“Goizueta’s faculty exemplify a lifelong commitment to excellence in research, teaching, and thought leadership on a global scale,” says Wei Jiang, Vice Dean for Faculty and Research and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Finance. “Their enduring contributions not only shape the future of business knowledge worldwide but also leave a lasting impact on generations of students and the international business community. Their work continues to elevate Goizueta’s global presence and long-term influence.”

Lifetime Achievements and Prestigious Honors

• + Jagdish Sheth Charles H. Kellstadt Chaired Professor of Business, received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the AMA Sustainable Marketing and Innovation SIG (AMA SUSTSIG) in 2025 for his profound influence on the field of marketing.
• + Sheth was also honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from Sankara Nethralaya USA in 2024 and the UIBS Lifetime Award from the India Business Summit & Georgia Tech Global Business Forum (GTGBF) for his lasting impact on global business thought leadership.

Recognitions for Research Excellence

• + Wei Jiang, vice dean for faculty and research and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Finance, was awarded The Michael J. Brennan Best Paper Award by the Review of Financial Studies in 2024 for outstanding research contributions.
• + Sergio Garate Alvarez, assistant professor in the practice of finance and director of the Goizueta Real Estate Program, received the Best Article Award in the 2023 volume from the Journal of Housing Research in 2024.
• + Diwas KC, professor of information systems and operations management, was honored with the Industrial Studies Association Babbage Best Industrial Innovation Policy Paper Award in 2024.
• + Brian Jonghwan Lee, assistant professor of finance, was recognized with the WFA Brattle Group PhD Candidate Award for Outstanding Research by the Western Finance Association in 2024.

Recognition for Business Education and Thought Leadership

• +Allison Burdette, professor in the practice of business law, and Catarina Fernandes, assistant professor of organization and management, were both recognized among Poets & Quants’ Best Undergraduate Business Professors of 2024.
• + Wei Jiang was named President Elect of the American Finance Association.

Industry and Professional Awards

• + Panagiotis Adamopoulos, associate professor of information systems and operations management, received the INFORMS Information Systems Society Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award in 2024. He was also awarded Best Associate Editor by Management Science in 2024.
• + Ramnath Chellappa, professor of information systems and operations management, was honored with the INFORMS Information Systems Society Practical Impacts Award in 2024.
• + Tucker Balch, Tucker Balch, professor in the practice and research of finance, received the Best Service Award sponsored by ACM AI in Finance in 2024, recognizing his contributions to the academic and professional community.

Goizueta Business School is proud to present the accomplishments of our faculty. Through their transformational work, they push industries forward, prepare the next generation of business leaders, and solve today’s toughest business problems.

The post Goizueta Faculty Honored for Excellence in Research, Leadership, and Service appeared first on EmoryBusiness.com.

The study identifies the world’s leading researchers and encompasses standardized data on citations, h-index, and a wide range of bibliometric indicators. Researchers are classified into 22 scientific fields and 174 sub-fields, drawing from Scopus data provided by Elsevier through ICSR Lab.

“Our faculty are more than educators – they are pioneering thought leaders shaping industries and redefining the future of business,” shared Gareth James, John H. Harland Dean of Goizueta Business School. “They tackle today’s most pressing challenges and uncover tomorrow’s greatest opportunities, driving positive impact throughout industry and the world.”

Introducing the World’s Top 2% Scientists

EmoryBusiness.com is proud to recognize these distinguished Goizueta faculty members among the top two percent of scholars in the world:

• Anandhi Bharadwaj, Goizueta Endowed Chair in Electronic Commerce and Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management

• Tarun Chordia, R. Howard Dobbs, Jr. Chaired Professor of Finance

• Ilia Dichev, Goizueta Foundation Chair in Financial Reporting, Professor of Accounting, and Director and Associate Dean of PhD Program

• Gareth James, John H. Harland Dean of Goizueta Business School and Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management

• Sandy Jap, Sarah Beth Brown Professor of Marketing

• Narasimhan Jegadeesh, Dean’s Distinguished Chair of Finance

• Wei Jiang, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Finance and Vice Dean for Faculty and Research

• Jay Shanken, Professor Emeritus (2024) in Finance

• Jagdish Sheth, Charles H. Kellstadt Chaired Professor of Business

Insights from Goizueta’s Distinguished Faculty

As leaders in their respective fields, our distinguished faculty members bring a wealth of knowledge, experience, and passion to Goizueta. Their journeys to academic excellence and global recognition are a testament to the school’s impact on both personal and professional growth.

EmoryBusiness.com connected with these professors to discuss their motivations, experiences, and the pivotal moments that have shaped their success.

Anandhi Bharadwaj

Q: What inspired you to choose Goizueta?

A: When I joined Emory in 1994, the business school was not yet named Goizueta—it was simply Emory Business School. At that time, Professor Benn Konsynski was the only other faculty member in my field, Information Systems, and it was his invitation and vision that initially drew me here. Professor Konsynski’s forward-thinking perspective on digital technology and its transformative role in the business world deeply resonated with me. His guiding vision not only inspired me to join the school but also fostered an environment that has kept me motivated to contribute to Goizueta’s growth and evolution over the years. The school’s commitment to innovation and excellence has only solidified my decision to remain a part of this vibrant community.

Q: How did Goizueta support your journey to becoming part of the top 2% of scholars worldwide?

A: Goizueta has been an incredible source of support throughout my academic career, providing both tangible and intangible resources that have significantly contributed to my success. On a tangible level, the school’s commitment to fostering a research-driven ecosystem has been invaluable—offering resources such as summer salary support, access to specialized databases, funding for conference travel, and more. On an intangible level, the vibrant academic community at Goizueta has been a constant source of inspiration. The flourishing PhD program has allowed me to collaborate with some of the brightest doctoral students, while the broader Emory network and the research ecosystem in Atlanta, with its concentration of world-class scholars across universities, have undoubtedly enriched my research journey.

Tarun Chordia

Q: What inspired you to choose Goizueta?

A: I moved from Vanderbilt University to Emory as an assistant professor in summer 2000. At the time Tom Robertson was the Dean and Goizueta was transitioning from a teaching to a research school while still maintaining great teaching. One of Dean Robertson’s goals was to improve the reputation of the finance area. I had a ring-side seat to what was happening in the finance department and in the school in terms of increasing the research focus of the faculty (by starting a doctoral program and subscribing to all the standard datasets). With the support of the Dean as well as the leadership in the university we were able to strategically hire senior people in the finance department such that today we are amongst the top finance departments.

Ilia Dichev

Q: What inspired you to choose Goizueta?

A: It was a combination of things: great university and business school, great group of faculty in my academic area (Accounting), the attraction of Atlanta as a growing, business-oriented city, which is very green and with warm weather year-round. Being appointed to the distinguished position of the Goizueta Foundation Chair of Financial Reporting was definitely a big factor (so, big thanks to The Goizueta Foundation!). Plus, the personal involvement of some key Goizueta people made it happen. Perhaps most importantly, on some gut level it just felt right.

Q: How did Goizueta support your journey to becoming part of the top 2% of scholars worldwide?

A: My most successful research project after arriving at Goizueta relied on personal access to CFOs of top companies. The dean and the alumni office at the time made most of these contacts possible. Plus, the school has top-notch working conditions all around. I am very grateful to Goizueta for the incredible opportunities to do quality work!

Gareth James

Q: What inspired you to choose Goizueta?

