Books by Joshua Gans
The Disruption Dilemma (The MIT Press)
by Joshua Gans
An expert in management takes on the conventional wisdom about disruption, looking at companies that proved resilient and offering managers tools for survival.
“Disruption” is a business buzzword that has gotten out of control. Today everything and everyone seem to be characterized as disruptive—or, if they aren't disruptive yet, it's only a matter of time before they become so. In this book, Joshua Gans cuts through the chatter to focus on disruption in its initial use as a business term, identifying new ways to understand it and suggesting new tools to manage it.
Almost twenty years ago Clayton Christensen popularized the term in his book The Innovator's Dilemma, writing of disruption as a set of risks that established firms face. Since then, few have closely examined his account. Gans does so in this book. He looks at companies that have proven resilient and those that have fallen, and explains why some companies have successfully managed disruption—Fujifilm and Canon, for example—and why some like Blockbuster and Encyclopedia Britannica have not. Departing from the conventional wisdom, Gans identifies two kinds of disruption: demand-side, when successful firms focus on their main customers and underestimate market entrants with innovations that target niche demands; and supply-side, when firms focused on developing existing competencies become incapable of developing new ones.
Gans describes the full range of actions business leaders can take to deal with each type of disruption, from “self-disrupting” independent internal units to tightly integrated product development. But therein lies the disruption dilemma: A firm cannot practice both independence and integration at once. Gans shows business leaders how to choose their strategy so their firms can deal with disruption while continuing to innovate.
Copies
No copies available.
The Disruption Dilemma (The MIT Press)
by Joshua Gans
An expert in management takes on the conventional wisdom about disruption, looking at companies that proved resilient and offering managers tools for survival.
“Disruption” is a business buzzword that has gotten out of control. Today everything and everyone seem to be characterized as disruptive—or, if they aren't disruptive yet, it's only a matter of time before they become so. In this book, Joshua Gans cuts through the chatter to focus on disruption in its initial use as a business term, identifying new ways to understand it and suggesting new tools to manage it.
Almost twenty years ago Clayton Christensen popularized the term in his book The Innovator's Dilemma, writing of disruption as a set of risks that established firms face. Since then, few have closely examined his account. Gans does so in this book. He looks at companies that have proven resilient and those that have fallen, and explains why some companies have successfully managed disruption—Fujifilm and Canon, for example—and why some like Blockbuster and Encyclopedia Britannica have not. Departing from the conventional wisdom, Gans identifies two kinds of disruption: demand-side, when successful firms focus on their main customers and underestimate market entrants with innovations that target niche demands; and supply-side, when firms focused on developing existing competencies become incapable of developing new ones.
Gans describes the full range of actions business leaders can take to deal with each type of disruption, from “self-disrupting” independent internal units to tightly integrated product development. But therein lies the disruption dilemma: A firm cannot practice both independence and integration at once. Gans shows business leaders how to choose their strategy so their firms can deal with disruption while continuing to innovate.
Copies
No copies available.
The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: An Agenda (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report)
by Joshua Gans, Ajay Agrawal, Avi Goldfarb
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) highlight the potential of this technology to affect productivity, growth, inequality, market power, innovation, and employment. This volume seeks to set the agenda for economic research on the impact of AI. It covers four broad themes: AI as a general purpose technology; the relationships between AI, growth, jobs, and inequality; regulatory responses to changes brought on by AI; and the effects of AI on the way economic research is conducted. It explores the economic influence of machine learning, the branch of computational statistics that has driven much of the recent excitement around AI, as well as the economic impact of robotics and automation and the potential economic consequences of a still-hypothetical artificial general intelligence. The volume provides frameworks for understanding the economic impact of AI and identifies a number of open research questions.
Contributors:
Daron Acemoglu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Philippe Aghion, Collège de France
Ajay Agrawal, University of Toronto
Susan Athey, Stanford University
James Bessen, Boston University School of Law
Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT Sloan School of Management
Colin F. Camerer, California Institute of Technology
Judith Chevalier, Yale School of Management
Iain M. Cockburn, Boston University
Tyler Cowen, George Mason University
Jason Furman, Harvard Kennedy School
Patrick Francois, University of British Columbia
Alberto Galasso, University of Toronto
Joshua Gans, University of Toronto
Avi Goldfarb, University of Toronto
Austan Goolsbee, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Rebecca Henderson, Harvard Business School
Ginger Zhe Jin, University of Maryland
Benjamin F. Jones, Northwestern University
Charles I. Jones, Stanford University
Daniel Kahneman, Princeton University
Anton Korinek, Johns Hopkins University
Mara Lederman, University of Toronto
Hong Luo, Harvard Business School
John McHale, National University of Ireland
Paul R. Milgrom, Stanford University
Matthew Mitchell, University of Toronto
Alexander Oettl, Georgia Institute of Technology
Andrea Prat, Columbia Business School
Manav Raj, New York University
Pascual Restrepo, Boston University
Daniel Rock, MIT Sloan School of Management
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Columbia University
Robert Seamans, New York University
Scott Stern, MIT Sloan School of Management
Betsey Stevenson, University of Michigan
Joseph E. Stiglitz. Columbia University
Chad Syverson, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Matt Taddy, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Steven Tadelis, University of California, Berkeley
Manuel Trajtenberg, Tel Aviv University
Daniel Trefler, University of Toronto
Catherine Tucker, MIT Sloan School of Management
Hal Varian, University of California, Berkeley
Copies
No copies available.
Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting (The MIT Press)
by Joshua Gans
What every parent needs to know about negotiating, incentives, outsourcing, and other strategies to solve the economic management problem that is parenting.
Like any new parent, Joshua Gans felt joy mixed with anxiety upon the birth of his first child. Who was this blanket-swaddled small person and what did she want? Unlike most parents, however, Gans is an economist, and he began to apply the tools of his trade to raising his children. He saw his new life as one big economic management problem—and if economics helped him think about parenting, parenting illuminated certain economic principles. Parentonomics is the entertaining, enlightening, and often hilarious fruit of his “research.”
Incentives, Gans shows us, are as risky in parenting as in business. An older sister who is recruited to help toilet train her younger brother for a share in the reward given for each successful visit to the bathroom, for example, could give the trainee drinks of water to make the rewards more frequent. (Economics later offered another, better toilet training solution: outsourcing. For their third child, Gans and his wife put it in the hands of professionals—the day care providers.) Gans gives us the parentonomic view of delivery (if the mother shares her pain by yelling at the father, doesn't it really create more aggregate pain?), sleep (the screams of a baby are like an offer: “I'll stop screaming if you give me attention”), food (a question of marketing), travel (“the best thing you can say about traveling with children is that they are worse than baggage”), punishment (and threat credibility), birthday party time management, and more.
Parents: if you're reading Parentonomics in the presence of other people, you'll be unable to keep yourself from reading the funny parts out loud. And if you're reading it late at night and wake a child with your laughter—well, you'll have some guidelines for negotiating a return to bed.
Copies
No copies available.