Month: September 2023

It is good that economic crashes are rare. This makes them harder to study. The severity of the events makes it essential for us to understand them fully, says Matteo Magiori, associate professor of finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business. My colleagues and I have been laying the foundations for a crash to be […]

Public DNA databases have become powerful tools for solving genetic mysteries in a few years. These databases have been used to find long-lost relatives and help adoptees locate their biological parents. The best-known use of these tools is to help police solve cold cases. They can do everything from identifying anonymous bodies to detecting criminal […]

Clinical drug trials are designed to compare a treatment against a placebo to determine the best option for a patient. These randomized control studies are the gold standard for determining causality. If there are enough participants, they can be used to determine the best course of action. The knowledge gained through the experiment allows drug […]

Kosinski’s latest study was published in Scientific Reports earlier this year. He fed over 1 million pictures of social media profiles into the algorithm, which correctly predicted a person’s self-identified ideology 72% of the time. Humans got it right only 55% of the time. Kosinski is an associate professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of […]

Michael Lewis called them “Flash Boysopen in a new window,” who use algorithms to predict and profit from significant moves made by slow-moving funds. These algorithms detect when mutual funds are about to purchase large stock quantities and can direct the system to start buying shares immediately. These algorithmic traders then profit from a short […]

A study in which researchers tested alternative credit scoring models using artificial intelligence found that lower-income families and minorities have a problem: the predictive tools are between 5-10% less accurate than those for higher-income groups and non-minorities. The algorithms that determine credit scores are not biased against disadvantaged borrowers. It’s not that credit score algorithms are […]

Does this mean that the quality of journalism is about to deteriorate? Are newspapers less likely to produce investigative stories that readers depend on to expose corruption, uncover wrongdoing, and hold influential people and institutions accountable? The worry is who else will investigate a scandal in a small regional city? says Gregory J. Martin, assistant […]

Even modest improvements in the organ exchange market can save many people’s lives. This is where economists and experts in operations come into play. Akbarpour, a professor of economics and associate professor at Stanford GSB, recalls: “We used these tools I was familiar with to solve this social problem.” “I’d never seen such an elegant […]

An analysis of lockdowns in Chile reveals that wealth was critical in determining who stayed at home and who took a risk. Latin American countries rushed to impose lockdowns and restrictions on mobility when COVID-19 struck in March 2020. Evidently, these public health measures would slow down the region’s growing economy. Still, it wasn’t clear […]

Donkor was always intrigued by the fact that an unpleasant or harmful experience with a passenger did not seem to affect whether they tipped him and how much. Why? He wondered why people list in the first place. Donkor, a marketing assistant at Stanford Graduate School of Business, explains that tipping behavior in NYC taxis […]