Posted by Marc Hodak on February 19, 2008 under Self-promotion | 
President’s Day marked a minor milestone in my academic career, such as it is. I scored my 1,000th download of a paper published to SSRN.
To give you an idea of how small a milestone this is, a real academic has thousands of papers downloaded; a successful academic, tens of thousands. Alas, I’m not a real academic, so 1,000 is not bad.
Among NYU professors, who collectively rank 4th among business schools in SSRN downloads, I am in the top quarter of professors, most of whom are tenured or on a tenure track. That and a dime…
Posted by Marc Hodak on December 22, 2007 under Self-promotion |
I’m leaving for a farm in southern Missouri with no internet connection. For those of you not familiar with U.S. geography, that will place me squarely in the middle of…nowhere.
I usually take this week of peaceful isolation to develop an idea for the following year. Two years ago, I used the time to write up some research that became the basis for our highly regarded, compensation governance advisory work. Last Christmas, I developed a proposal to NYU for what would become my “History of Scandal” course. I’m still amazed that the department deans approved the course last spring, but having just finished its opening semester, I’d like to think they’re pretty happy they did.
The idea I’ve teed up for next week is quite novel, but I’ve gotten spoiled by my successes these last couple of years, so I’m getting bolder. (Hint: if you’re a public company CEO, your options will multiply as your excuses shrink.)
To the couple dozen of you who faithfully–or otherwise–follow these scribblings, I hope that this season is one of relaxation, hope, and good cheer with your loved ones.
Posted by Marc Hodak on October 26, 2007 under Self-promotion |
Forbes added the first and last line of this article. The rest was (mostly) what I wrote last weekend. For those of you taking my “History of Scandal” class, this is your first reading. Enjoy!
Posted by Marc Hodak on October 24, 2007 under Self-promotion |
I haven’t been that into baseball since I was a kid, when I was really into baseball; I could tell you the stats of every player in the league. But, since we have family in the game tonight, there’s someone to root for. And it looks like a pitching duel!
Posted by Marc Hodak on October 15, 2007 under Self-promotion |
For the longest time, my most downloaded paper on SSRN has been my contribution to mechanism design. My paper on the Enron Scandal submitted last June, however, has been downloaded at a rapid clip (it was #5 among “new papers” in the Management Research Network)–a trajectory that would make it my #1 paper sometime next month. Maybe with the publicity of the Hurwicz, Maskin, and Myerson Nobel, my ingenious mechanism may see a surge!
My mechanism, a corporate cost allocation method, was praised at the time of publication (ten years ago) as extraordinarily clever. It was adopted by some very large, complex organizations, and succeeded in getting their managers to reveal reservation prices (a key objective of mechanism design) on major investments, with the effect of significantly improving their corporate returns.
Unfortunately, over the last decade, corporate cost allocations have come to be driven almost entirely by tax considerations rather than internal economics. The impact on organizational efficiency of this sorry trend is incalculable. Imagine E-bay auctions organized by the IRS.
Posted by Marc Hodak on September 11, 2007 under Self-promotion |
My new paper is up on SSRN! This is the cool case of Ford v. Dodge (the famous 1919 legal case is only part of the whole, sordid story). This fully-sourced presentation is for my “History of Scandal” class opening this semester, where I’m teaching about the evolution of corporate governance in the U.S.
If you’re into business history with a legal twist, you will enjoy this case. I was hoping to get six cases up before the class started, but reality intrudes. I’ll be lucky to have three up by the middle of the semester. I made a slight revision to my other case already up on SSRN, The Enron Scandal, which was the #5 most downloaded new paper in the Management Research Network this summer.
I’m still promising an awesome class, but the rest of the class material just won’t look as finished as I would have hoped.
The “Ford Squeeze-out” abstract appears below the fold!
Read more of this article »
Posted by Marc Hodak on June 9, 2007 under Self-promotion |
I don’t expect big things from my Enron presentation because its breaks new ground in research or analysis. It doesn’t. Nor does it come to any startling new conclusions. What it does is distill the whole, incredibly complicated story to the essential elements that distinguished Enron from all the other companies whose greedy, lazy, or corrupt management didn’t bankrupt them. And it puts it all together in a form uniquely useful to a professor who has to cover this material in about two hours. That’s why I expect big things from this presentation.
My wife, who counted all the non-revenue generating hours I put into it, is skeptical. I can now point out that this submission is suddenly among SSRN’s Top 10 in the Organizational Behavior Research Centers Papers. But I’m afraid that just makes her more concerned–that this nominal success in an admittedly narrow category will only egg me on in spending unruly amounts of time preparing the remaining cases.