A: Goizueta Business School stood out to me as a premier institution with a compelling combination of strengths. As a Top 20 business school within a Top 20 university, Goizueta offers a world-class environment for both research and teaching. The school has built an exceptional research community, where faculty members not only produce groundbreaking work but also make a tangible impact on the business world.

Beyond the intellectual vibrancy, Goizueta provides strong financial resources that support high-caliber research, including access to top-tier data acquisition, research funding, and a rigorous PhD program. This commitment to advancing knowledge and fostering innovation makes it an ideal place for scholars who seek to push the boundaries of their fields.

Sandy Jap

Q: What inspired you to choose Goizueta?

A: I came to Goizueta 24 years ago after having been on the faculty at MIT. While MIT is an amazing place in and of itself, what attracted me to Goizueta was the possibility of being in a faculty group that really valued and understood the research that I wanted to do. I’m also not a big fan of winter. 

Q: How did Goizueta support your journey to becoming part of the top 2% of scholars worldwide?

A: While I have had opportunities to leave (I visited Wharton for a year), I have remained at Goizueta because it is less bureaucratic than larger schools and provides important summer and research support that many schools do. Goizueta is an entrepreneurial environment that allows me to take on new initiatives and directions as needed to advance my research. There is also a very supportive alumni base which is always willing to speak in my classes and connect me to the decision makers in their organization who would be willing to support my research with data. 

Jegadeesh Narasimhan

Q: What inspired you to choose Goizueta?

A: I was drawn to Goizueta because of its ambitious vision to become a leader in the field. At the time I joined, the school was making strategic hires of top scholars, strengthening its focus on rigor and academic excellence. Its growing reputation was gaining well-deserved recognition, and the school’s proposed launch of the PhD program underscored a strong commitment to long-term academic leadership. These factors offered an exciting and intellectually stimulating environment—an ideal place not only to advance my research and teaching but also to contribute to Goizueta’s progress toward its ambitious vision.

Q: How did Goizueta support your journey to becoming part of the top 2% of scholars worldwide?

A: Goizueta’s strong culture of academic excellence provided an ideal environment for impactful research. I had the privilege of working alongside colleagues who are thought leaders in the profession, engaging in stimulating intellectual exchanges. The school’s regular academic seminars brought in leading scholars, fostering a dynamic and enriching research atmosphere. The launch of the PhD program further strengthened this environment, attracting bright students and promoting vibrant research activity.

Additionally, because my research focuses on rigorous empirical testing of theory, Goizueta’s generous financial support for data and research assistance was invaluable in enabling high-quality studies. Importantly, all of us—faculty and students—collectively contributed to enhancing Goizueta’s reputation as a place of excellence. At the same time, we all benefited from its growing visibility, which expanded opportunities for collaboration and increased our scholarly impact.

Wei Jiang

Q: What inspired you to choose Goizueta?

A: It was a privilege to join a finance department already with three Top 2% scholars worldwide, reflecting a strong research environment and an intellectually vibrant community. I valued the opportunity to work alongside faculty whose seminal research I had studied extensively as a PhD student and cited as foundational to my own work. Being part of a department where groundbreaking ideas are developed and advanced was both inspiring and motivating.

Jay Shanken

Q: What inspired you to choose Goizueta?

A: The school, led by Tom Robertson, was committed to taking the (already very good) finance group to the next level and Professor Jegadeesh and I were recruited at the same time. The commitment to faculty research was backed up by a low teaching load for chaired faculty and they made me an aggressive offer. I always enjoyed working with PhD students and the fact that the school would soon be starting a PhD program in finance was definitely a consideration as well. Although Rochester’s Simon School was very strong in those days, Atlanta seemed like it would be a better place to live at that point in my life. All of these factors together resulted in my decision to move to Emory and I enjoyed my many years there. 

Q: How did Goizueta support your journey to becoming part of the top 2% of scholars worldwide?

A: It was the excellent overall academic environment and colleagues. Specifics like the low teaching load mentioned above and the nice view from my office helped.

Jagdish Sheth

Q: What inspired you to choose Goizueta?

A: There were three specific reasons. First, I wanted to move to the East Coast from the West Coast and in a moderate climate. Second, I did not want commute and wanted to have housing nearby. Finally, Emory University provided opportunities to grow the marketing area with new and innovative programs and recruit young faculty. For example, we focused on Relationship Marketing and became among the top ten marketing departments in the country.

Q: How did Goizueta support your journey to becoming part of the top 2% of scholars worldwide?

A: When I joined the Goizueta in 1991, we were an “up and coming” business school. Both President James Laney and Dean John Robson were committed to invest in professional schools and their graduate programs including the MBA and the Executive MBA programs. They had already recruited senior faculty in Finance and Management and they wanted me to lead the Marketing discipline. Over the past 30 years, Goizueta gave me opportunities both at the Goizueta and the university level to be on several committees including the Personnel Committee and Emory’s inaugural Presidential Advisory Committee (PAC). My professional growth and recognition came from the silent language of Emory culture that states that you belong here. Finally, Atlanta was emerging as a global hub city and many large companies such as Coca-Cola, Delta, UPS and Home Depot were headquartered here. Atlanta is also the capital of Georgia. This allowed me to contribute to policy work especially for the telecommunications industry.

Goizueta faculty are eminent in their respective fields, advancing global knowledge and inspiring further research. Learn more about the research projects driven by our esteemed Goizueta faculty.

The post Goizueta Business School Faculty Rank in the Top Two Percent of Scholars Worldwide appeared first on EmoryBusiness.com.

Back in 2021, the FDA found itself under tremendous pressure to decide on the approval of the experimental drug aducanumab, designed to slow the progress of Alzheimer’s disease—a debilitating and incurable condition that ranks among the top 10 causes of death in the United States.

Welcomed by the market as a game-changer on its release, aducanumab quickly ran into serious problems. A lack of data on clinical efficacy along with a slew of dangerous side effects meant physicians in their droves were unwilling to prescribe it. Within months of its approval, three FDA advisors resigned in protest, one calling aducanumab, “the worst approval decision that the FDA has made that I can remember.” By the start of 2024, the drug had been pulled by its manufacturers. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight and data from the public’s use of aducanumab, it is easy for us to tell that FDA made the wrong decision then. But is there a better process that would have given FDA the foresight to make the right decision, under limited information?

The FDA routinely has to evaluate novel drugs and treatments; medical and pharmaceutical products that can impact the wellbeing of millions of Americans. With stakes this high, the FDA is known to tread carefully: assembling different advisory, review, and funding committees providing diverse knowledge and expertise to assess the evidence and decide whether to approve a new drug, or not. As a federal agency, the FDA is also required to maintain scrupulous records that cover its decisions, and how those decisions are made.

The Impact of Voting Mechanisms on Decision Quality

Some of this data has been analyzed by Goizueta’s Tian Heong Chan, associate professor of information systems and operation management. Together with Panos Markou of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, Chan scrutinized 17 years’ worth of information, including detailed transcripts from more than 500 FDA advisory committee meetings, to understand the mechanisms and protocols used in FDA decision-making: whether committee members vote to approve products sequentially, with everyone in the room having a say one after another; or if voting happens simultaneously via the push of a button, say, or a show of hands. Chan and Markou also looked at the impact of sequential versus simultaneous voting to see if there were differences in the quality of the decisions each mechanism produced. Their findings are singular.

It turns out that when stakeholders vote simultaneously, they make better decisions. Drugs or products approved this way are far less likely to be issued post-market boxed warnings (warnings issued by FDA that call attention to potentially serious health risks associated with the product, that must be displayed on the prescription box itself), and more than two times less likely to be recalled.

