MBA Masterclass What Should the Objective of a Corporation Be?

Lisa Koengeter: Well, I'm going to get started. I know a few more folks are still joining, but I wanna keep us on track. So, hello, everyone and welcome to the Chicago Booth MBA Masterclass series. My name is Lisa Koengeter and on behalf of our full-time, our evening, our weekend, and our executive MBA program, it is my pleasure to welcome you today and to serve as your moderator for this session. In this Masterclass series, we feature world-renowned Chicago Booth faculty to give you a glimpse inside of our classroom and our very unique approach to business education. It's what we call the Chicago Approach, and it's rooted in data, it's rooted in fundamental disciplines, and it's based in rigor. You will learn to define problems. You'll learn to ask better questions and to build better solutions. All of you today are in for a real treat. Our featured faculty member, Professor Raghuram Rajan, is one of the top economic minds in the world. Today he's going to discuss with you the objective of a corporation, what that should be. We're gonna save some time at the end of our session to answer your questions live. So please send in your questions as we go. You can use the Q&A box that you've all been using to share your city and your location. Send those questions in, it'll allow me to queue them up and ask a few of them live at the end. So I'll do a quick introduction of Professor and then I'm gonna turn the floor over. So, Professor Raghuram Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at Chicago Booth. He served as the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 2013 to 2016. He also served as the youngest chief economist at the International Monetary Fund from 2003 to 2006. In 2016, he was named by Time in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world. I could go on and on all day with accomplishments and accolades but I want to focus on our main event. So Professor Rajan, I turn the mic over to you.

Raghuram: Thank you, thank you very much, Lisa, and welcome to everybody from across the world. And what I want to talk to you about today is the objectives of the corporation and I'll make that clearer in just a moment. It seems somewhat dry, but it's an issue which has really become very important today, given what we see happening in society. So what I wanna do is spend about 20, 25 minutes talking to you, laying out some of the terrain, and then we'll open up to questions. But first I want to ask you a question, which is, "Why are we gonna start with a poll?" Lisa, can we put the questions? What -- I want you to answer the first question here, "I think business corporations should," and there are multiple choices possible: Pick as many as you want. So, read through the possibilities of a good product at a cheap price, et cetera, et cetera, and we'll see what you think in just a bit. So please do answer this first question. Lisa, whenever you think we're up to 50 or 60 percent, let's share the results.

Lisa: I'm going to give it just another minute or so; we're at about 30 percent right now. I think it took a little while to read through the options. Now the votes are coming in, we're at 40 percent. Let me just, I'm gonna close this in about 20 more seconds. All right, I'm gonna end the poll now and I'll publish the results for everyone to see.

