The fierce competition between rival ride-sharing services Lyft and Uber is revving up for a battle in the courtroom. In a complaint filed with the San Francisco Superior Court on November 4, 2014, Lyft alleges that former Chief Operating Officer Travis VanderZanden breached his confidentiality agreement and fiduciary duties when he joined Uber after leaving…
Category: Blog Articles
Impact Investment
Impact investment, also known as the “double bottom line,” is a business strategy in which investors direct funds to for-profit companies which will further some social good, the second bottom line.1 Though this seems antithetical to traditional investment models, comprehensive studies have shown that at the least impact investments are currently performing as well as…
Starbucks to Purchase Control of Own Stores in Japan
Starbucks launched its first overseas store in 1995 in Tokyo, Japan. As the world’s third largest economy, the move to Japan proved to be very successful for the company and they now operate over 1,000 stores in the country1. What is more surprising than the company’s huge success in Japan is the fact that they…
Bitcoin Regulation
Recently, Mark Wetjen, a commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal calling for the regulation of the digital currency, Bitcoin.1 Citing the need of merchants to hedge exposure to fluctuations in Bitcoin’s value, trading platforms beginning to list Bitcoin derivatives contracts, its financial innovative capabilities, and the…
The Benefits and Complications of Big Data
The type of significant decisions that drive businesses, big and small, in their attempts to better react to customers’ needs have increasingly been driven by big data. Big data refers to “the recent wave of electronic information produced in greater volume by a growing number of sources (i.e., not just data collected by a particular…
Transfer Pricing and Tax Consequences
The United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. 1 Hence it is no surprise that corporations may try to avoid recognizing income in order to avoid paying taxes on that income. One of the ways a multinational corporation can achieve this result is by manipulating their transfer prices with foreign affiliated…
Challenges of Ecommerce in India
India’s growing ecommerce market has recently been the target of large investments. On Tuesday, October 28, 2013, SoftBank, a Japanese telecommunications and Internet company, announced it was investing $800 million in India’s internet market, specifically in two internet start-ups.1 627 million dollars of this investment will be in Snapdeal.com, an Indian online ecommerce marketplace.2 Additionally,…
Alternate Methods of Paying for College Tuition and Dealing with Our Nation’s Debt
The college graduation class of 2014 graduated with the highest average debt of any college class in the history of our country.1 College student’s student loan debt now amounts to $1.2 trillion dollars, and economists and business leaders are beginning to worry that student loan debt, which amounts to 6% of the total national debt,…
A Market of Milliseconds: Unraveling the Tangled Future of High-Frequency Trading
In an increasingly digital society, innovative technology that yields speed and efficiency can serve to spark industry-wide trends and influence future practice for years, even decades, thereafter. When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod in 2001, for example, Apple earned worldwide acclaim and provoked an incredible proliferation of similar devices.1 What, then, can be made…
Government Cheese: AIG and the Fed
“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world,” Shakespeare wrote.1 The United States government is now thinking twice about performing a good deed at a weary time. Former AIG CEO Maurice Greenberg and his firm Starr International2 filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of fellow…