UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

A Stellar Lineup Will Ask — and Answer — Questions about the Future of Health Care in California

All students registered for the third annual UCLA Anderson Healthcare Conference on Saturday, March 11, will be invited to a pre-conference networking night on campus on Friday, March 10, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. The evening will feature a senior executive keynote speaker from conference sponsor Blue Shield of California. Cocktails and snacks will be served.

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By Harshita Mishra (’18)

The “health care industry” impacts us all. It is an industry that intersects with technology, law, economics, government and countless other sectors. In the United States alone, the health care industry is worth more than $3 trillion.

How can California, the most populous and diverse state in the U.S., serve as the model for value, innovation and collaboration in health care? How will the changing political climate impact the Affordable Care Act? What are California’s strengths to face the upcoming challenges? What should you as a future global leader know, and why?

These questions intrigue and excite me. That’s why I’m attending the third annual UCLA Anderson Healthcare Conference, whose theme this year is Caring for California: Visions of Value, Innovation and Collaboration.

CES at Anderson, Where Technology Shakes Hands with Science

Enjoy the complete album of photos from CES at Anderson

UCLA Anderson’s annual CES^® event, held in partnership with the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)^TM following the world-renowned CES conference in Las Vegas, attracted audiences among the wider community of UCLA students, faculty and staff, as well as industry professionals and business leaders.

The CES at Anderson differentiator is the university context, where rigorous scientific research meets entrepreneurship across disciplines. Professor Mayank Mehta, who teaches in UCLA’s departments of physics and astronomy and neurobiology, and Dr. Ramin Ramezani, assistant adjunct professor of computer science, both lent expertise to panels that explored machine learning, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Several Anderson alumni chimed in with insights from their positions at companies that include Epson, Sengled and Deepgram. Dyan Decker (’02), PwC’s U.S. forensic technology leader, sat down with Easton Technology Management Center faculty director John Blevins for a conversation about CES in Las Vegas, where the emphasis was on rapidly developing smart home technology and the race to refine virtual assistants.

Can Uber Create “Order Out of Chaos” When It Comes to Driverless Cars?

By Paul Feinberg

Professor Keith Chen is a behavioral economist whose research blurs the traditional disciplinary boundaries in both subject and methodology, bringing unorthodox tools to bear on problems at the intersection of economics, psychology and biology. He recently returned to UCLA Anderson after a stint as head of economic research at Uber, the near-ubiquitous ride sharing platform.

Chen spoke last month at Anderson’s second annual Big Data Conference. His talk focused on Uber’s current challenge, what the professor called “running a ‘gig’ platform.” Much of Chen’s talk looked at Uber’s experimentation with the disruptive impact of driverless cars. He said that Uber was looking to “create order out of chaos.”

Happiness Studies by Cassie Mogilner Holmes Recognized by Association of Consumer Research

The Association of Consumer Research has recognized UCLA Anderson Associate Professor of Marketing Cassie Mogilner Holmes with its 2016 Early Career Award. ACR is the preeminent society within the field of behavioral marketing. Holmes, who studies how focusing on time rather than money increases happiness, said, “I feel happy and grateful for this recognition.”

Established in 2010, the ACR Early Career Award recognizes contributions to consumer research by someone who received his or her Ph.D. within the last 10 years.

Having examined how the meaning of happiness changes over the course of one’s lifetime, how giving time to others can alleviate the stress of being time-constrained, and how ordinary and extraordinary experiences contribute to happiness, Holmes will continue her research on the relationship between time and happiness by asking, “How can we most optimally spend our time in order to increase our happiness and overall satisfaction in life?”

Each year, a panel of three ACR members is appointed by the ACR president to serve as a selection committee. The panel solicits nominations from the ACR membership and selects one or more recipients of the award for their scholarly contributions to the field of consumer research. Criteria used to determine contribution include innovation, methodological rigor and the potential to substantially advance our understanding of consumer behavior.

Dr. Chris Janiszewski, chair of the award committee, said, “Dr. Mogilner Holmes has written a number of insightful papers on how consumers initiate and manage happiness. She is the world’s leading [authority] on this topic. The award reflects the tremendous influence Dr. Mogilner Holmes has had on academic and industry audiences.”

Holmes said that when she was informed by ACR of the honor, she told them she “was truly happy and glad that reading the papers was worth the committee’s time!”

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UCLA Distinguished Professor Chris Tang Recognized for Analytical Research on Health Care Reimbursement Schemes

By Elise Anderson

Christopher Tang, UCLA Distinguished Professor of Decisions, Operations and Technology Management and the Edward W. Carter Chair in Business Administration, and his co-authors recently received an honorable mention for their paper titled “The Impact of Reimbursement Policy on Patient Welfare, Readmission Rate and Waiting Time in a Public Healthcare System: Fee-for-Service vs. Bundled Payment.”

The best paper competition was sponsored by the China Business Initiative of the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business at Columbia University. The awards were presented at the recent annual Conference of Chinese Scholars Association for Management Science and Engineering (CSAMSE). The theme of the 2016 CSAMSE, Internet Plus and Scientific Management, reflects a desire to focus on the new challenges for the management practice of the traditional industries in the background of internet and mobile social networks, and the corresponding data-driven management techniques and tools. Scholars in MSE from around the world were invited to present their research at the conference.