Raghuram: OK. So we have, about half of you think it should offer a good product at a cheap price. Most want corporations to offer a diverse and inclusive workplace, and then we have some of other choices; maybe second is, focus on enhancing corporate profitability. A third is long-term career opportunities, and none of you wanted to fund, or very few of you wanted to fund, political parties. OK, so let's come back to that. I'm gonna note this down: First is diverse workplace and last is fund political parties. OK? And we'll come back to all of this in, towards the end. So, why is this issue important? Well this issue is important because today we have many societal problems, many of which have been exacerbated by the pandemic. You have rising inequality within countries; you have many movements starting as a result; you have a number of left-behind communities; you have racial disparities. And of course you have that overriding problem, the existence of our planet itself, as a result of climate change. And in the midst of these really huge problems you have what seems to be paralyzed government. So in this situation, there's enormous pressure on corporations to do more than just produce a good widget at cheap price -- which is something many of you thought was important, but not the most important thing corporations should do. And corporations themselves have sensed the broad sort of environment in which they are, and have started making noises, you know, to try and tell the public that they actually believe their role is important and they're willing to take up this larger role. For example, the Business Roundtable: These are the biggest corporations in the United States. The Business Roundtable came up with a statement in 2019 saying, "Each of our stakeholders is essential, we commit to deliver value to all of them for the future success of our companies, our communities, and our country." In other words, they're gonna be nice to everyone. And this obviously sounds very, very, good; the question is, does it have any content? Does it have any meaning? And, you know, there's a report in the Financial Times from the Shell CEO's daughter who said, "Well, you've made the statement -- well, why don't you sell the firm and give the proceeds to Greenpeace? After all, that way you will be promoting the environment, promoting the future of your country, of your community. Why don't you do that?" And actually a statement which says we're gonna be good to everybody doesn't really tell you very much, because it doesn't tell you why you won't favor one entity, in this case Greenpeace, at the expense of others. Why do workers matter when you can make Greenpeace happy with a big donation after selling Shell to someone else? So the real point is if everyone is essential, no one is. How should firms prioritize given this statement? And in fact, they have been studies since then, I will talk about one. Wharton Professor Tyler Wry suggests that in the first four weeks of the crisis, the people who signed on to the Business Roundtable statement were almost 20 percent more likely to announce layoffs or furloughs for their employees. They turn out to be less likely to donate to relief efforts, less likely to shift production to pandemic-related goods. Effectively he concludes that signing this statement had zero positive effect. My guess is you would find a variety of studies which would have a variety of results on this. But broadly, the question these kinds of studies raise is: Is this all whitewashing? Are they being nice to everyone just because it's politically right? And does it have any meaning? And I say this because the most important statement on the objectives of the corporation prior to these kinds of statements was Milton Friedman's view written over 50 years ago, in which he said that really there is only one and only one social responsibility of business: to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game: which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud. Essentially, it boils down to, Friedman was saying: The objective of the corporation is to make profits and everything else is fluff. That if it does make profits while staying within the law and being competitive, it does all the other things that you might want to, or most of the other things. And in that process, you don't need to make it essentially focus on things like we, "We care about our community, we care about nation." It sort of implicitly will do some of that wherever it's necessary to enhance profits. Now, Friedman, you must remember, was making the statement in the late 1960s, early 1970s, when he was reacting to the then-administration's exhortation to corporations to stop raising prices because it was part of the corporate social responsibility to curb inflation. And he said, "Look, you know, the job of the corporation is not to stop inflation. That's the job of the government or the central bank. If the corporation starts tampering with prices, it creates more distortions, and it would in effect do nothing to combat inflation because that's driven by the excessively intemperate policies of the administration. What you're doing by telling corporations they shouldn't raise prices is you're pressing them to remedy the deficiencies of the government. That is not their role. Their role is to do what they do best -- which is produce what consumers want at the right price, that will enable them to make profits. And he said that putting all these other pressures on the corporations means you're driving economic decisions by politics rather than by the market. Now, effectively, Friedman was saying, render unto the government the things that are the government's -- let the government take care of that -- and render unto corporations the thing that are the corporation's. Now: Do we still believe all this? In a world where many of you want to work in a diverse and, you know, welcoming workplace; in a world where we fear climate change and we worry about what corporations might do to enhance the likelihood of a climate cataclysm -- should we press corporations to do more? Now, I think it's first important to understand what Friedman, you know, what sort of theoretical background, sort of substantiates what Friedman says -- and then what the deficiencies in that background are to get a good sense of what corporations should do. Now, Friedman was saying that when you focus on profits, profits are what comes after satisfying the myriad stakeholders of the firm. Profits come after I pay wages, profits come after I pay my debt holders. So essentially what Friedman was saying is by maximizing profits, I'm also ensuring that I keep everyone else who contributes to the corporation happy because I'm paying my workers well, I'm paying the debt holders, I'm paying everybody else who matters. And so maximizing the value of the residue -- that is the profits -- maximizing the value that goes to shareholders, doesn't mean the company is being run into the ground: that everybody else is being sort of, you know, shafted for the benefit of the shareholders. It does mean that you treat them in a way that you ought to treat them so that they cooperate in creating firm value, right? So this was the idea behind saying maximize shareholder value or maximize profits: That's what comes after everyone else is satisfied. Now of course, people, you know, have raised questions about this. Often they have a very limited view of what this means. They think it's very short term-ish and that, you know, when it comes to choosing whether I pay my workers higher wages, or, you know, getting more dividends from my shareholders, I'm gonna choose more dividends and reduce the wages I pay. And, you know, there are corporations who behave in this way. But more broadly speaking, when corporations think about the medium term -- think about their position in society -- many of them say, I need happy workers. If I pay them too little, if I squeeze them on benefits, if I squeeze them on costs here and there, I'm not gonna have happy workers. Well, if I don't need happy workers, that's fine. I can operate a corporation, you know, very much like a Dickensian world of the 19th Century. But if I do care about having