Newsstand

The February 2008 issue of Stanford Business magazine can now be read online at http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/bmag/index.html. Here are some highlights:

Michal Bortnik, a second-year MBA student, was one of 14 who had arrived on campus before the start of classes to attend Professor Baba Shiv's intensive weeklong elective seminar on The Frinky Science of the Human Mind.

Why do people herd around risky investments, causing "bubbles" that inevitably burst and leave most investors losers? Couldn't the players in the dot-com bust, for example, have seen disaster looming? Why did more investors not get out earlier, and why did they continue to pump money into already overinflated stocks? Similar questions surround the recent bust in the subprime mortgage market.

As first dates go, it rated four stars. The antipasto platter and pizza were good; the conversation was even better. Both spoke Italian, loved Mediterranean food and had lived in Florence, so there was plenty to talk about. The chemistry? "I knew from her pictures that she was beautiful," says Dan Beltramo, MBA '94, "but when we met, it was love at first sight."

In the mid-1990s, a European contemporary art connoisseur called the Chinese contemporary art collection of Guy Ullens, MBA '60, "rubbish." Few people internationally, let alone in China, were interested in Chinese contemporary artists or their art. "Nobody knew about them," the retired Belgian businessman chuckled. How times have changed. Last October, a painting by Chinese contemporary artist Wang Guangyi sold to a buyer at a London auction for $1.59 million, 63 times more than its American seller paid in 1996.

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