The FDA changed its voting protocols in 2007, when they switched from sequentially voting around the room, one person after another, to simultaneous voting procedures. And the results are stunning.

Tian Heong Chan, Associate Professor of Information Systems & Operation Management

“Decisions made by simultaneous voting are more than twice as effective,” says Chan. “After 2007, you see that just 3.4% of all drugs and products approved this way end up being discontinued or recalled. This compares with an 8.6% failure rate for drugs approved by the FDA using more sequential processes—the round robin where individuals had been voting one by one around the room.”

In other words, simultaneous decision-making is two times less likely to generate a wrong decision as the sequential approach. Why is this? Chan and Markou believe that these voting mechanisms impact the quality of discussion and debate that undergird decision-making; that the quality of decisions is significantly impacted by how those decisions are made.

Imagine you are told before

hand that you are going to vote on something important by simply raising your hand or pressing a button. In this scenario, you are probably going to want to expend more time and effort in debating all the issues and informing yourself before you decide.

Tian Heong Chan

“On the other hand, if you know the vote will go around the room, and you will have a chance to hear how others’ speak and explain their decisions, you’re going to be less motivated to exchange and defend your point of view beforehand,” says Chan.

Quality Discussion Leads to Quality Decisions

Parsing the FDA transcripts for content, language, and tonality in both settings, Chan and Markou find evidence to support this. Simultaneous voting or decision-making drives discussions that are characterized by language that is more positive, more authentic, and more even in terms of expressions of authority and hierarchy, says Chan. What’s more, these deliberations and exchanges are deeper and more far-ranging in quality.

We find marked differences in the tone of speech and the topics discussed when stakeholders know they will be voting simultaneously. There is less hierarchy in these exchanges, and individuals exhibit greater confidence in sharing their points of view more freely.

Tian Heong Chan

“We also see more questions being asked, and a broader range of topics and ideas discussed,” says Chan.

In this context, decision-makers are also less likely to reach unanimous agreement. Instead, debate is more vigorous and differences of opinion remain more robust. Conversely, sequential voting around the room is typically preceded by shorter discussion in which stakeholders share fewer opinions and ask fewer questions. And this demonstrably impacts the quality of the decisions made, says Chan.

Sharing a different perspective to a group requires effort and courage. With sequential voting or decision-making, there seems to be less interest in surfacing diverse perspectives or hidden aspects to complex problems.

Tian Heong Chan

“So it’s not that individuals are being influenced by what other people say when it comes to voting on the issue—which would be tempting to infer—rather, it’s that sequential voting mechanisms seem to take a bit more effort out of the process.”

When decision-makers are told that they will have a chance to vote and to explain their vote, one after another, their incentives to make a prior effort to interrogate each other vigorously, and to work that little bit harder to surface any shortcomings in their own understanding or point of view, or in the data, are relatively weaker, say Chan and Markou.

The Takeaway for Organizations Making High-Stakes Decisions

Decision-making in different contexts has long been the subject of scholarly scrutiny. Chan and Markou’s research sheds new light on the important role that different mechanisms have in shaping the outcomes of decision-making—and the quality of the decisions that are jointly taken. And this should be on the radar of organizations and institutions charged with making choices that impact swathes of the community, they say.

“The FDA has a solid tradition of inviting diversity into its decision-making. But the data shows that harnessing the benefits of diversity is contingent on using the right mechanisms to surface the different expertise you need to be able to see all the dimensions of the issue, and make better informed decisions about it,” says Chan.

A good place to start? By a concurrent show of hands.

Goizueta faculty apply their expertise and knowledge to solving problems that society—and the world—face. Learn more about faculty research at Goizueta.

The post Why Simultaneous Voting Makes for Good Decisions appeared first on EmoryBusiness.com.

Do you know where your finances stand?

When it comes to building a retirement portfolio, many folks don’t know where to start. The reigning retirement narrative has urged citizens to invest in the “high risk, high reward” stock market while they’re young, and slowly allocate more funds to assets like bonds as they age, which are considered the more staid and sturdy option compared to stocks.

But before you trod this well-worn path, Assistant Professor of Finance Aizhan Anarkulova would like to have a word.

Aizhan’s most recent paper on lifecycle investing argues that while the stock market is often characterized as the “sprinter” horse in a race to wealth, it may actually be both the sprinter and steady horse to back in the marathon of long-term wealth accumulation. Her findings have turned heads in the financial sector (and even rubbed some fur the wrong way, as researchers grapple with this up-ending of conventional wisdom).

Aizhan emphasizes that this is still a working paper, and even after publication, people should consult a financial advisor before making any leaps. There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach when it comes to financial planning, although Aizhan does have one piece of advice that should benefit everyone: whatever strategy you land on, save more.

The following interview has been edited for clarity.

Summarize your most recent research paper in six words.

You should invest more in stocks!

What inspired you to pursue a career in this field, and drew you to focus on long-term saving in particular?

My bachelor’s degree is in economics, which opened the door to my interest in finances. After that, I worked as an auditor in accounting, and found the part I liked the most was training the junior hires. Once I realized my passion for helping to create and pass knowledge, I left the corporate world to pursue a Ph.D.

The topics I’m looking at are ambitious; they’re such big economic questions, and the answers would affect almost everyone I know personally. We don’t have a lot of shots at saving for retirement. How many times can you save for 30 years, look at the outcome and say, “oh, that was wrong, next time I’ll change my strategy”? If you’re lucky, you might get two 30-year-windows in your lifetime. But this is why most people benefit from research and data-driven results. It’s a super high stakes question without much room for trial and error.

Your paper specifically uses the term “long term saving.” Does that only mean retirement savings?

My research is definitely relevant to retirement savings and that is likely the scenario most people are imagining when they hear about my research agenda. That said, there are other investments that have long horizons. An individual may be saving over decades to leave an estate behind for their children, or to purchase a business, for example. Or an institution may be looking to maintain an endowment.

This paper studies the optimal lifecycle investment, which also involves the other half of the equation: withdrawal or “desaving.” We study what kind of portfolio not just produces the highest returns, but is also less risky in the sense that it minimizes the risk of losses.

Your research challenges two widely accepted principles of retirement investing: first, that people should invest in both stocks and bonds. Second, that as they age, they should move more of their money into bonds/cash. Can you explain the rationale behind this conventional wisdom?

The first principle is about the general benefits of diversification. The idea is that stocks and bonds don’t operate in sync: bonds might do better if stocks don’t perform well, and vice versa. We do maintain an argument for diversification in our paper—the principle of “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” still holds true here—but we find you are better off diversifying with international stocks rather than bonds.

Regarding the second principle, I get a lot of questions about this, even in academia. One of the explanations for the second principle is human capital. Here’s what that means: when we’re young, most of us have capital in the form of future earnings because we will work for many years to come. Most likely, you can’t sell it and/or you cannot borrow against it, but it is a form of wealth. With these assumptions in mind, young investors are able to take on more risks with stocks. That human capital diminishes as you get older. That’s why you can afford a larger stock allocation while young— your salary will carry you through the whims of the stock market. You will save again, if something happens, and the stock market will mean revert in the long run. When people are closer to retirement, they may want something “safer” (read it as ‘less volatile’), because they aren’t going to work much longer, and can’t afford to lose their savings anymore.

Did something in particular lead you to question this conventional wisdom—a hunch, a personal experience?

Honestly,  we never planned to go against the status quo. We simply let the data speak.