productive, happy workers, then perhaps I have to pay some sort of attention to their welfare and go beyond what the law demands that I actually pay; go beyond what the law demands in terms of ensuring worker security, workplace security, et cetera, et cetera. So the broader point is that, you know, even if I'm thinking about maximizing shareholder value, if I think about it about the over the longer term, I do need happy, productive workers. I do need happy consumers. I'm not gonna sell the shoddiest product to them at, you know, at the highest cost possible. I'm not gonna squeeze my workers by giving them impossible work schedules. In the long run that catches up on me and therefore I'm gonna do the right thing. Now we know there are exceptions to all this: We know there are poorly run firms, we know there are firms that treat their workers terribly. But these in the Friedmanian view would be the exception rather than the norm. Now, there is another criticism of this view, which is that increasingly, it's not only the shareholders who are the residue claimants. Anybody making long-term investment in the firm -- including debt holders, workers, suppliers, and sometimes even customers -- become implicit equity holders. And therefore, choosing shareholders over the others can reduce the firm, the value of the firm, to all; in other words, some stakeholders are potentially as important as the shareholders, because they too have long-term residual claims on the firm. Think of a worker who's worked for this firm for 30 years, knows everything about the culture, knows, has contributed tremendously: Don't they also have effectively an investment in the firm? Isn't that at stake? Isn't that important? So that's one reason why we think, you know, you need to temper at the edges but broadly, Friedman's view of long-term shareholder value maximization can incorporate these other views. Sometimes it makes sense for the corporation to say, "I care about these other stakeholders also because they're important to my long-term wellbeing," and I'll come to that once again in just a bit. A second view why Friedman's focus on shareholder value maximization makes sense is that often, it is easier to monitor a single goal and a well-defined goal than multiple goals. For instance, if the corporation does badly, the manager, the CEO might say, "Well, I was focused on making my workers happy," or, "You know, I've got lousy profits but I've got very happy customers." Well, when you focus on whether they're making profits, whether over the longer run they're generating good performance, then you actually rule out some of these excuses because, you know: If they run a lousy business but keep a variety of people happy, that's not a good performance. They have to run a good business and in the process keep everybody happy -- that's running it well. So a well-defined goal can be helpful. But of course, you know, this is again theoretically nice. But when it comes to practice, it's not always clear what specific actions enhance shareholder value. In fact, a lot of boards have a tremendous freedom to use their judgment to say what enhances value and what doesn't -- and sometimes they do make mistakes, but courts aren't willing to interfere. So I think one can be excessively sort of complacent if one says, "Yes, this is one goal, it is clear." What is true is having multiple goals allows you to move back and forth between those goals and whenever you're not working out -- the corporation is not doing well on one goal, claim the other as what your objective is -- that gives a lot of loopholes for management. With fewer goals, you can tie management to a particular set of objectives and force them to deliver on it. So that's important -- but does it have to be just one? And does it have to be shareholder value only? That's something one could debate. Third set of issues is, is Friedman believed -- you know, he didn't say don't contribute to social causes, don't contribute to the local football team -- but he said, it's not the objective of management to contribute to social causes or to the local football team -- or even to political parties, which many of you said, don't do. Because who gave corporate management the right to use shareholder money, to use the money that their workers generated, to contribute to their favorite political causes? Nobody. So why should they contribute to their favorite social causes? Why should they, you know, contribute to the Met. when many of the people whose money they're putting at work simply don't attend the opera or the symphony? So, Friedman said, "Look, I'm not saying don't contribute. But let the decision to contribute to these social causes be the shareholder whose -- you know, once you maximize the value of the shareholder's shares, she can go and then contribute to a local football team or to her, to the symphony or, you know, to her community fund: whatever she thinks is important. But she is the one who should be making the decision, not the CEO sitting in his or her plush New York office. They're not the ones who actually own the corporation and they should not be contributing to social causes. Now, again, on this issue, there have been some criticisms of this that, yes, maximizing shareholder value can sometimes allow shareholders to essentially play out their preferences. But there are other places where the corporation has shareholders who have a certain preference, but maybe the corporation changing what it does can actually meet the shareholder preferences better. And so one example of this is, supposing, you know, the corporation is a retailer selling guns and ammunition. And we know that, you know, there is some correlation between guns and crime, guns and violence. And so supposing the shareholders didn't want that violence, well, either the retailer could stop selling guns and ammunition and all retailers could make that decision -- that could be one way of slowing down gun crime -- or you could get the shareholders essentially to get the profits from the gun trade, and then they could spend their money in trying to, you know, offset the guns on the street through various kinds of social efforts to reduce crime and violence, which is better. And some would argue it's better to stop the corporation selling the guns in the first place than to effectively, you know, get the shareholders to spend the money that they have earned on social causes to stop the consequences of gun violence. This is a debate which you could go either way and I'm happy to engage in this, but this is one criticism perhaps corporations should stop doing things. Now, the votaries for shareholder value maximization will say, if you feel so strongly, pass a law: pass a law banning guns, rather than effectively using the corporation as a back door to stopping the sale of guns. But again, we could have a long debate about that. Another example where essentially you have chosen between different alternatives as a corporation is, remember, a few months ago, Google announced that it was getting off Project Maven, which was a Pentagon program that uses artificial intelligence to look at video imagery and which could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes. So this is a profitable Pentagon project which Google got off -- and why did it get off? Because its employees essentially rose up and said, "We don't want to be working on these kinds of things in our corporation. You said the objective of the corporation was to do no evil. Well, we think violence, even if exerted by a country, is wrong. We want to back off from this kind of project. And eventually Google chose to back off, partly because its employees were so strongly against this, and this is a situation where, you know, you're choosing between shareholders and employees. And you're saying, "I prefer from the longer term perspective of the corporation to have happy employees rather than to pick shareholders over them." Finally, I think -- and this is the point that the last example raises -- Friedman basically thought there was an economic sphere and there was a political sphere. And the political sphere was where the government ought to be, and democracy should make sure that the right laws are passed -- and the economic sphere was where corporations made good widgets at cheap prices and therefore maximize their profits. When you use corporate social responsibility to get the corporation to do what was properly in the political sphere, it was a backdoor way for special interest to push what Congress had been unable to pass. So take the gun example, or take what was a perfectly legal project: that is, the Maven Project that Google was working on. He thought that, you know, they shouldn't opine on those things; they should do what was allowed by the law and let the law change if in fact you wanted to change what corporations need to do. Now, I mean, to some extent, I think Friedman was somewhat naive in saying that this fear of the political side and the economic side can be kept completely separate. Purely what was happening in Google was its employees, which were a important part of the corporation, weren't willing to let their political views stay at the door when they entered the office. It was part of who they were and wanted those political views also to be expressed in what they did. And in today's world, it may be hard to say the employees of the corporation should check out their beliefs at the door, it may be very hard. So the bottom line I think is, that while Friedman's view that corporations should maximize value makes sense, it has to be seen in the proper light: that it makes sense given that you're doing everything else that is needed to maximize value, and often this means making choices favoring your employees at the expense of certain customers if you think your employees are really important and worth keeping on. And therefore, you know, in the long run it adds to the value of the corporation but it does require making choices. The problem, I think ultimately with Friedman's sort of statement is really, it's politically very hard to defend in its narrow -- if it's framed very narrowly -- or you're favoring those plutocrat shareholders versus the hardworking worker. If you frame it as that, it's clear, you would always prefer the worker relative to the shareholder. But if you frame it as, you're keeping the corporation focused on adding value over the long term by keeping its workers happy, by keeping its customers happy, by keeping its shareholders happy, then in fact, you know, it has a little more political plausibility. But it's very hard in this day and age to make that kind of longer statement. So: Essentially what I believe corporations should do -- and here I'm trying to inject some -- is not make broad, vacuous statements about we're gonna benefit all the stakeholders in the company. But focus a little more on who the important stakeholders are in your firm -- and say why those are important to what you do as a firm -- and then that gives those stakeholders more confidence in the longer-run future. So many of you talked about having a diverse and inclusive workforce. Well, for many workers that might be really very important and if the corporation cares about having good workers, it should make that statement. Many of you will give up a few thousand dollars at the competition in order to get that job with a corporate which says, "I'm gonna do good by you by having the right kind of work environment." And that corporation will also do good by shareholders because it has got talented people like you working for it. Let me end this sort of broad and very quick sort of statement by going to the question. We've talked about why business, you know, should, you know, have pretty well-defined objectives, and the question is, should they go beyond that? Should they go beyond obeying the law and treating stakeholders well? Should they effectively do more than what the law requires? And in this day and age, that might not be a bad thing -- even from the perspective of maximizing profitability over the long run or maximizing shareholder value. Because recognizing societal trends and acting early can be both socially good and profitable, right? So think, for example, about lending to coal plants. If you recognize the trend in society was to, you know, shut down the coal plants to move more to renewable energy, a company, a bank which recognize that and moved its lending towards lending towards more sustainable enterprise in a sense has gotten a much over its competitors. Many of those coal plants will be stranded assets, which will be unprofitable, maybe turn into bad loans. And by moving ahead of society, recognizing social trends, you actually are making more money. But, you know, should it -- there are some situations where you may actually, by going beyond the law, effectively undermine the long-term profitability of your own firm. For example, if you're a firm worried about climate change, it certainly makes sense to worry about sustainability, to worry about your suppliers, and whether they're following sustainable practices. And in fact, that focusing on sustainability can sometimes be a way of reducing costs because they're reducing excessive energy consumption and waste. But does it make sense for you to now start agitating for a global change here? Well, to the extent it's unconnected to your business, perhaps it's one step too far because you're investing resources, time and energy in something that is properly the role of the government. Let me end there by saying, going into something which is properly the role of the government may sometimes be a short-term substitute. But we really don't have ways of ensuring companies do the right thing there -- which is one reason why many of you thought perhaps that it was wrong for companies to fund political parties: having all that money come into areas where we don't have controls. For government, we have democracy to control how government behaves. For companies, we have boards to control how they behave performance. But for performance by companies on things like social activism, political activism, et cetera, we have very few controls. And so to that extent for corporations to enter that business may in fact be a step too far; they should focus much more on . Let me end by saying: Bottom line, profits are a good measure of performance, other things equal. So corporations do add value if they make a desirable widget legally -- which is why, then, they can employ all sorts of people, have a engaged workforce, a diverse workforce, and offer career opportunities: all the things you said were good, But it's important that they have a viable product and you can't lose sight of that. Of course, in making that viable product, there are many factors that come together -- including workers, including suppliers, including customers -- and corporations should make clear who the important stakeholders amongst these are and why it's going to choose one over the other when it comes to making choices. That gives you a better understanding of the objectives of the corporation. Should corporations go beyond the law? Yes for sure, skating too close to the law is always problematic because you tend to cross the line. But even staying within, in some situations that can be very profitable if you anticipate where society is going and you know that, in fact, you will do better because you are ruling out some things that over time will become untenable in society's views. You should help the government and the community where you can, but be very wary of displacing either and doing too much, because then you expose yourself. And I'll end by saying, you know, think about many of these tech companies which came out -- these social platforms with all the sense of doing good and you know, not tolerating evil -- and see where they are in the public's views now, as they attempt to regulate content on their sites. This is actually corporations entering an area where really it should be the role of the government to regulate content. Corporations are entering it and you feel aggrieved because you say, "Who is Mark Zuckerberg to determine what I see and how I see it?" And that debate has gotten a lot of legs today simply because we have corporations trying to do too much without the appropriate control. So, be careful of wanting corporations to do too much. Let me stop there, happy to take questions.

