Motorcycles, Dating and Performance Enhancing Drugs
Stanford Speaks: Professor Paul Oyer
The Fred H. Merrill Professor of Economics, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
Breakfast, Friday 15 April 2016, 07:45-9:45 am, The Hong Kong Club
Hosted by HK Club Member, Richard Hext
Unusual Insights from an Unusual Mind
Event Details:
The Stanford GSB Chapter of Hong Kong is pleased to invite you for breakfast and conversation with Professor Paul Oyer, one of the world’s most creative observers on how big economic theory boils down to unexpected and often highly personalized decisions in each of our daily lives.
In Oyer’s award-winning Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Economics I Learned from Online Dating, Nobel-Prize winning economic theories are applied to help anyone find true love online – even a newly divorced GSB Professor. Concepts and phrases such as utility, liquidity, thick vs. thin markets, information asymmetry, rationality, adverse selection, game theory, network externalities – all take on a dramatically different meeting when applied to, well, the search for an attractive partner and love, with the realization that, at the end of the day, dating websites and the matching of hearts work in many ways no differently than many other markets that a business person might encounter.
In Oyer’s co-authored book, Roadside MBA: Backroad Lessons for Entrepreneurs, Executives & Small Business Owners, three b-school professors decide to play hooky from a Boston conference and instead of focusing on Fortune 500 companies, take a rental car and loo k for big insights from 100+ small businesses in America’s overlooked corners – places such as Hickory, North Carolina and Liberal, Kansas and Council Bluffs, Iowa, to name but a few. Businesses such as the dental practice of the flying rural Arkansas orthodontist; the Missouri tobacco and candy distributor (whose operating hours match the availability of their best workers, “single mums with a couple of kids and a deadbeat ex-husband’); and the Bloomington, Illinois outdoor media company owner who identifies the region’s longest timed stop lights for optimal adjacent placement of his billboards – all have great lessons to share from under-appreciated places.
In Oyer’s upcoming book focusing on Sports & Economics, topics such as the unexpected downside of building Olympic stadiums, or how game theory explains the use of performance-enhancing drugs, and why ticket resale (and sites like Stubhub) are making the world a better place will are all explored, among others.
The Stanford GSB Chapter of HK could not be more pleased for you to share in this “motorcycle-speed” tour of Oyer’s unparalleled observations on how big economics affects all of the little quirky things in our lives. We hope you can join us for this most compelling of talks.
Speaker’s Bio: PROFESSOR PAUL OYER
Paul Oyer is The Fred H. Merrill Professor of Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is also a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economics and the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Labor Economics.
His work studies both the economics of organizations and their impact on human behavior and personal economics and is the author of Everything I Ever Need to Know About Economics I Learned from Online Dating and the co-author of Roadside MBA: Backroad Lessons for Entrepreneurs, Executives & Small Business Owners, with his newest book focusing the relationship between sports and economics.
Oyer’s current projects include studies of how labor market conditions affect their entire careers when MBAs and PhD economists leave school, how firms identify and recruit workers in high-skill and competitive labor markets (with a focus on the markets for software engineers and newly minted lawyers). He has studied, in the past, how firms have adjusted their human resource practices to increases in legal barriers to dismissing workers, how random events early in a person’s career can have long-term ramifications and how firms pay and provide incentives for their workers, how salespeople and executives in turn react to incentive systems and why some firms use broad-based stock option programs.
Perhaps of greatest interest to his GSB colleagues, he has studied how universities price and allocate parking spaces.
Before moving to the GSB in 2000, Paul was on the faculty of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. In his pre-academic life, he worked for the management consulting firm of Booz, Allen and Hamilton, as well as for the high technology firms 3Com Corporation and ASK Computer Systems.
He holds a BA in math and computer science from Middlebury College, an MBA from Yale University, and an MA and PhD in economics from Princeton University.