Aizhan Anarkulova

That said, we provide explanations for why we’d gotten that result so I encourage you to read the paper. I’ve published an earlier paper that essentially argues that “stocks are  riskier in the long run” than conventionally thought. Then people wanted to follow up, ‘asking ‘if stocks are risky, where should I invest?’ To answer that, we started adding other major assets—bonds, bills, and international stocks—to the portfolios and found that the mix of domestic and international stocks outperforms in our lifecycle setting. So stocks are risky but hey, you have to hold them anyway as long as it is internationally diversified!

What did your paper find to be the most effective strategy in accruing wealth over time?

One third domestic stocks, two thirds international stocks. That is the most optimal ratio for the setting that we consider. We leave some room for how comfortable you are with those weights. The US stock market accounts for about half of the world’s stocks, so you can hold a portfolio that is 50/50 domestic stocks/international stocks. Can you deviate from that exact balance of 1/3 and 2/3? Yes. The point is to have both.

Why is this mix optimal? What should investors consider when adding international equities to their portfolio—what countries? What kinds of stocks?

Our research only considers well diversified portfolios. When we talk about holding international stocks, we are talking about stocks in developed countries. That is, stable markets that are all comparable to the United States and each other. And we’re talking about holding the whole market of a country—an index fund that includes every stock that is publicly traded within that country. When creating an international portfolio, the investments are weighed in proportion to the size or “value” of each country’s stock market relative to the world.

While picking and choosing individual stocks over others may be exciting, that is not the focus of our paper. However, we do imagine you’d need to rebalance your international and domestic periodically, maybe once a year, as the weight of those markets will shift. In our paper, the portfolios are assumed to be rebalanced monthly.

What limitations or uncertainties in your analysis should readers be aware of?           

Maybe this question is better for an editor or a referee, because I have a strong sense we did all of this right given our set of assumptions and the empirical setting in the paper. For example, in the base case, we assume investors save 10% of their earnings. But we considered lots (and I mean it) of variations of the base case for each of the assumptions and found that our conclusion holds true.

Our paper is a statistical analysis. What we show is what is most likely to happen, from a statistical standpoint. But we can’t put an exact number on what stock returns will be, say, in the next 30 years; we aren’t fortune tellers.

Can you give us a behind-the-scenes glance into the methodology, in layman’s terms?

In a nutshell, we follow a hypothetical couple in the United States, then we simulate different kinds of income scenarios that happen to people in real life—high income, low income, temporary unemployment, for example—and determine which investment portfolio accrues the largest retirement income and bequest.

We consider a lot of risks that investors face, including job income uncertainty, Social Security income, and the risk of outliving their savings. The model uses Social Security mortality data, calculates benefits based on 2022 rules, and draws on a comprehensive dataset covering returns on domestic stocks, international stocks, government bonds, and government bills from 39 developed countries. Labor income is modeled using findings from a 2021 study by Guvenen, Karahan, Ozkan, and Song, which analyzed real earnings data from millions of U.S. workers provided by the Social Security Administration.

We get to play god for this exercise. We simulate a couple’s life and let them “live” it several times from the beginning to the end.

Aizhan Anarkulova

In those repeat lives, the couple picks different lifecycle investment portfolios, while everything else stays the same. This couple is earning money, they’re saving a certain proportion, they retire at 65, start getting social security, and start taking money from their account. Across the simulated lives, the outcomes are driven by the portfolio that they chose. As mentioned before, we consider lots of variations of the base case and the results are the same. For example, instead of a heterosexual couple, we consider single female and single male, and we also look at same sex couples.

What are the drawbacks to this alternative investment strategy?

We also study what the maximal drawdowns look like for different portfolios. Basically, it’s the largest drop you experience in the value of your portfolio. Maybe the stock market crashes and your million goes to half a million, for example. We look at how that differs across the strategies. If you look at the average of that, then our all-equity optimal portfolios have a larger average maximal drawdown compared to a portfolio with bonds. But if you consider the maximum of the potential drawdowns, then our optimal portfolio is better than the bond-based portfolios. However, drawdown is an intermediate outcome; it’s not something that is affecting your actual wealth as long as you stay invested. If you withdraw money at that low point, you will be worse off. Our analysis assumes you don’t go and sell stocks when the market crashes, you just stay invested.

You have to be able to stick to the strategy you pick and hold it through good times and bad. Ultimately, in the end, it’s going to be better for you. But there’s going to be periods where it hurts.

Aizhan Anarkulova

If you could change one aspect of how people think about investing for retirement, what would it be?

Save more! Everybody should be saving more. At every age.  I have to tell it myself, too—I’m like, “you do this research, you know the answer, you know you have to save more.”

What challenges have you faced as a researcher in questioning well-established investment principles, and how have you addressed skepticism?

People have definitely been reactive. We have received a lot of comments and suggestions. “What if you change the retirement age? What if you change the percentage saved?” We have done a lot of additional analyses in this version of the draft to address those comments. I think we’re still facing lots of challenges because it’s an unpublished paper at the moment. When it is published, that’s when it will make the biggest impact and help people.

What questions remain unanswered in your research, and what areas are you most excited to explore next?

In research, the questions never get answered in such a way where it ends the discussion and we move on. When my paper is published, it will beget more questions. So in the future, I’m still likely going to explore the same questions in a sense— the big economic questions are still out there.

What do you find most rewarding about your work in this field?

It’s people. I enjoy building a network with professors across many institutions. I especially enjoy teaching, and my co-workers. Goizueta students are enthusiastic, and they’re really smart. I’ve been very impressed by them.

The post Keep Calm and Consider Staying in the Stock Market appeared first on EmoryBusiness.com.

The start of a new year is a symbolic clean slate. It’s a chance to embrace fresh opportunities, set ambitious goals, and imagine what lies ahead.

It’s also a great time to pause for a moment of reflection. Before diving headfirst into the demands of work, school, or life’s daily rhythm, we can appreciate the journey we’ve traveled over the past year. It’s a chance to celebrate our achievements, reflect on the lessons learned and challenges faced, and carry forward the wisdom we’ve gained.

So, before we launch full steam ahead into the new year, let’s take a look back at some of the most compelling and memorable stories that defined 2024 on EmoryBusiness.com.

Welcoming Impressive Inaugural Classes to Two New Programs

Meet the Inaugural Cohort of Goizueta’s New Master in Management Program

One of Goizueta Business School’s newest additions is the Master in Management degree, a program for recent college graduates with liberal arts and science majors. Spanning 10 months, the program acts as a “fast track” option for students to gain business skills to complement their undergraduate work. Among the inaugural cohort, 38% graduated from an Emory University program, with a total of 84% of the class graduating from their undergraduate programs in 2024.

Meet the First Cohort of Goizueta’s New Master in Business for Veterans

Goizueta Business School launched a new graduate degree last year, and the first cohort of students started in May. The Master in Business for Veterans program is led by Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General and Associate Dean for Leadership Ken Keen. The inaugural cohort of this working professional program includes 31 students. Among them are two Air Force, 19 Army, five Marines, and five Navy veterans and active duty service members. These men and women have decorated and accomplished backgrounds, including several careers of service to the United States.

Experiential Learning Opportunities Abound

MBA Students Explore Denmark’s Model for Work and Well-being

This summer, more than 25 MBA students from Goizueta Business School ventured out of the classroom and across the globe, traveling to Copenhagen, Denmark to explore how the Danes approach their short work week (standard 37 hours), while having some of the most productive companies in the world. The immersive experience is part of a new course at Goizueta, Life Design for the Modern MBA, focused on helping Goizueta students—who are passionate, ambitious, and often working in overdrive—to find meaning and fulfillment in both career and life.

