Dive into the archives.
- Equities and the Time Value of Emotion
A commonplace in Finance I is the “time value of money”- the idea that future worth may be discounted to the present moment. But looking at the oscillation of stocks over a given time-period, spanning a universe of daily volatility unknowable in any discrete “present”, it makes you wonder about an equity’s present “value”. What [...]
- The Dynamics of Public Blame: BP (and Groupon)
I’ll be discussing the dynamics of blame and BP at the weekly case conference of the William Alanson White Institute, NYC; on February 22 at 10 AM. Here’s the announcement: February 22, 2011 – Blaming BP: Examining the Psychodynamics of Blame Ian Miller, Ph.D., NYU Postdoc & WAWI Org. Prog. The psychodynamics of blame will [...]
- Beneath the Headlines: BP’s Radical R&D
Our headlines continue to engulf BP with our passionate blame. But increasingly, after we turn the page, another story begins to coalesce: BP as the genius of Big Oil’s future: it has been BP’s pioneering fieldwork in capping the busted Macondo well that has shaped Big Oil’s billion dollar emergency response plan for the Obama [...]
- Surfing the Oily Waves of Information: Parsing BP
Like most of the folks I know, I have spent the last months surfing the waves of information coming at me about BP. I come away with a story about the dynamics of blame. Characters in no special order include: Transocean, Haliburton, BP, Tony Haywood, Obama, Congressional Democrats, Congressional Republicans, Hillary Clinton, the new and [...]
- Valuing Selective Attention as We Risk
BP is our tragedian of moment. Our anxieties are priced in the cost of its shares, off 50% since April. As investors, we anticipate significant punitive and reputational damages, eyeballing the $30bn gap between worst-case scenarios and its $20bn escrow fund, puzzling on internal bets between our personal fantasies of corporate resurrection and bankruptcy. What [...]
- BP & the Federal Government: When Strategic Alliance Works
Tucked away on page 4 of today’s Financial Times is a story by Ed Crooks and Harvey Morris called “High level tensions behind the clean-up effort”. Its a most marvelous narrative both in its depiction of process and content in organizational cooperation. The context is familiar: the American populace, desirous of continuing our oil addiction, [...]
