Large Margins
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In order to understand “where we come from”, we must understand the evolutionary history of life, and in order to understand that, we must understand the physical history of the earth, and in order to understand that, we must understand its history in the solar system, and in order to understand that….you get the idea. So, to start the course we will go all the way back to the origin of the universe. At the time of the Big Bang, words...more
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In this lecture, Professor Freeman discusses the Articles of Confederation. Although they seem hopelessly weak in the long view of history, the Articles made perfect sense as a first stab at a national government by a people who deeply distrusted centralized power - a direct product of their recent experience of the British monarchy. Among the many issues that complicated the drafting of the Articles, three central issues included: how...more
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We consider games in which players move sequentially rather than simultaneously, starting with a game involving a borrower and a lender. We analyze the game using "backward induction." The game features moral hazard: the borrower will not repay a large loan. We discuss possible remedies for this kind of problem. One remedy involves incentive design: writing contracts that give the borrower an incentive to repay. Another involves...more
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This lecture is about optimal exercise strategies for callable bonds, which are bonds bundled with an option that allows the borrower to pay back the loan early, if she chooses. Using backward induction, we calculate the borrower's optimal strategy and the value of the option. As with the simple examples in the previous lecture, the option value turns out to be very large. The most important callable bond is the fixed rate amortizing...more
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Insurance provides significant risk management to a broad public, and is an essential tool for promoting human welfare. By pooling large numbers of independent or low-correlated risks, insurance providers can minimize overall risk. The risk management is tailored to individual circumstances and reflects centuries of insurance industry experience with real risks and with moral hazard and selection bias issues. Probability theory and...more
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David Kelley, founder and CEO of IDEO Product Development, grew up in Ohio, where he survived on a diet of Velveeta cheese and white bread, He attended Carnegie Mellon and studied electrical engineering, but spent more time working on carnival floats. After graduation, he worked for Boeing on the 747. He learned early that in a large company, he didn't get to choose the people he worked with. He came to the Graduate Product Design Program...more
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In the decades immediately following the French Revolution, Paris was at the center of a series of major developments in medical science, sometimes described as the transition from medieval to modern medicine. Although the innovations associated with the Paris School were in large part products of the ideological and institutional transformations brought on by the Revolution, they belong to a long list of challenges to the Galenic...more
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Several reasons can be found to explain why Great Britain and the Netherlands did not follow the other major European powers of the seventeenth century in adopting absolutist rule. Chief among these were the presence of a relatively large middle class, with a vested interest in preserving independence from centralized authority, and national traditions of resistance dating from the English Civil War and the Dutch war for independence from...more
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Dominic Orr, CEO of Aruba Networks, speaks about lessons learned from applying the HP way to startups. Orr suggests that he has achieved great results from giving employees respect and dignity. At the same time, Orr acknowledges mistakes he has made in applying the HP way to startups. In particular, in a large organization, such as HP, there time for long feedback cycles because any mistakes from giving people too much benefit of the...more
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November 16, 2007 lecture by Ge Wang for the Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction Seminar. In the first part of this talk, Ge presents the design, philosophy, and development of ChucK, a computer music programming language intending to provide a different approach, expressiveness, and thinking with respect to time and parallelism in audio programming - as well as a platform for precise and rapid experimentation. In the second...more
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Tom Friel, Chairman of Heidrick and Struggles, discusses the challenges of building a great team and suggests that startups can attract great talent with a number of factors, including money, self-fulfillment, belief in the mission or belief in the founder. Friel argues that to attract and retain great talent, entrepreneurs should be generous with at least one or more of these factors and sufficient on the others. Furthermore, Friel adds...more
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The boom in European colonial expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century, the so-called New Imperialism, can be seen to follow from three principle factors, in ascending order of importance: religious proselytizing, profit, and inter-imperial political strategy. With respect to the latter concern, the conflicts emerging from imperialism set the stage for World War I. Along with its military and industrial consequences,...more