Lisa: Hello, thank you professor for that very informative and thought-provoking talk. We have had a number of questions coming in, so we'll take a little bit of time now to answer those questions. There's one that has come in on multiple occasions from a variety of different people: "Could you talk about, should the objectives of a corporation change during a pandemic?" This has come in from a number of people.

Raghuram: So, should a corporation change? For sure. Because the sort of needs of society, the attention of society, as well as the way society will judge that corporation will depend on the actions it takes during the pandemic. So for example, I've talked to many CEOs who've said, "We don't want to fire anybody right now simply because things are really tough. We want the economy to stabilize somewhat. We are willing to hold on employees a little more." And implicit but not explicit in what they're saying is, one, they have their ear tuned to what society is thinking. But they also know that if they're particularly harsh at this time, they're gonna have very aggrieved workers -- very uncertain, insecure workers going forward -- and so to that extent, to the extent that these corporations are large and have buffers, they may want to help them a little bit at this time, knowing that their workers need it. And implicitly, not explicitly, that in the longer run, they will be rewarded by happier workers who know that corporations put out. You know, CEOs have, have told me that they feel really, really happy when the workers come by and say, "Thank you for the help you gave us at this time." Now, that is not to say that every company has the resources to do this; if you're a small or a medium-sized company, and you're struggling for survival, keeping on excessive workers at this point when you don't have the work for them will bring everybody else down with you. So you have to pick and choose depending on the situation you are. But if you're a large corporation with access to the bond markets and et cetera, you may want to be a little more flexible at this time, given that society is going through a bad patch -- and given that in the longer run, this may actually be beneficial when your workers think you're a more benign corporation, and when your customers think that you're not so harsh. Lisa, before we go further, can we run that second question and see what people think? So, you know, when you started out, I asked you to sign up to various statements and tell me what you thought was important. Now I want you to go through a second question which asks you precisely the same question; we need to actually let them see the second question.