Team Building with Taste: Lessons in Leadership from the Kitchen

At first, Yaqi Liu 26BBA wasn’t keen about getting up early on a Saturday to cook. But over the course of the day, Liu changed his mind. “It was a really good experience,” he says. That experience is called “Team Building with Taste.” It’s a cooking competition in the style of Bravo network’s “Top Chef,” except with the ultimate goal of improving team dynamics. The challenge is a part of the undergraduate BBA program’s Team Dynamics and Leadership class. Over multiple weekends this fall, student teams were given a $50 budget, a set time to plan and shop, and one hour to cook and plate their meals. The teams then presented their dishes to a panel of judges.

How HackATL Fosters Future Changemakers

A lot can happen in 48 hours. For Selina Kao 27BBA, that was the turnaround time afforded her team at this October’s HackATL competition. Their mission? Transform a fledgling business idea into an actionable plan. Hosted by The Roberto C. Goizueta Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, this year’s event—powered by a dynamic collaboration between InnovATL, the City of Atlanta and the center—brought together more than 300 students from across the Southeast. After two days of frenetic brainstorming, building, and pitching transformative start-up initiatives to a panel of judges, the top teams took home over $13K in prizes.

Accomplished Alumni Create Meaningful Impact

Goizueta’s Veterans: Meet Matt Smith

In February 2025, Matt Smith 01MBA will retire as a two-star major general for the U.S. Army. His story is unique because of its many twists and turns. Smith joined the Army in college, before heading to the corporate world in Atlanta in the late 90s and enrolling in Goizueta Business School’s MBA program. However, it wasn’t long before Smith realized that the military was where he was meant to be. He resumed active duty for the Army in 2019, and in December 2022, he stepped into his current role as commander of the Joint Task Force – North. His team has helped federal agencies with interdepartmental coordination and assisted U.S. Border Patrol when they needed additional observation help. Smith says the skills he gained from earning an MBA have helped set him apart as a military leader. Now he’s he’s giving voice to Goizueta’s veterans as part of the advisory board for the new Master in Business for Veterans program.

Meet Marnie Harris: Building Hotels with Purpose

When Marnie Harris 20MBA was an undergraduate biomedical engineering student, she dreamed of building a more accessible world. Harris helped found The Excel Program at Georgia Tech, a certificate program for students with intellectual disabilities. When Harris graduated, she stayed on to welcome the first cohort of Excel students. But she soon came to believe that creating meaningful employment for this demographic must begin inside business, where the jobs are. So, Harris enrolled in Goizueta Business School’s MBA program, where she received the Woodruff Scholarship, Emory’s most prestigious named scholarship, awarded to Emory applicants who want to make a positive social impact. Now, Harris serves as the director of business and marketing strategy at Pavilion Development Company. There, she’s developing and franchising the Shepherd Hotels brand, which focuses on employing staff with intellectual disabilities.

Holistic Health Starts at Home: Meet Kyle Brown

After enrolling in the One-Year MBA program at Emory’s Goizueta Business School, Kyle Brown 20MBA became interested in holistic living and the various ways cannabidiol (CBD) could improve one’s health. Brown soon teamed up with his aunt, an expert gardener and advocate of natural medicine, who had long been growing her own herbs for healthful teas. The duo developed a series of CBD tea formulas, and ultimately launched their brick-and-mortar cannabis bar Bookstore Gallery. While its products assist in pain management on an individual level, Bookstore Gallery leads the charge of healing on a community level. Brown’s holistic healing mission comes to life through diverse events, including therapy-focused happy hours, game nights, tailgates, spoken word poetry, men’s mental health meetups, and creative outlets like “Puff and Paint.”

Groundbreaking Research from Goizueta’s Brightest Minds

Mitigating Bias in AI: Sharing the Burden of Bias When it Counts Most

From directions on Google Maps to job recommendations on LinkedIn, by now, we’ve all grown accustomed to AI systems’ integration in nearly every aspect of our daily lives. But are AI systems fair? The answer to this question, in short—not completely. Fortunately, some dedicated data scientists are working around the clock to tackle this big issue. One of those data scientists is Gareth James, who also serves as the Dean of Goizueta Business School as his day job. In a recent paper titled “A Burden Shared is a Burden Halved: A Fairness-Adjusted Approach to Classification” Dean James—along with coauthors Bradley Rava, Wenguang Sun, and Xin Tong—have proposed a new framework to help ensure AI decision-making is as fair as possible in high-stakes decisions where certain individuals—for example, racial minority groups and other protected groups—may be more prone to AI bias, even without our realizing it. 

Hiring More Nurses Generates Revenue for Hospitals

Underfunding is driving an acute shortage of trained nurses in hospitals and care facilities in the United States. American nurses are quitting in droves, and that’s bad news for patient outcomes. For beleaguered administrators looking to sustain quality of care while minimizing costs (and maximizing profits), hiring and retaining nursing staff has arguably become something of a zero-sum game in the U.S. But could there be potential financial losses attached to nurse understaffing that administrators should factor into their hiring and remuneration decisions? Research by Goizueta Professors Diwas KC and Donald Lee, as well as recent Goizueta PhD graduates Hao Ding 24PhD (Auburn University) and Sokol Tushe 23PhD (Muma College of Business), would suggest there are.

Training Innovative AI to Provide Expert Guidance on Prescription Medications

A new wave of medications meant to treat Type II diabetes is grabbing headlines around the world for their ability to help people lose a significant amount of weight. The two big names that come to mind are Ozempic and Wegovy. However, both medications come with a host of side effects, and are not suitable for every patient. Many clinics and physicians—particularly in smaller communities—do not have immediate access to expert second opinions needed to make decisions about prescription medications such as these. That’s one of the reasons Karl Kuhnert is using artificial intelligence to capture the expertise of physicians like Caroline Collins MD through the Tacit Object Modeler, or TOM. By using TOM, Kuhnert and Collins can create her “decision-making digital twin.” Though there are a number of ways TOM could be useful to the healthcare industry when prescribing medications, not least among them is the potential to expand access to the expert opinions of medical specialists to rural areas experiencing significant health disparities.

Help keep the great Goizueta stories coming with a gift of support to Emory’s 2O36 campaign.

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Take the backlash the Kardashian-Jenner family faced for adopting styles from minority cultures or the controversy over non-Indigenous designers using Native American patterns in fashion. These examples highlight the issue of cultural appropriation, where borrowing elements from another culture without genuine understanding or respect can lead to accusations of exploitation.

Abraham Oshotse, an assistant professor of organization and management at Goizueta Business School, along with Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University Yael Berda and Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business Amir Goldberg, explores this in their research on “cultural tariffing.” They shed light on why high-status individuals, such as celebrities or industry leaders, often come under fire when crossing cultural boundaries.

The Concept of Cultural Tariffing

Oshotse and coauthors define cultural tariffing as “the act of imposing a social cost on cultural boundary crossing. It is levied on high-status actors crossing into low-status culture, in order to mitigate the reproduction of the status inequality.” This notion suggests that the acceptance or rejection of cultural boundary-crossing is influenced by the perceived costs and benefits.

Cultural appropriation involves taking elements from a culture that one does not belong to, without permission or authority. For example, when Elvis Presley brought African-American music into the mainstream, it was initially seen as elevating the genre. However, in today’s context, such acts might be criticized as appropriation rather than celebration. This research seeks to analyze people’s modern reactions to different examples of cultural boundary-crossing and which conditions induce cultural tariffing.

