Research

Success in business is all about creating an exceptional customer experience, and then enhancing it. But how do we innovate the customer experience to make it exceptional?

Like an object dropped over the side of a high building, housing prices in the Phoenix metro area picked up speed on the way down, reports Karl Guntermann, real estate professor at the W. P. Carey School of Business.

Consumers are worried, and that's a bad sign for the economy. Consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the economy; these days people appear reluctant to buy big-ticket items like cars and major appliances.

Like ripples from a pebble pitched into a pond, the federal law passed to combat white-collar crime has resulted in booming demand for the specialists who can comb through financial records and follow a trail of evidence.

The new consumer sensibility, widely heralded in the business press, is the Experience Economy. Our world of mediated, staged and multi-sensory experience — an increasingly unreal world — gives rise to people desiring authentic or "real" experiences. But what is authenticity?

The idea behind services blueprinting is fairly simple: Companies put themselves in their customers' shoes to find out what's working, what's not, and what needs to be changed.

W. P. Carey professors Stephen Happel and Marianne Jennings are free-market defenders. For almost two decades they have evangelized the fundamentals of supply and demand, specifically in the secondary market for event tickets.

Two entrepreneurial CEOs shared some of the challenges they have faced and lessons they have learned with attendees at "Entrepreneurship: From IP to IPO and Beyond," a seminar presented by the W. P. Carey MBA Executive Program.

The Federal Open Market Committee voted 9-1 today to lower the rate at which banks lend to each other to 3 percent from 3.5 percent. Just eight days ago the Fed lowered that rate by three-quarters of a percent.

Business researchers have long proposed that when employees find their work meaningful and fulfilling, they are more likely to do that work well, and, as a result, help their companies succeed.