Lisa: They're lumped together, so if everyone can scroll down to the second question in the two.

Raghuram: And answer just one of those. So I'm forcing you now to say: If you had to choose between these, which one do you think the objective should be? Earlier you chose a bunch of them and it didn't matter whether you chose three or four. Now, if you had to choose one, which one would you choose? Choose one of these, they exactly the same choices as earlier.

Lisa: We're at about 20 percent submitting their vote; 30 ... I'll let it go to 50. All right, I am going to end the poll here. We'll see the results.

Raghuram: Aha! Well, maybe the lecture had some value. More of you are convinced now that corporate profitability is an important issue. But anyway -- now I do think these other objectives have a role. I do think many of them are subsumed in the broader -- subsumed, not always, but often in the broad objective of generating corporate profitability. But it's good to see that we had some effect. OK, let's go to more questions.

Lisa: One more question here that came in from Shruti asks: "There are some economies such as India who have put in legal repercussions on corporations if they fail to fulfill their corporate social responsibilities. How does it affect the economic decisions of the corporation as a whole? And how does it affect the objective in question?"

Raghuram: India has some rules on saying you have to spend 2 percent -- I think that was the number -- of your profits on issues of corporate social responsibility. But a couple of things: First, these penalties, I think have been softened once again. They were enhanced and then softened because there's an uproar from corporations. The broader problem is we don't define what corporate social responsibility is so it could be, you know -- this is money that's given to your favorite charity, it could be money that's given to training your workers. I mean, in reality, I think making explicit requirements of corporations on doing good, you know, sometimes can have positive effect; often can have, you know, very little effect if they do what they were gonna do anyway but term it "corporate social responsibility." I really think that corporate social responsibility comes not so much from explicit rules and requirements, but from your broader sort of workers and shareholders demanding that you show some responsibility in specific directions. And that's a change in attitude of a larger mass of people rather than the government requiring you to deliver on social responsibility. One of the worries about a mandate is that can also be, you know, it can be distorted in the sense of various people going to the corporations and saying, "Fund this or fund that because you have corporate social responsibility and I have power over you, so fund my favorite cause." So it gives people a lever over the corporation which I think is also a source of worry.

Lisa: I think we have time for one more question here. Brandon would like to know: "When is owning too much consumer data a bad thing? Is there a quantity limit on how much a company should all own?"

Raghuram: Well, I think that's a debate which is going on right now. And clearly there are situations where a company knows a lot about a consumer, often without them knowing what data have been collected. And then they can, you know, in some situations entice the customer into doing more, into activities that they don't really understand they're being enticed into. They're being nudged in parts of the brain which aren't fully, fully aware, to go more -- the sort of click bait kind of stuff -- to get totally addicted into certain kinds of activities which, if they were fully aware, may not actually do. Similarly, you know, you may have ways of selling customers based on the profiles that you create, which give corporations a significant amount of power relative to what they had in the past because the amount of data they have is a magnitude higher than what they had in the past. These are issues we'll have to confront. These are issues, who owns the data, does the customer own the data? Can the company use the data without the customer being aware of it? Does it have a duty of disclosure? Does it have limits on what it can do? If I can make you addicted to staying on my platform for 10 hours in a row, is that a good thing? Or does it put me in a similar sort of, sort of group as those who enticed you into opioids? Of course, there's a big difference between in the two -- but is it, in terms of quality if not quantity, a similar kind of, sort of power? So these are all questions we need to address going forward. I don't -- this is a long-winded way of saying there's no simple answer to your question, "How much data is too much?" Some data clearly can make the customer better off because I don't have to put in my address every time I get onto Amazon. But if Amazon knows too much about me, perhaps that's a bad thing and we are trying to work out. Europe today has a different level to which it thinks data, you know, should be taken up by the company to what the U.S has, and I'm sure there's gonna be some sort of movement in the U.S over time.

Lisa: And with that, our 45 minutes has come to an end. Thank you again, Professor Rajan for speaking with us today, sharing this little glimpse inside of the Chicago Booth classroom. We really appreciate your time today. This Masterclass series will continue, so if you'd like to hear more, you can register for the next session which is on November 18th. The topic is Marketing at Booth with Professor Pradeep Chintagunta, sorry. If you are interested in learning more about an MBA from Chicago Booth, I encourage you to reach out to our admissions team. We would be more than happy to talk to you about our programs here at Booth and whether it's the right fit for you. We've really enjoyed starting the week with you. And I wish you good health and everyone stay well, and thank you again for attending.

Raghuram: Thank you.