The Hypotheses

The researchers make four hypotheses about participants’ reactions to cultural appropriation:

1. People will disapprove of cultural borrowing if there’s a clear power imbalance, with the borrowing group having more status or privilege than the group they are borrowing from.
2. Cultural borrowing is more likely to be criticized if the person doing it has a higher socioeconomic status within their social group.
3. Cultural borrowing is more likely to be criticized if the person doing it has only a shallow connection to the culture they’re borrowing from.
4. Cultural borrowing is more likely to be criticized if the person doing it benefits more from it than the people from the culture they are borrowing from.

Put to the Test

Oshotse et al exposed respondents to four scenarios per hypothesis (16 total) with a permissible and a transgressive condition. In the permissible condition, subjects exhibit lower status or socioeconomic standing or a stronger connection to the target culture. Subjects in the transgressive condition exhibit a higher status or socioeconomic standing and less of an authentic connection to the target culture.

Insights from the Study

Oshotse’s study offers four key insights:

1. Status Matters: Cultural boundary-crossing is more likely to generate disapproval if there’s a clear status difference favoring the adopter.
2. Superficial Connections: The less authentic the adopter’s connection to the target culture, the more likely they are to face backlash.
3. Socioeconomic Influence: Higher socioeconomic status within the adopter’s social group increases the likelihood of disapproval.
4. Value Extraction: The more value the adopter gains relative to the culture they’re borrowing from, the higher the disapproval.

These insights are crucial for leaders who want to navigate cultural boundaries successfully, ensuring their actions are seen as respectful and inclusive rather than exploitative.

Real-World Implications for Business Leaders

Why does this matter for business leaders? Understanding cultural tariffing is crucial when expanding into new markets, launching multicultural campaigns, or even managing diverse teams. The research suggests that crossing cultural boundaries without deep understanding or respect can backfire. That’s especially true when the adopter holds a higher socioeconomic status.

Consider the example of a luxury brand adopting traditional African patterns without engaging with the communities behind them. In this case, it risks being seen as exploitative rather than innovative. The consequences aren’t just reputational; they can also impact the brand’s bottom line.

This research isn’t just about isolated incidents; it mirrors sweeping societal shifts. Over the past 50 years, Western views have evolved to embrace ethnic diversity and multicultural exchange. But with this newfound appreciation comes a fresh set of challenges. Today’s leaders must navigate cultural interactions with greater care, fully aware of the historical and social contexts that shape perceptions of appropriation.

In today’s global and interconnected business landscape, mastering the subtleties of cultural appropriation and tariffing is crucial. Leaders who tread thoughtfully can boost their reputation and success, while those who falter may face serious backlash. By understanding the hidden costs of crossing cultural boundaries, business leaders can cultivate authentic exchanges and steer clear of the pitfalls of appropriation.                     

Goizueta faculty apply their expertise and knowledge to solving problems that society—and the world—face. Learn more about faculty research at Goizueta.

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American nurses are quitting in droves, thanks to low pay and burnout as understaffing increases individual workload. This is bad news for patient outcomes. Nurses are estimated to have eight times more routine contact with patients than physicians. They shoulder the bulk of all responsibility in terms of diagnostic data collection, treatment plans, and clinical reporting. As a result, understaffing is linked to a slew of serious problems, among them increased wait times for patients in care, post-operative infections, readmission rates, and patient mortality—all of which are on the rise across the U.S.

Tackling this crisis is challenging because of how nursing services are reimbursed. Most hospitals operate a payment system where services are paid for separately. Physician services are billed as separate line items, making them a revenue generator for the hospitals that employ them. But under Medicare, nursing services are charged as part of a fixed room and board fee, meaning that hospitals charge the same fee regardless of how many nurses are employed in the patient’s care. In this model, nurses end up on the other side of hospitals’ balance sheets: a labor expense rather than a source of income.

For beleaguered administrators looking to sustain quality of care while minimizing costs (and maximizing profits), hiring and retaining nursing staff has arguably become something of a zero-sum game in the U.S.

The Hidden Costs of Nurse Understaffing

But might the balance sheet in fact be skewed in some way? Could there be potential financial losses attached to nurse understaffing that administrators should factor into their hiring and remuneration decisions?

Research by Goizueta Professors Diwas KC and Donald Lee, as well as recent Goizueta PhD graduates Hao Ding 24PhD (Auburn University) and Sokol Tushe 23PhD (Muma College of Business), would suggest there are. Their new peer-reviewed publication* finds that increasing a single nurse’s workload by just one patient creates a 17% service slowdown for all other patients under that nurse’s care. Looking at the data another way, having one additional nurse on duty during the busiest shift (typically between 7am and 7pm) speeds up emergency department work and frees up capacity to treat more patients such that hospitals could be looking at a major increase in revenue. The researchers calculate that this productivity gain could equate to a net increase of $470,000 per 10,000 patient visits—and savings to the tune of $160,000 in lost earnings for the same number of patients as wait times are reduced.

“A lot of the debate around nursing in the U.S. has focused on the loss of quality in care, which is hugely important,” says Diwas KC.

But looking at the crisis through a productivity lens means we’re also able to understand the very real economic value that nurses bring too: the revenue increases that come with capacity gains.

Diwas KC, Goizueta Foundation Term Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management

“Our findings challenge the predominant thinking around nursing as a cost,” adds Lee. “What we see is that investing in nursing staff more than pays for itself in downstream financial benefits for hospitals. It is effectively a win-win-win for patients, nurses, and healthcare providers.”

Nurse Load: the Biggest Impact on Productivity

To get to these findings, the researchers analyzed a high-resolution dataset on patient flow through a large U.S. teaching hospital. They looked at the real-time workloads of physicians and nurses working in the emergency department between April 2018 and March 2019, factoring in variables such as patient demographics and severity of complaint or illness. Tracking patients from admission to triage and on to treatment, the researchers were able to tease out the impact that the number of nurses and physicians on duty had on patient throughput. Using a novel machine learning technique developed at Goizueta by Lee, they were able to identify the effect of increasing or reducing the workforce. The contrast between physicians and nursing staff is stark, says Tushe.

“When you have fewer nurses on duty, capacity and patient throughput drops by an order of magnitude—far, far more than when reducing the number of doctors. Our results show that for every additional patient the nurse is responsible for, service speed falls by 17%. That compares to just 1.4% if you add one patient to the workload of an attending physician. In other words, nurses’ impact on productivity in the emergency department is more than eight times greater.”

Boosting Revenue Through Reduced Wait Times

Adding an additional nurse to the workforce, on the other hand, increases capacity appreciably. And as more patients are treated faster, hospitals can expect a concomitant uptick in revenue, says KC.

“It’s well documented that cutting down wait time equates to more patients treated and more income. Previous research shows that reducing service time by 15 minutes per 30,000 patient visits translates to $1.4 million in extra revenue for a hospital.”

In our study, we calculate that staffing one additional nurse in the 7am to 7pm emergency department shift reduces wait time by 23 minutes, so hospitals could be looking at an increase of $2.33 million per year.

Diwas KC

This far eclipses the costs associated with hiring one additional nurse, says Lee.

“According to 2022 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average nursing salary in the U.S. is $83,000. Fringe benefits account for an additional 50% of the base salary. The total cost of adding one nurse during the 7am to 7pm shift is $310,000 (for 2.5 full-time employees). When you do the math, it is clear. The net hospital gain is $2 million for the hospital in our study. Or $470,000 per 10,000 patient visits.”

