EAST LANSING – Patrick Anderson, CEO of Anderson Economic Group, using his Rapid Recursive technology, explains why Amazon selected New York City and Washington DC over other cities for its HQ2, and lists similarly desirable cities that could serve as alternatives to the now-terminated Queens, New York project.
As a result of his research, Anderson Economic Group won the 2018 Edmund Mennis award from the National Association for Business Economics for “outstanding writing in business economics.”
On November 13, 2018, Amazon announced that its second headquarters will be split between Queens, New York and Arlington, Virginia. The metro New York and Washington D.C. area ranked 1 and 6, respectively on the original HQ2 Index. On February 14, 2019, Amazon decided to only proceed with Arlington, Virginia, axing the New York plan.
“Business Strategy and Firm Location Decisions: Testing Traditional and Modern Methods,” by Anderson Economic Group CEO Patrick L. Anderson, was just published in the journal Business Economics, and is now available online. (The print version will be released shortly.)
Patrick Anderson
The article documents how three different sets of experts predicted the selection of 20 cities among the over 200 that applied as finalists for the project, and compares how these human experts performed against alternatives, including “artificial intelligence” models.
“The article lists a number of similarly desirable cities for Amazon, which have a combination of excellent talent pool, reasonable costs of doing business, and desirable cultural amenities, plus access to mass transit,” Anderson said.
“These include places like Chicago, Atlanta, and Newark, all of which scored well on our HQ2 Index. On top of that, there are cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Grand Rapids that didn’t make the original list of finalists, but are much more eager to attract Amazon and would probably roll out the red carpet.”
