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Thought in Action
 Nightmare on Wall Street
Wall Street was rocked this week as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch & Co. sold itself to Bank of America Corp. and insurer American International Group Inc. saw its shares plummet as it scrambled to raise billions to stay afloat. Watch Ross Professor Amiyatosh Purnanandam explain how the investment banking world got to this point, and what the future holds for the industry and regulators. Purnanandam, assistant professor of finance, also outlines how this Wall Street crisis affects average Americans.
Listen to Ross Assistant Professor of Finance Sreedhar Bharath's take on how America got into such a financial mess.
 Listen to podcast.
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Robert Van Order
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 Why the U.S. Took Control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
The U.S. government, in a historic move September 7, 2008, took over mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, ousting the CEOs of both companies and laying out plans to invest up to $200 billion in capital to shore up their finances. Both companies, which were privately held but were government sponsored enterprises chartered by Congress, struggled of late as home values crashed and the value of mortgages they held plummeted. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, after saying in July there were no plans to act on the authority, felt it was time to move in this month as investor nerves continued to rattle. Ross School of Business Professor Robert Van Order, a former chief economist at Freddie Mac, talks about why Secretary Paulson took action now and the implications for the future of the two companies.
Read Q&A.
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Richard Bagozzi
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 It's All in Their Heads
How is it that some salespeople can get you to buy anything—while others can't? Are certain folks born to be salespeople while others just don't have the gift? What, exactly, goes on inside the mind of a sales professional? Ross marketing professors Richard P. Bagozzi and Carolyn Yoon were part of a team that found some answers to that question. The team developed a new scale for measuring the ability of salespeople to read, process, and act upon subtle cues of their customers, and validated it by using brain scans from functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. The study, one of the first to test the legitimacy of a new scale using insights from neuroscience, is detailed in the paper "A Salesforce Theory of Mind Scale," set for publication in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2009.
Read more.
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Aradhna Krishna
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I Think, Therefore I Judge
Every day we're faced with decisions that involve spatial judgments. Which line should we choose at the supermarket? Which route should we take to work? A new study by Professor of Marketing Aradhna Krishna shows that one's decisions regarding these spatial dilemmas are affected by one's thinking style. Read about Krishna's new research that finds people can be divided into two distinct categories: independent thinkers (self-focused) and interdependent thinkers (relationship-focused), largely based on their cultural upbringing.
Read more.
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