Incontrovertible Benefits to Hiring More Nurses

These findings should provide compelling food for thought both to healthcare administrators and U.S. policymakers. For too long, the latter have fixated on the upstream costs, without exploring the downstream benefits of nursing services, say the researchers. Their study, the first to quantify the economic value of nurses in the U.S., asks “better questions,” argues Tushe; exploiting newly available data and analytics to reveal incontrovertible financial benefits that attach to hiring—and compensating—more nurses in American hospitals.

We know that a lot of nurses are leaving the profession not just because of cuts and burnout, but also because of lower pay. We would say to administrators struggling to hire talented nurses to review current wage offers, because our analysis suggests that the economic surplus from hiring more nurses could be readily applied to retention pay rises also.

Sokol Tushe 23PhD, Muma College of Business

The Case for Mandated Ratios

For state-level decision makers, Lee has additional words of advice.

“In 2004, California mandated minimum nurse-to-patient ratios in hospitals. Since then, six more states have added some form of minimum ratio requirement. The evidence is that this has been beneficial to patient outcomes and nurse job satisfaction. Our research now adds an economic dimension to the list of benefits as well. Ipso facto, policymakers ought to consider wider adoption of minimum nurse-to-patient ratios.”

However, decision makers go about tackling the shortage of nurses in the U.S., they should go about it fast and soon, says KC.

“This is a healthcare crisis that is only set to become more acute in the near future. As our demographics shift and our population starts again out, demand for quality will increase. So too must the supply of care capacity. But what we are seeing is the nursing staffing situation in the U.S. moving in the opposite direction. All of this is manifesting in the emergency department. That’s where wait times are getting longer, mistakes are being made, and overworked nurses are quitting. It is creating a vicious cycle that needs to be broken.”

Goizueta faculty apply their expertise and knowledge to solving problems that society—and the world—face. Learn more about faculty research at Goizueta.

*Ding, Tushe, Kc, Lee: “Frontiers in Operations: Valuing nursing productivity in emergency departments.” Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 26:4:1323-1337 (2024)

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Our faculty showcase the breadth of innovation and thought leadership that equips our students for an ever-changing marketplace.

Gareth James, John H. Harland Dean of Goizueta Business School

Goizueta Business School is pleased to welcome the following faculty members for the 2024/25 academic year.

Faculty

Tucker Balch: Professor in the Practice and Research of Finance

Tucker Balch’s work lies at the intersection of AI and finance. He holds a bachelor’s degree and PhD in computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology. In addition, he’s held research and teaching positions at Carnegie Mellon University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was a tenured full professor. A prolific author and inventor, he has published over 115 peer-reviewed research papers and filed 40 patents.

In the financial industry, Balch served as managing director of AI Research for JP Morgan Chase. Since 2019, he helped create and grow the research team, applying machine learning, cryptography, and synthetic data for finance to business problems. Further, he’s a successful startup co-founder of Lucena Research (now Neuravest) in the alternative data for investing space. Always innovating, he is an online education pioneer, developing and teaching massive online open courses (MOOCs) including, “Computational Investing” and “Machine Learning for Trading.” Prior to his research career, Balch served as an F-15 pilot in the U.S. Air Force.

Jake Jo 15BBA: Assistant Professor in the Practice of Organization and Management

A 2015 BBA alum, Jo received his PhD in management from The McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. In 2021, he returned to Goizueta as a postdoctoral fellow in organization and management, where he taught organizational behavior and negotiations.

His research explores the psychological processes behind how people form their informal social networks. Specifically, he works in two areas: one, examining the ways individuals think about who they should connect with and two, how their approaches to forming social connections differ based on their identity groups. His work has been published in top academic outlets including Journal of Applied Psychology.

Brian Jonghwan Lee: Assistant Professor of Finance

Brian Jonghwan Lee completed his PhD in finance at Columbia Business School in 2024. Prior to his PhD, he received his undergraduate degree in economics and statistics from Carnegie Mellon University and subsequently held research positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

His research areas include corporate finance and household finance, delving into topics such as credit score inequality and bankruptcy. An avid soccer fan, Lee grew up in Seoul, Korea, and Athens, Georgia.

Dionne Nickerson: Assistant Professor of Marketing

Dionne Nickerson’s research focuses on the impact of sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on marketing strategy. Her work has been published in Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Channels. In 2024, she was a finalist for the AMA Foundation Robert Lusch Early Career Research Award.

Nickerson was born and raised on Chicago’s South Side. She earned her PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Also, she holds an AB in engineering (Brown University) and an MBA (Providence College). Prior to joining Goizueta, she was a faculty member at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington. A former technology consultant, Nickerson advised clean technology start-ups funded through the EPA’s Small Business Innovation Research program on marketing strategy, and taught English through the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF).

Post Doctoral Fellows

Jared Scruggs: Organization and Management

Jared Scruggs received his PhD (2024) and MS (2022) in management from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His research broadly addresses justice and equity at work and reflects both societal and organizational influences. Specifically, he examines how these elements shape employee attitudes, well-being, and behaviors, using a variety of methodologies, including field and online surveys and experiments, archival datasets, and natural-language processing.

Excerpts of his dissertation on “The Rejection of ‘Work as Worth,’” won the 2023 Academy of Management William H. Newman Award and the OB Division’s Most Innovative Student Paper. In addition, Scruggs has undergraduate degrees in psychology and neuroscience along with Portuguese from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to academia, he worked as an international payroll specialist at CloudPay Solutions.

Maoyu Zhang: Information Systems and Operations Management

Prior to this appointment, Maoyu Zhang was a visiting scholar at Goizueta. She completed her PhD in statistics from the Institute of Statistics and Big Data at Renmin University of China (RUC) in 2024. Her research involves the statistical analysis of networks, graphs, and tensor data, with applications in business, neuroscience, and social science. In addition, she is interested in statistical depth and its applications. Recently, her paper “Learning Brain Connectivity in Social Cognition with Dynamic Network Regression,” was published in the Annals of Applied Statistics. Earlier in her career, Zhang received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, applied mathematics, and economics from Central China Normal University.

Goizueta faculty apply their expertise and knowledge to solving problems that society—and the world—face. Learn more about faculty research at Goizueta.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is developing into an amazing tool to help humans across multiple fields, including medicine and research, and much of that work is happening at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School.

Financial reporting and auditing are both areas where AI can have a significant impact as companies and audit firms are rapidly adopting the use of such technology. But are financial managers willing to rely on the results of AI-generated information? In the context of audit adjustments, it depends on whether their company uses AI as well.

Willing to Rely on AI?

Cassandra Estep, assistant professor of accounting at Goizueta Business School, and her co-authors have a forthcoming study looking at financial managers’ perceptions of the use of AI, both within their companies and by their auditors. Research had already been done on how financial auditors react to using AI for evaluating complex financial reporting. That got Estep and her co-authors thinking there’s more to the story.

“A big, important part of the financial reporting and auditing process is the managers within the companies being audited. We were interested in thinking about how they react to the use of AI by their auditors,” Estep says. “But then we also started thinking about what companies are investing in AI as well. That joint influence of the use of AI, both within the companies and by the auditors that are auditing the financials of those companies, is where it all started.”  

The Methodology

Estep and her co-authors conducted a survey and experiment with senior-level financial managers with titles like CEO, CFO, or Controller – the people responsible for making financial reporting decisions within companies. The survey included questions to understand how companies are using AI. It also included open-ended questions designed to identify key themes about financial managers’ perceptions of AI use by their companies and their auditors.

