BS 60
Robert Buchman, BS 61
Robert Hermanson, BS 63, MBA 65
Barbara Tosse, BS 65
John McCue, MBA 69
Robert Hickey, MBA 77
J.P. Sheehan, MBA 78
Julie Leuvrey, MBA 88
Stockton Rush III, MBA 89
Leonora A. Burke, PhD 90
Susan Kobayashi, MBA 92
Candace Bennyi, BS 94
Beidi Zheng, MBA 08
Daniel Potter, MBA 19
Victor Garlin, Faculty
June A. Cheit, Friend
What’s the Big Idea?
Revolutionary findings by Haas faculty that have advanced business
All established wisdom had to start somewhere, often in the form of fresh insights that went on to become common knowledge. Here are some of those big ideas that started at Haas and became deeply embedded in business thinking.
Social Responsibility
Business firms and their leaders should govern with accountability and be socially responsible in their relationships with diverse sectors of society affected by their operations. Leaders failing to do so may eventually lose their leadership roles and see their own organizations collapse.
The late Professor Emeritus Dow Votaw was a pioneer in the field of corporate social responsibility and looked at how corporations evolved amid a society growing increasingly complex.
Wages
Paying workers more than the market wage boosts productivity and morale and reduces turnover.
Professor Emeritus Janet Yellen’s scholarship has focused on a range of issues related to wages, unemployment, and economic cycles. Her most-cited work on “efficiency wages,” written with her husband, George Akerlof, found that businesses offering better pay and better working conditions are often making a wise decision and are rewarded with more productive workers.
Employees
Human assets are as important as the financial and physical assets of a company and need to be managed in a strategic way.
As a scholar, the late Professor Emeritus and former Dean Raymond Miles positioned human resources as a strategic function, defining HR management styles commonly taught today.
NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS
Even in games where players don’t know what their opponents know or what the parameters are, it’s still possible to develop a framework to analyze strategic decision-making.
In 1994, the late Professor John Harsanyi (along with John Nash from Princeton University and Reinhard Selten from Bonn, Germany) won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in game theory that used probabilities to model how rational people will interact strategically when they have imperfect information. The spark for Harsanyi’s research came from his inability to advise the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1964 on negotiations with the Soviet Union, because neither side knew much about the other; it was a game of incomplete information. Game theory is now a significant tool for analyzing myriad conflicts, including global political clashes, labor negotiations, and price wars.
Analyzing the boundaries between firms and the markets they operate in is critical to understanding how to best design productive activities.
In 2009, the late Professor Oliver Williamson won a Nobel (along with Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University) for his insights into what’s known as the “make or buy” decision, a way of analyzing whether an organization should contract out for parts or make them in-house. Williamson brought together multiple disciplines to invent the field of transaction cost economics, which sheds light on optimal contracting, the boundaries of the firm, the design of bureaucracies, and more. His work was path-breaking because economic research at the time was focused on market transactions and not what happened inside organizations. Williamson’s insights have influenced everything from electricity deregulation in California to human resource management in the technology industry.
ORGANIZATIONS & INNOVATION
Natural selection processes akin to those in bioecology drive the emergence, growth, evolution, and decline in groups of related organizations.
This vibrant field of research, called organizational ecology, was co-developed by the late Professor John Freeman and former Professor Glenn Carroll.
Reliable performance by an organization may require a well-developed collective mind in the form of a complex, attentive system tied together by trust.
Professor Emeritus Karlene Roberts pioneered a new way to understand human-made disasters, looking beyond human error and technical glitches to the organizational causes of catastrophes in industries requiring nearly error-free operations, like commercial aviation and nuclear power plants. The quality of interactions among team members, she found, was a critical part of highly reliable organizations.
Knowledge gives companies competitive advantage and is contained within a company’s people.
Ikujiro Nonaka, MBA 68, PhD 72, pioneered theories about knowledge management and transformed how people drive innovation together. Along with Hirotaka Takeuchi, MBA 71, PhD 77, Nonaka co-authored the business best-seller The Knowledge-Creating Company. In 1997, Nonaka became the Haas School’s Xerox Distinguished Professor in Knowledge, the first professorship in the world dedicated to the study of knowledge management.
It isn’t enough for companies to innovate—they also must be able to profit from those ideas. This requires good strategic management and access to manufacturing, marketing, distribution, and other complementary assets and technologies on favorable terms—which is just as important to financial success as great R&D.
Professor David Teece is known for this theory of dynamic capabilities, which puts the management team front and center in the innovation process. Gary Pisano, PhD 88, co-authored the first article on the topic, in 1997.
Companies used to rely on their internal labs for their innovations, but they can retain their competitive edge by partnering with other companies—even competitors—to create useful and lucrative products and services.
This concept, known as open innovation, was created by longtime Adjunct Professor Henry Chesbrough, PhD 97.
Branding
A brand is an asset involving relevance and image (functional and emotional) and having a loyal customer core. The implication is that a brand is the responsibility of the whole organization including the executive suite.
Professor Emeritus David Aaker is widely considered the father of modern branding. His pioneering work defined brand equity and detailed ways to build and manage brands and portfolios that are used by organizations worldwide.
Open Science
Widely accepted research practices in the social sciences leave too much room for bias and manipulation and need to be reformed.