The Journal of Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, Edited by UCLA Anderson Professor Chris Tang, Added to Financial Times Journal List

Financial Times (FT) has added the journal of Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (M&SOM) to its list of journals used to rank global business schools, effective January 2017.  

“Having this journal on this list is important, as FT counts the per capita faculty publications in these journals to calculate the research ranking of faculty,” says Chris Tang, current editor-in-chief of M&SOM and distinguished professor and holder of the Edward W. Carter Chair in Business Administration at UCLA Anderson School of Management. “This research score accounts for 10 percent of the Global MBA, Executive MBA and online MBA rankings.”

The FT journal list, developed in 2003, initially included 40 journals, adding five more in 2012. In 2016, FT invited the deans of 210 business schools to suggest journals to be dropped from or added to the list. Based on the votes submitted by 140 business schools worldwide, four journals were dropped and nine out of 150 journals that were nominated were added to the FT list.  The M&SOM was among the most recent additions. 

Why Seth & Lauren Rogen and Maria Shriver Are Talking Alzheimer’s at a Business School

View photos and video from the event

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By Britt Benston

Alzheimer’s disease can actually bring a greater capacity for understanding.

When Lauren Rogen’s mother was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s before the age of 60, Lauren was left dumbfounded.

“I was 25 when my mom was diagnosed. Nobody my age was going through it, nobody was talking about it,” she recounted.

“But people started contacting us. And I was, like, ‘Oh! I am not alone.’ There are so many people out there who want a voice, who want to share their story, who want to take action. We became very lucky — there was an organic growth that happened because there was a need for it.”

The force of this disease and our own understanding that we must live with it is turning Alzheimer’s care into a cause for grace and alarm, thanks in part to Lauren and Seth Rogen, a powerhouse couple with global reach (remember The Interview?).

UCLA HBA Healthcare Conference Tackles Debate around Pharmaceutical Pricing

By Sicong Li (’17)

The Second annual UCLA HBA Healthcare Conference officially kicks off on Saturday, January 30, with the theme Innovation at a Crossroads. Be sure to ink this event into your date books, because you’ll want to hear what happens at the conference.

Why? Consider this: Last August, Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired a drug called Daraprim and quickly raised the drug’s price from $13.50 per tablet to an appallingly hard-to-swallow $750 per tablet. Daraprim is a 62-year-old drug long considered the standard of care for life-threatening parasitic infection. More alarmingly, this is not an isolated occurrence, huge price increases are being seen across the board.

In fact, at the forefront of public discourse are health care costs and pharmaceutical pricing, like the Daraprim example and a recent subpoena of Valeant pharmaceuticals in response to steep price hikes for two of its heart drugs. The health care conference will provide a morning panel on these topics featuring Matt Nye, vice president of pharmacy service at Blue Shield, and Chad Pettit, value and access director at Amgen. Attendees can most likely expect an impassioned discussion.

CES® Opens with Surge-ical Precision

Anderson associate professor and Uber research Keith Chen said we should expect autonomous cars to be driving a “nontrivial” number of people by the end of 2016.
Photo: @atakinteractive #AndersonCES

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by Andy Tillman

CES^® 2016 at UCLA Anderson zoomed to life with a transportation theme that featured panels of industry professionals, faculty and students who shared dazzling insights on all things Next.

UCLA Anderson’s own Keith Chen, associate professor of economics and head of economic research for Uber, was first to take the stage. Known in academe for blurring the lines between economics, psychology and biology, Chen may be best known in the wider world for his design of Uber’s now famous “surge” pricing model. 

For those who’ve been relying on a unicycle as their primary mode of transportation for the last five or so years, Uber is the alternative that turned paid transportation models on their heads, nearly driving the taxi industry out of business and in the process disrupting the entire transportation space. This is thanks in large part to Chen’s surge pricing model, which is based on the simple law of supply and demand. Surge calculates a higher fare for rides in certain geographic regions identified by a combination of mapping technologies to create spatial grids that provide a dense view of the world. This allows Uber to break the whole wide world into manageable grids so that when demand is high in a certain area, rates increase and drivers earn more per ride. Riders have the choice to wait out the “surge” in price by staying put or to accept the higher fare.

UCLA Receives $570,000 Grant

UCLA Anderson to lead study monitoring the effects of a higher minimum wage in Los Angeles

The Regents of the University of California received a $570,000 grant to conduct a study that will evaluate the effects of the higher minimum wage ordinance in the Los Angeles metropolitan region. The research initiative will be led by Edward Leamer, UCLA Anderson School of Management Distinguished Professor, Chauncey J. Medberry Chair in Management and UCLA Anderson Forecast director. Leamer will collaborate with Drs. Till von Wachter and Frederick Zimmerman, faculty members from the Department of Economics and School of Public Health at UCLA, and Jerry Nickelsburg of UCLA Anderson School.

While increases in minimum wages are occurring in many locations, the Los Angeles experiment could be one of the most informative, since the city has an unusually large share of geographically-concentrated low-wage workers, and the legislated increases in the minimum wage are projected to cover a greater fraction of workers here than in any other jurisdiction, and there are abundant locations near the City where jobs might go. The research will study the impact of the local minimum wage increase on a broad set of effects, including wage and employment levels but also product prices and health outcomes.