Good morning and happy Friday!
Here are a few stories you may have missed from the week that was …
LBS Wins Harvard Case Competition
A team of five London Business School students managed to win first place at a recent Harvard Global Case Competition, topping an impressive 126 teams from around the world, including The Wharton School at UPenn, INSEAD and the aforementioned hosts, Harvard Business School. The winning team of Chin Ta Sim, Adrian Ho, Marston Litvinsky, Salman Alam and Lucas Servido, all MiF students, earned a $10,000 cash prize for their efforts despite the fact that Servido’s flight to Boston was cancelled the night before the event began.
Maybe Taxes Could Solve Traffic? Ah, Probably Not.
Increased urbanization and rising population means, naturally, increased urban congestion. Traffic, one of the modern world’s great inconveniences, hasn’t really been given a verifiable solution, but the idea of a “traffic tax” may be one. Unless you talk about with with Wharton real estate professor Gilles Duranton.
Speaking with Knowledge@Wharton, Duranton argues that a traffic tax to reduce cars would impede more social mobility than it should and that traffic isn’t quite as bad as we may think. “My key takeaway is that actually the social cost of congestion is much smaller than we think,” he says. “I am not saying that traveling in large cities is easy. I’m just saying that the pure social cost of congestion is actually pretty small.”
Kelley Direct At IU Voted Best Online MBA By QS Intelligence Unit
For the second year in a row, UK-based QS Intelligence Unit ranked the Online MBA from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University as the world’s best online program.
The QS Distance Online MBA Ranking 2017 is based upon a questionnaire submitted by business schools and a survey of international employers who hire MBA graduates. The results of both surveys are then used to produce the final scores.
Kelley Direct received a score of 100 in terms of employer reputation, which makes up nearly a third of the score used to create the overall ranking.
“Employability” is the “backbone of an MBA degree’s value,” its editors said in explaining the rankings’ methodology. The score is based on a global survey of companies that were asked to identify schools where they prefer to recruit.
Penn State Finds Weird Eco-Friendly Buying Patterns
Researchers from the Penn State Smeal College of Business found an odd correlation in eco-friendly product consumers. The work from “Lisa E. Bolton, professor of marketing and Frank and Mary Jean Smeal Research Fellow at Smeal, and Smeal doctoral alumnus Aaron M. Garvey, assistant professor of marketing at the Gatton College of Business and Economics at the University of Kentucky,” found that consumers are often split in long-term patterns. Basically, consumers who are more eco-conscious will continually make positive purchasing decisions while those who are less are likely to buy a eco-friendly product and “feel they’ve done their good deed and tend not to choose eco-products in their next purchase. For these consumers, one green purchase boomerangs on the next.”