Professor Leif Nelson’s 2011 paper, “False Positive Psychology” (co-authored with Joseph Simmons and Uri Simonsohn), helped launch the open science movement, which has upended the field of psychology, toppled famous studies, and sent waves throughout the social sciences. Open science focuses on rooting out biases, replicating important studies, and—on rare occasions—exposing fraud. Many researchers have since adopted more rigorous practices, and reforms are ongoing.
Culture
Person-culture fit is a useful predictor of organizational commitment and extra-role behavior, which in turn affect firm performance.
Professor Jennifer Chatman, PhD 88, co-created the Organizational Culture Profile in the early 1990s with Charles O’Reilly, MBA 71, PhD 75, and Dave Caldwell. It illustrates how organizational culture can be quantified, has defined the agenda for the scientific study of culture for decades, and remains the most robust and reliable measure of organizational culture to date.
Finance
The balance sheet approach should be used to analyze accounting issues as opposed to the income statement approach.
Articles by the late Professor Maurice Moonitz, BS 33, MS 36, PhD 41, played an important role in the gradual switch to the balance sheet approach by the bodies that establish the generally accepted accounting principles followed by publicly held American corporations. He also influenced the conceptual frameworks eventually adapted by accounting standard setters both in America and abroad.
Securities with various risks and returns can be combined into a mutual fund that mimics the S&P 500.
The concept of a “SuperFund” index, a radical innovation in security markets that paved the way for exchange-traded funds, was developed by Professor Emeritus Nils Hakansson in 1976.
Prior to the Global Financial Crisis that started in 2007, banks were selecting the riskiest pools of home mortgages—the lemons that were more likely to contain mortgages in which borrowers prepaid or defaulted on their loans—to sell into the securitized bond market.
The late Professor Dwight Jaffee, along with Professor Nancy Wallace and Christopher Downing, were the first to document loan cherry-picking by banks and Freddie Mac. Their research drew intense scrutiny from Freddie Mac and helped to pressure the quasi-governmental entity into disclosing more information about underlying mortgages. Jaffee made seminal contributions aimed at influencing the public policy debate on questions related to the causes of the Global Financial Crisis, which he anticipated years before its onset.
Behavioral Economics
Humans tend to remain committed to a losing course of action (think bad investments or relationships) rather than pull the plug and try something different.
Professor Emeritus Barry Staw coined this phenomenon “escalation of commitment,” a discovery that is one of the most highly cited in organizational behavior. He helped pioneer the field of behavioral decision theory, a sub-area of behavioral economics.
Individual experiences of macroeconomic shocks affect financial risk-taking, as often suggested for the generation that experienced the Great Depression.
Professor Ulrike Malmendier proved econometrically what had been observed only anecdotally and has continued her groundbreaking research into how the economic conditions that prevail during a person’s life so far strongly influence their views on money for years and decades to come.
Homeownership
Lending discrimination has not disappeared with the shift online, since algorithms incorporate human biases.
Professors Adair Morse, Richard Stanton, and Nancy Wallace were the first to merge large datasets with details on interest rates, loan terms and performance, property location, and borrower’s credit with race and ethnicity. Their 2021 research found that both online and face-to-face lenders charge higher interest rates to African American and Latino borrowers, and these differentials lead to over $450 million in extra interest payments per year.
Energy
Californians have been paying a “mystery gasoline surcharge”—which has ranged from 28 to 65 cents a gallon in any given year—since 2015.
Professor Severin Borenstein discovered this surcharge, finding that between 2015 and 2022, it cost Californians $48 billion—over $4,000 for a family of four. He’s been fighting to get government officials to understand it ever since. Earlier this year, the state legislature and governor passed a bill that will establish a special state office to investigate the cause of the surcharge and possible remedies.
TECHNOLOGY & ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Lack of total transparency limits the liquidity that firm owners can obtain through an IPO.
Professors Emeriti Hayne Leland and David Pyle’s 1976 paper was a seminal contribution in the field of corporate finance, investigating what happens when entrepreneurs cannot be expected to be entirely straightforward about their projects to lenders, since there may be substantial rewards for exaggerating positive qualities.
“Smart markets,” defined as a turbulent, information-intensive environment with constantly changing products, consumers, and competitors, will require a shift in performance goals from profitability per product to profitability per customer.
Professor Rashi Glazer’s trailblazing theory about smart markets—which he first introduced in 1991, years before the Internet boom—positioned Haas as a thought leader in the data-driven marketing movement.
Durable economic principles can guide you in understanding today’s frenetic business environment in information-based products and the technology sector.
Haas Professors Emeriti Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian co-authored Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (1999), a widely acclaimed book that deconstructs the economic factors affecting information technology markets. Though the book pre-dated Facebook, the iPad, and big data, it continues to guide leaders through the information age.
Perception is reality in entrepreneurship.
Professor Toby Stuart has investigated the nuances of how startups build momentum by establishing the right set of affiliations. In building a company, entrepreneurs proactively architect exchange relationships that enhance the legitimacy of their endeavors. His work finds that the more uncertain the prospects of a new venture, the more essential it is to enlist the support of those already held in high esteem in the space.
Despite it seeming easy to shop around online, information gatekeepers design markets so that prices vary widely and are hard to compare.
The late Professor John Morgan was a prolific researcher, with notable contributions to the area of pricing and competition in online markets. His most-cited work sheds light on the reasons that prices can vary so widely on the internet when it’s easy to shop around: So-called “information gatekeepers” have an incentive to design markets in ways that prices across sellers vary.