Three Questions

Do your loved ones want their presents to be expensive or thoughtful? Do they want to be surprised or to get items from their wish lists? We asked Professor Nathan Novemsky, a psychologist and expert in consumer behavior, to explain some of the common mistakes that gift-givers make.

Yale SOM’s Rick Antle, an accounting scholar who worked on the Bernie Madoff restitution, says that FTX was a toxic combination of a new asset and a failure of corporate controls.

Taylor Swift fans scrambling for concert tickets faced endless queues and crashes on the Ticketmaster website. Yale SOM economist Florian Ederer explains the antitrust issues at play and the tradeoffs inherent in satisfying overwhelming demand.

We asked Prof. William English, a former Fed official, to interpret the announcements at the Federal Open Market Committee’s monthly meeting last week.

We asked Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, what another five years of Xi Jinping’s leadership means for China’s economic policies and the environment for Western businesses there.

We asked Paul Bracken, an expert in nuclear strategy, how this “unthinkable” scenario would play out.

We asked Prof. Fiona Scott Morton, an expert on competition in the healthcare industry, whether the new legislation will make a difference—and what it will take to get drug prices under control.

We asked SOM’s Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, whose current work focuses on assessing the costs and benefits of debtor protection policies and understanding the role that consumer debt plays in the macroeconomy, to put President Biden’s decision to forgive student debt in context.

Inflation has put consumers in an anxious, angry mood, even as the economic data shows confounding bright spots. We asked Yale SOM’s Ravi Dhar how the perception of rising prices affects buying behavior, and how companies can respond.

Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter has turned into a battle over the prevalence of bot accounts on the platform. We asked Prof. Tauhid Zaman, who has studied the impact of bots, how much they skew the experience of Twitter users.