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The Comparing Trap

Harvard Business Review

Robert Merton was 46 when he won the award. He and two other economists created the trading process called Black-Scholes that impacted the ways financial markets were informed and influenced. Merton had the office on the other side of my office. You see the problem.

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What an Economist Brings to a Business Strategy

Harvard Business Review

Even more directly, the growth in financial options can be traced largely to the ease of valuing them, which is due to the Nobel-prize winning work of Fischer Black (the MIT economist and later Goldman Sachs partner who died before he certainly would have shared in the award), Myron Scholes (formerly of Stanford) and MIT’s Robert Merton.

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If the SEC Measured CEO Pay Packages Properly, They Would Look Even More Outrageous

Harvard Business Review

In the case of stock options, the EFV formula is typically a Black-Scholes-Merton option-pricing model that, rooted in the “efficient markets hypothesis,” assumes that changes in a company’s stock-price exhibit a log-normal distribution and thus predicts that most stock-price changes will be very small.

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