|
Continued from previous page
Yuletide Economics
While Waldfogel spends most of his time on more serious topics such as markets and IP piracy issues, he does have a favorite pet project that began with his introduction to the gift-giving rituals of Christmas.
“I’m Jewish, and I first encountered Christmas through my
wife, [Wharton management professor] Mary Benner, and
her very generous family. I ended up getting a lot of well-intentioned
gifts, but they weren’t things I would have chosen
for myself, which got me wondering if this was a widespread
phenomenon,” he recalls.
So in the early 1990s, he began surveying his students at
Yale, where he was teaching at the time. What he discovered
was that the difference in what the giver spent and what the
receiver valued was a “dead-weight loss.”
“If I go out and buy a $100 sweater for you, and it’s only
something that you would value at $30, then I have essentially
destroyed $70 worth of value and that is a dead-weight
loss,” explains Waldfogel.
He maintains that the gifts that really concern him are
those given under circumstantial obligations like birthdays
where you have no idea what the person really wants. “I think
a gift card or gift to a charity in that person’s name would be
a really good idea.”
Over time, Waldfogel has done more surveys, which have
confirmed those results. Not surprisingly, he’s found that in
doing this type of research, he’s gotten a lot less gifts over the
years. “Maybe that is payback for not appreciating their gifts
or maybe it’s payback for my bad behavior in writing about
it,” he quips.
A Vibrant Community
While Waldfogel’s PhD is in economics from Stanford
University and he began teaching economics at Yale
University, it was his business interests that brought him to
Wharton in 1997.
“The first five years of my career were spent working on
law and economics, and I still have some interest in that,”
he says. “But I also became interested in industrial economics
and how businesses and markets work. Wharton has much
more of a focus on actual phenomena as opposed to ideas divorced
from phenomena.”
“My colleagues at Wharton have a vibrant applied economics
community that stretches across its departments—Real
Estate, Insurance, Operations and Information Management,
Finance. It’s a fun place to be and is very active.”
His closest colleague at Wharton, of course, is his wife
Mary, an assistant professor in the Management Department.
“Mary is important to me in many ways, but one of those
ways is that she has a different academic discipline. Her area
is organization theory, and because of her I benefit from a lot
of different perspectives about economics and business.”
Meghan Laska is a senior associate director in Wharton’s Office
of Communications.
|
