Olin Business School

Faculty and graduate students from St. Louis-area universities with an interest in labor, households, health care, law and social welfare are invited to take part in a series of Monday brown-bag luncheon seminars to be held biweekly on the Danforth Campus at Washington University in St. Louis beginning Monday, Jan. 23, through Monday, April 16.The series continues Monday, Jan. 23, with a lecture by Kelly Bishop, PhD, assistant professor of economics at WUSTL, on “Hedonic Prices and Implicit Markets: Estimating Marginal Willingness to Pay for Differentiated Products without Instrumental Variables.”

The Gephardt Institute for Public Service is accepting nominations for the Civic Scholars program, which recognizes Washington University in St. Louis undergraduate students who exemplify future potential for civic leadership. Nominate a current sophomore by Friday, Feb. 3, by filling out a brief form on https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CivicScholarsNominationForm.

Everyone has a good story to tell and Washington University’s Olin Business School has created a new blog platform for its community of students, professors, alumni, deans, and staff to share their favorite stories about life at the business school.

Napoleon Bonaparte, the notoriously “short” French emperor, may have stood only 5 feet 6, but being a powerful military and political leader probably made him feel much taller, suggests a new study by an organizational behavior expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

Coors Light has surpassed Budweiser as the No. 2 beer by shipments in the United States, foretelling a downward trend for full-calorie lagers that will continue, says a strategy expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

The presents have been opened. The tree has been put away. Now come the bills. What is the best way to tackle holiday debt? Pay down the loan with the highest interest rate first. But consumers often take a slightly different approach, according to a consumer behavior expert at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis.

With a concentration of high-tech startups second only to America, Israel — which has the second-most number of companies on the NASDAQ stock exchange — is considered the world’s next Silicon Valley. Twelve students from Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis will get a chance to view that innovation up close when they travel to Israel Jan. 5-12, 2012 as part of a venture advising course aimed at exploring the country’s venture capital market.

Traditional product advertising — full-page magazine ads and 30-second television commercials — may be going the way of the rotary phone. Emerging concepts such as crowdsourcing, viral Internet campaigns, product placements and guerilla promotions will dominate the marketing and advertising landscape in 2012 and beyond, says a marketing expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

Some WUSTL news stories never get old, and some just get better with time. WUSTL news editors picked 11 stories from 2011 — some new, some old — but all worth a second look as we head into 2012.

Seethu Seetharaman, PhD, was recently installed as the W. Patrick McGinnis Professor of Marketing in the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. The ceremony, held Oct. 26 in the Charles F. Knight Executive Education Center, included welcoming remarks by Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton and an address by Seetharaman.