Earning Instability, Dynamic Pricing, and Marketing Strategy: Highlights from Management Conference 2026

Chicago Booth’s 73rd annual Management Conference took place on May 1, 2026, at the Sheraton Grand Riverwalk and Gleacher Center in Chicago. Each year, this conference brings together a lineup of notable Booth faculty members and celebrated alumni to discuss the most pressing issues in business today, through the Booth lens of rigorous inquiry. This year, more than 725 attendees gathered to reflect on topics ranging from the financial fragility of workers in the United States to the applications of business in politics to the importance of conversation and connection.

Selected highlights of the conference are below.   

Keynote Conversation with Brian Niccol and Anil Kashyap

“What’s the best customer service business in the world right now?” Brian Niccol, MBA ’03, chairman and chief executive officer of the Starbucks Coffee Company, asked the audience during his keynote conversation with Anil Kashyap, Stevens Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Finance.

“In the future,” continued Niccol, after the audience response suggested no consensus, “I would hope you’d say Starbucks.”

During the luncheon, Kashyap and Niccol discussed Niccol’s focus on improving the Starbucks customer experience. The two also explored Niccol’s extraordinary career trajectory, a path that has traversed leadership roles across marketing and operations at some of the world’s most well-known brands. 

Before Starbucks

During his first job in brand management for Procter and Gamble (P&G), Niccol realized that to further his career, he wanted to pair a foundation in finance with his bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering. Chicago Booth offered other benefits; he also credits his time at the school with strengthening his understanding of behavioral science. 

“If you’re in a customer business, you have to understand what motivates people to choose a certain brand over other brands…the emotional reason as well as the functional reason,” explained Niccol.

While at Booth, Niccol continued working at P&G. He later held several roles at Yum! Brands, including at Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, before joining Chipotle. He discussed the influence of integrating technology at each company: the social media reach that mattered to Taco Bell’s young customers, and the removal of fax machines and creation of the digital make line at Chipotle, which became vital as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. 

The Connection, the Craft, the Third Place 

In between serving as chief executive officer at Chipotle and beginning his current role at Starbucks, Niccol explained that he spent time at his local Starbucks, simply observing the environment as a customer. He noticed that key elements of the coffeehouse experience had been rolled back in the pandemic and hadn’t returned—less seating, no writing on cups, no condiment bars, and fewer amenities like power outlets. 

Niccol shared that a key goal of his was to make people want to spend more time in the coffeehouse again. He pointed to “connection, craft, and the third place,” as Starbucks differentiators. Under his leadership, the company began reinvesting in its coffeehouses and in labor to deliver a more consistent, high-quality experience. Niccol also emphasized that Starbucks—while staying rooted in great coffee—must also truly excel in the customer service business by creating a great coffeehouse experience. 

“I want [our partners’] eyes up and high energy when people walk in…if you want to work at Starbucks, you have to like talking to people,” Niccol said of the company’s service-oriented hiring strategy. 

Make Ritual Frictionless

Metrics are also central to Niccol’s reimagining of Starbucks, with clear standards for each barista and coffeehouse. He referenced Starbucks’ “smart queue,” a sequenced ordering system that ensures both customers ordering in café and customers ordering via the Starbucks app have a positive experience and predictable wait times. He also referred to “coffeehouse walk” guidelines for observation visits, which encourage managers to experience the coffeehouse as both a customer and a barista. 

“Some of the morning is such a ritual,” Niccol said, “The more we can make that ritual frictionless, the more we will win the morning.” 

Advice from the CEO 

“Any time there’s an opportunity to grow, you should jump on it,” said Niccol as he and Kashyap wrapped up their conversation, urging the audience to take the leap—get an MBA, take a challenging class, or put their hands up for a project no one else seems willing to take on. 

This is how you surprise yourself, learn something new, and meet lifelong friends, Niccol concluded. 

Breakout Sessions

Business and Politics

“We had to teach everyone to manage,” said US Senator Pete Ricketts, AB ’86, MBA ’91, of his time as governor of Nebraska, during his conversation with Madhav Rajan, dean and George Shultz Professor of Accounting for Chicago Booth and chief global strategist for the University of Chicago. 

During the conversation, Ricketts highlighted the lessons he learned during his MBA experience, as well as his time at the company now known as TD Ameritrade, explaining the applications and influence of the same lessons on his work in public service. For Ricketts, one of business school’s most valuable lessons was learning the importance and methods of defining and articulating a mission, a vision, and a value statement for every organization. Emphasizing a persistent focus on process improvement during his time as governor, Ricketts talked through the application of concepts like Lean Six Sigma.

