Are there some companies or industries doing a particularly good job with quantitative analysis?
Riddiough: I can think of two industries that do interesting things with data. One is the gaming industry. They systematically collect consumer information to identify spending habits and monitor betting by individuals in the casinos. They can follow up and market their gambling products more effectively to those consumers. Another area that I’m interested in from a research standpoint is the mortgage business. When you take on a fixed-rate mortgage it’s probably going to be held by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, these two gigantic financial institutions. They’ve spent the last 10 to 15 years developing automated underwriting systems that are very sophisticated. They have a better understanding of credit risk and prepayment risk than their borrowers or their competitors. Caggiano: Wal-Mart is a classic example, it’s a company we all know— and that some of us love and some of us vilify. But here’s a company that’s made tremendous advances in the last 10 years on data collection and data min
