The Wharton School

In 1881, American entrepreneur and industrialist Joseph Wharton established the world’s first collegiate school of business at the University of Pennsylvania — a radical idea that revolutionized both business practice and higher education.

Since then, the Wharton School has continued innovating to meet mounting global demand for new ideas, deeper insights, and  transformative leadership. We blaze trails, from the nation’s first collegiate center for entrepreneurship in 1973 to our latest research centers in alternative investments and neuroscience.

Wharton's faculty members generate the intellectual innovations that fuel business growth around the world. Actively engaged with the leading global companies, governments, and non-profit organizations, they represent the world's most comprehensive source of business knowledge.

For more information, see the Research, Directory & Publications site.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 111
  • Publication
    Collaboration in Supply Chains: With and Without Trust
    (2007-01-01) MacDuffie, John Paul; Helper, Susan
  • Publication
    The Evolution of Retirement Risk Management
    (2010-01-01) Mitchell, Olivia S; Clark, Robert L
  • Publication
    Law and the Entitlement to Coerce
    (2013-01-01) Hughes, Robert C
    A long tradition in political and legal philosophy regards coercion as central to the very idea of law. Some historical figures, such as Hobbes, Locke, and Austin took the position that there can be no law without a coercive sanction. Many philosophers of law, most famously H.L.A. Hart, have called this view into question.1 Nonetheless, many political and legal philosophers continue to believe that law is necessarily connected with coercion in a subtler way. Whenever government is entitled to make a law that imposes a direct requirement on conduct, it is entitled to use coercion to enforce this requirment. Some endorse this position explicitly.2 Others commit themselves to it when they argue against certain kinds of laws or legal arrangements by claiming that coercive enforcement of those laws would be law only if it has some sort of justification for enforcing law coercively. The view that the entitlement to make law necessarily comes with an entitlement to coerce is challenged rarely, if ever. Nonetheless, this view is mistaken.
  • Publication
    Strategies for Product Variety: Lessons from the Auto Industry
    (1995) Fisher, Marshall L; Jain, Anjani; MacDuffie, John Paul
  • Publication
  • Publication
    Trade-Offs in Fairness and Preference Judgments
    (1993) Ordoñez, Lisa D; Mellers, Barbara A
    At the heart of many debates about distributive justice is the widely assumed trade-off between equality and efficiency (Okun, 1975). In the present chapter, equality refers to the distribution of income within a society. Equality increases whenever income variability is reduced. Efficiency refers to the goods and services that result from a given input – production, physical capital, or human labor. Efficiency increases whenever society produces more from the same input. Trade-offs between equality and efficiency occur because increases in one often lead to decreases in the other. An egalitarian society satisfies basic needs by establishing programs that redistribute wealth. But those programs can reduce efficiency when they introduce bureaucratic waste or diminish financial incentives. A reduction in efficiency can lead to fewer investments, fewer jobs, and declining productivity.
  • Publication
    Business Model Innovation: Toward a Process Perspective
    (2015-01-01) Zott, Christoph; Amit, Raphael
    Business model innovation matters to managers, entrepreneurs, and academic researchers because it represents an often underutilized source of value and, as such, could translate into sustainable performance advantage. Yet, despite the importance of the topic and the increasing attention it has received from researchers, relatively little is known about the process of business model innovation. To address this gap, this chapter draws on the design literature to derive a generalizable and normative model of the business model innovation process. This contribution links creativity at the individual and firm levels with innovation at the business model level of analysis and thus acknowledges explicitlt the multilevel nature of innovation.
  • Publication
    State Bankruptcy from the Ground Up
    (2012-01-01) Skeel, David A
    The nineteenth-century English poet William Wordsworth famously defined poetry as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings ... recollected in tranquility."1 By this definition, there is something a little poetic about the recent debate as to whether Congress should enact a bankruptcy law for states. In late 2010, as the extent of the fiscal crisis in many states became clear, a handful of commentators and politicians proposed that Congress enact a bankruptcy law for states.2 "If Congress does its part by enacting a new bankruptcy chapter for states," one advocate concluded with a somewaht hyperbolic flourish, California governor "Jerry Brown will be in a position to do his part by using it."3 These proposals met immediate, passionate resistance. One law professor denounced state bankruptcy as a "terrible idea."4 "[I]f we in fact create ... a state bankruptcy chapter," another critic testified to Congress, "I see all sorts of snakes coming out of that pit," as "[b]ankruptcy for states could — would cripple bond markets.'"5
  • Publication
    Citizen Responsibility and the Reactive Attitudes: Blaming Americans for War Crimes in Iraq
    (2012-01-01) Sepinwall, Amy
    This chapter takes seriously the notion that individuals may bear responsibility for the transgressions of their group even where they do not bear the hallmarks of individual culpability. More specifically, I shall contend that citizenship itself can ground responsibility for the crimes of one’s nation-state. I seek to locate and interrogate the grounds upon which we may, in the first instance, hold group members responsible for a transgression of their group. The focus here is then on responsibility assigned directly to members, and not derivative of the responsibility of the group. The account of citizen responsibility that I advance differs from an individualist account insofar as it severs moral and causal responsibility: I argue that the citizen may bear moral responsibility even though she did not participate in, facilitate, or even tolerate the abuses committed in her midst. The account also severs the notions of guilt and blameworthiness: I argue that the citizen may be an appropriate object of blame (and hence appropriately subject to resentment and indignation) even though she need not conceive of herself as guilty. Finally, I suggest that this fracturing of the traditional troika of guilt, resentment, and indignation has implications for the way we think about moral responsibility more generally. I begin by articulating an account of the relationship between the citizen and her nation-state that grounds the citizen’s responsibility for a transgression of her nation-state independent of the extent of her participation in that transgression. I do not anticipate, however, that that account will induce guilt in every American who encounters it. The resistance to guilt is itself interesting and, in the second Part of the paper, I seek to investigate its source. To that end, I undertake an exploration of the moral psychology of guilt and resentment, especially as these emotions pertain to understandings of responsibility for war crimes among members of the perpetrator and victim populations. I end by gesturing to the ways in which the account challenges accepted truths about moral responsibility and its relationship to the reactive attitudes.
  • Publication
    Living, and Thinking about It: Two Perspectives on Life
    (2005-01-01) Kahneman, Daniel; Riis, Jason
    Introduction It is a common assumption of everyday conversation that people can provide accurate answers to questions about their feelings, both past (e.g. 'How was your vacation?') and current (e.g. 'Does this hurt?'). Although the distinction is mostly ignored, the two kinds of questions are vastly different. Introspective evaluations of past episodes depend on two achievements that are not required for reports of immediate experience: accurate retrieval of feelings and reasonable integration of experiences that are spread over time. The starting point for this chapter is that the retrieval and the temporal integration of emotional experiences are both prone to error, and that retrospective evaluations are therefore less authoritative than reports of current feelings. We first consider the dichotomy between introspection and retrospection from several perspectives, before discussing its implications for a particular question: how would we determine who is happier, the French or the Americans?