Ricketts also discussed the specific opportunities and challenges presented by his current role in the Senate. The session concluded with a lively Q&A session, during which Ricketts discussed US trade relationships with China, explored the potential benefits of term limits for Congress, and emphasized the importance of bipartisan collaboration.

Earning Instability and the Financial Fragility of American Workers

Pascal Noel, Singh Family Professor of Finance, discussed his research on earning instability and financial fragility among American workers. Drawing on microdata from a large payroll company and JPMorgan checking accounts, Noel demonstrated that earnings risk—and in particular month-to-month income variance—is a fundamental feature of the financial circumstances of a significant portion of American households. “By focusing on monthly changes, we have been able to track volatility that would have been washed out in earlier examinations of annual income data,” said Noel.

Noel noted that, “A high level of volatility exists even with stable employment and when wages are stable,” as volatility is overwhelmingly driven by fluctuating hours, which are largely driven by employers. Because many American households also have unpredictable expenses—a fridge may break suddenly, or a car may need repair—this volatility can cause workers to leave jobs that have unstable hours, which contributes to instability within the labor market more broadly.

Leading for Impact: Lessons from Operations Management

“The goal of a successful operations team is not to be noticed,” said Amy Ward, Rothman Family Professor of Operations Management and Charles M. Harper Faculty Fellow, at the beginning of her session. “If you're noticed, something has gone wrong.”

The value of being unnoticed was just one of the lessons Ward shared during her overview of operations management concepts and questions. She also walked attendees through the basic concepts of process analysis and strategic queueing, which is one of Ward’s key areas of research. She used a “stand right, walk left” escalator problem to model process analysis, which could be used to determine which combination of standing or walking would be most efficient at moving people up an escalator.

Ward then introduced new variables to these analyses like strategic customers, who get to decide whether to join a queue or not, and strategic servers, who get to decide how hard they are willing to work when providing a service to customers. Seemingly undesirable traits like server idleness, Ward explained, can actually be beneficial for business workflows, inasmuch as it may prevent server burnout and control customer congestion. 

A Little More Social

“The most powerful words you have are, ‘Hi, I’m [blank],’” said Nicholas Epley, John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow, during his session A Little More Social, which is also the title of his latest book.

Epley’s research focus is social misunderstanding. Humans are highly social creatures, made happier and healthier by socializing, Epley argued, saying that minds can and do talk themselves out of initiating social interactions. By walking the audience through a series of experiments, Epley suggested that there is a gap between the fear and anxiety people have before talking to a stranger, and the benefit of the actual conversation they have when they do. His findings also support the argument that people underestimate how positively conversations with strangers can go because preconceived expectations guide their behavior.

Conversations are magical, but having them is a choice one needs to make, concluded Epley, as he urged his audience to keep the conversation going.

Is Dynamic Pricing Fair?

Jean-Pierre Dubé, James M. Kilts Distinguished Service Professor of Marketing and Charles E. Merrill Faculty Scholar, discussed dynamic pricing in the consumer goods markets and reviewed the promises and the pitfalls of algorithmic price-setting.

A price that shifts with demand, supply, time, or customer segment is a concept that has been employed for a long time, established Dubé.

“Marketers should be using analytics to be more accountable,” suggested Dubé, employing the resale market for Lollapalooza four-day passes and grocery store milk pricing to illustrate the opportunity costs of uniform pricing for multiple stakeholders.

Looking at the case study of Uber surge pricing after a concert or on New Year’s Eve, Dubé also discussed fairness concerns, including opaque algorithms, unintended algorithmic bias, unfair opportunism, and the elasticity of supply versus gouging.

AI Meets Statistics: Intelligence Under Uncertainty. 

“Can you trust humans to use AI responsibly?” asked Veronika Rockova, Bruce Lindsay Professor of Econometrics and Statistics in the Wallman Society of Fellows, during her session on AI and statistics. Beginning with a 2025 study from Nature Medicine, Rockova suggested that user interactions pose a challenge to the successful deployment of LLMs to generate medical advice.

Rockova asserted that there are myriad opportunities to enhance AI’s capabilities in this sphere by building statistical models on top of it, citing recent research, including her own.

She suggested that statistics could provide the language of uncertainty, as well as principles, for learning from data in AI systems—essentially, that statistics could give AI its epistemology.

For Rockova, the key to successfully employing AI is the use of not just synthetic data, but of real and synthetic data, with the synthetic data accurately weighed and properly calibrated to provide useful results.