Publication records

The case aims to leverage the telecommunications industry as an earlier analogue for the development of infrastructural industries (e.g. utilities, railways, aviation) in times after liberalization. It describes the years of Deutsche Telekom CEO Kai-Uwe Ricke. By doing so, it provides students with the opportunity to analyze the need to adjust the company model to a changing competitive environment and the role of leadership in times of transition.

In this paper, we explore the possible consequences that pricing and reimbursement regulation may have on pharmaceutical innovation. We first investigate qualitatively how a pharmaceutical firm is likely to strategically respond in its R&D activities to pricing and reimbursement regulation. We then quantitatively evaluate these effects in the context of a calibrated decision-theoretic model of drug development in which a pharmaceutical firm is forward-looking and takes future pricing regulation into account in making current development decisions. Our findings indicate that, in designing optimal pharmaceutical pricing and reimbursement regulation, the benefits of more affordable or cost-effective drugs must be traded against the costs of less pharmaceutical innovation, with fewer projects being developed in general and in particular in low-margin therapeutic areas and with little potential of being considered highly innovative at the time of market launch.

Globalization has been seen as both a threat and an opportunity whenever it has occurred. Jamie Anderson, Martin Kupp and Jörg Reckhenrich give us an artists' perspective on managing in a global business world.

© 2009 The Author Journal compilation © 2009 London Business School

The Basel II Accord requires banks to establish rigorous statistical procedures for the estimation and validation of default and ratings transition probabilities. This raises great technical challenges when sufficient default data are not available, as is the case for low default portfolios. We develop a new model that describes the typical internal credit rating process used by banks. The model captures patterns of obligor heterogeneity and ratings migration dependence through unobserved systematic macroeconomic shocks. We describe a Bayesian hierarchical framework for model calibration from historical rating transition data, and show how the predictive performance of the model can be assessed, even with sparse event data. Finally, we analyze a rating transition data set from Standard and Poor's during 1981-2007. Our results have implications for the current Basel II policy debate on the magnitude of default probabilities assigned to low risk assets.

With permission of Elsevier

We study the dynamics of usage intensity of second-generation cellular telephony over the diffusion curve. Specifically, we address two questions: First, can we draw conclusions about the underlying drivers of technology diffusion by studying usage intensity? Second, what is the effect of high penetration of previous generations and competing networks on network usage intensity? Using an operator-level panel covering 41 countries with quarterly data over 6 years, we find that heterogeneity among adopters dominates network effects and that different technological generations are complements in terms of usage, but substitutes in terms of subscription.

With permission of Elsevier

The purpose of this paper is to deepen our understanding of the MBA market. Our focus lies hereby on the customers, that is, on people who are interested in attending an MBA program and who are courted relentlessly by business schools. The paper analyzes why people do an MBA and how they select their favorite business schools and MBA programs. We particularly try to understand the differences between various groups of applicants based on gender, length of work experience, level of GMAT score, type of study, and nationality. The paper shows that different segments of applicants start an MBA for different reasons and display different preferences with respect to school selection, use of information sources as well as decision-making. We hope that the insights will help business schools make their marketing approaches even more effective.