In the experiment, participants completed a hypothetical case in which they were asked about their willingness to record a downward adjustment to the fair value of a patent proposed by their auditors. The scenarios varied across randomly assigned conditions as to whether the auditor did or not did not use AI in coming up with the proposed valuation and adjustment, and whether their company did or did not use AI in generating their estimated value of the patent. When both the auditor and the company used AI, participants were willing to record a larger adjustment amount, i.e., decrease the value of the patent more. The authors find that these results are driven by increased perceptions of accuracy.

It’s not necessarily a comfort thing, but a signal from the company that this is an acceptable way to do things, and it actually caused them to perceive the auditors’ information as more accurate and of higher quality.

Cassandra Estep, assistant professor of accounting

“Essentially, they viewed the auditors’ recommendation for adjusting the numbers to be more accurate and of higher quality, and so they were more willing to accept the audit adjustment,” Estep says.

Making Financial Reporting More Efficient

Financial reporting is a critical process in any business. Companies and investors need timely and accurate information to make important decisions. With the added element of AI, financial reporting processes can include more external data.

We touched on the idea that these tools can hopefully process a lot more information and data. For example, we’ve seen auditors and managers talk about using outside information.

Cassandra Estep

“Auditors might be able to use customer reviews and feedback as one of the inputs to deciding how much warranty expense the company should be estimating. And is that amount reasonable? The idea is that if customers are complaining, there could be some problem with the products.”

Adding data to analytical processes, when done by humans alone, adds a significant amount of time to the calculations. Research from the European Spreadsheets Risks Interest Group says that more than 90% of all financial spreadsheets contain at least one error. Some forms of AI can process hundreds of thousands of calculations overnight, typically with fewer errors. In short, it can be more efficient.

Efficiency was brought up a lot in our survey, the idea that things could be done faster with AI.

Cassandra Estep

“We also asked the managers about their perspective on the audit side, and they did hope that audit fees would go down, because auditors would be able to do things more quickly and efficiently as well,” Estep says. “But the flip side of that is that using AI could also raise more questions and more issues that have to be investigated. There’s also the potential for more work.”

The Fear of Being Replaced

The fear of being replaced is a more or less universal worry for anyone whose industry is beginning to adopt the use of AI in some form. While the respondents in Estep’s survey looked forward to more efficient and effective handling of complex financial reporting by AI, they also emphasized the need to keep the human element involved in any decisions made using AI.

What we were slightly surprised about was the positive reactions that the managers had in our survey. While some thought the use of AI was inevitable, there’s this idea that it can make things better.

Cassandra Estep

“But there’s still a little bit of trepidation,” Estep says. “One of the key themes that came up was yes, we need to use these tools. We should take advantage of them to improve the quality and the efficiency with which we do things. But we also need to keep that human element. At the end of the day, humans need to be responsible. Humans need to be making the decisions.”

A Positive Outlook

The benefits of AI were clear to the survey participants. They recognized it as a positive trend, whether or not it was currently used in their financial reporting. If they weren’t regularly using AI, they expected to be using it soon.

I think one of the most interesting things to us about this paper is this idea that AI can be embraced. Companies and auditors are still somewhat in their infancy of figuring out how to use it, but big investments are being made.

Cassandra Estep

“And then, again, there’s the fact that our experiment also shows a situation where managers were willing to accept the auditors’ proposed adjustments. This arguably goes against their incentives as management to keep the numbers more positive or optimistic,” Estep continues. “The auditors are serving that role of helping managers provide more reliable financial information, and that can be viewed as a positive outcome.”

“There’s still some hesitation. We’re still figuring out these tools. We see examples all the time of where AI has messed up, or put together false information. But I think the positive sentiment across our survey participants, and then also the results of our experiment, reinforce the idea that AI can be a good thing and that it can be embraced. Even in a setting like financial reporting and auditing, where there can be fear of job replacement, the focus on the human-technology interaction can hopefully lead to improved situations.”

Goizueta faculty apply their expertise and knowledge to solving problems that society—and the world—face. Learn more about faculty research at Goizueta. 

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But are AI systems fair? The answer to this question, in short—not completely. Further complicating the matter is the fact that today’s AI systems are far from transparent.  

Think about it: The uncomfortable truth is that generative AI tools like ChatGPT—based on sophisticated architectures such as deep learning or large language models—are fed vast amounts of training data which then interact in unpredictable ways. And while the principles of how these methods operate are well-understood (at least by those who created them), ChatGPT’s decisions are likened to an airplane’s black box: They are not easy to penetrate.

So, how can we determine if “black box AI” is fair? Some dedicated data scientists are working around the clock to tackle this big issue.

One of those data scientists is Gareth James, who also serves as the Dean of Goizueta Business School as his day job. In a recent paper titled “A Burden Shared is a Burden Halved: A Fairness-Adjusted Approach to Classification” Dean James—along with coauthors Bradley Rava, Wenguang Sun, and Xin Tong—have proposed a new framework to help ensure AI decision-making is as fair as possible in high-stakes decisions where certain individuals—for example, racial minority groups and other protected groups—may be more prone to AI bias, even without our realizing it. 

In other words, their new approach to fairness makes adjustments that work out better when some are getting the short shrift of AI. 

Unpacking Bias in High-Stakes Scenarios

Dean James and his coauthors set their sights on high-stakes decisions in their work. What counts as high stakes? Examples include hospitals’ medical diagnoses, banks’ credit-worthiness assessments, and state justice systems’ bail and sentencing decisions. On the one hand, these areas are ripe for AI-interventions, with ample data available. On the other hand, biased decision-making here has the potential to negatively impact a person’s life in a significant way. 

In the case of justice systems, in the United States, there’s a data-driven, decision-support tool known as COMPAS (which stands for Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) in active use. The idea behind COMPAS is to crunch available data (including age, sex, and criminal history) to help determine a criminal-court defendant’s likelihood of committing a crime as they await trial. Supporters of COMPAS note that statistical predictions are helping courts make better decisions about bail than humans did on their own. At the same time, detractors have argued that COMPAS is better at predicting recidivism for some racial groups than for others. And since we can’t control which group we belong to, that bias needs to be corrected. It’s high time for guardrails.

A Step Toward Fairer AI Decisions

Enter Dean James and colleagues’ algorithm. Designed to make the outputs of AI decisions fairer, even without having to know the AI model’s inner workings, they call it “fairness-adjusted selective inference” (FASI). It works to flag specific decisions that would be better handled by a human being in order to avoid systemic bias. That is to say, if the AI cannot yield an acceptably clear (1/0 or binary) answer, a human review is recommended. 

To test the results for their “fairness-adjusted selective inference,” the researchers turn to both simulated and real data. For the real data, the COMPAS dataset enabled a look at predicted and actual recidivism rates for two minority groups, as seen in the chart below. 

In the figures above, the researchers set an “acceptable level of mistakes” – seen as the dotted line – at 0.25 (25%). They then compared “minority group 1” and “minority group 2” results before and after applying their FASI framework. Especially if you were born into “minority group 2,” which graph seems fairer to you?

Professional ethicists will note there is a slight dip to overall accuracy, as seen in the green “all groups” category. And yet the treatment between the two groups is fairer. That is why the researchers titled their paper “a burden shared is a burdened halved.” 

Practical Applications for the Greater Social Good

“To be honest, I was surprised by how well our framework worked without sacrificing much overall accuracy,” Dean James notes. By selecting cases where human beings should review a criminal history – or credit history or medical charts – AI discrimination that would have significant quality-of-life consequences can be reduced. 

Reducing protected groups’ burden of bias is also a matter of following the laws. For example, in the financial industry, the United States’ Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) makes it “illegal for a company to use a biased algorithm that results in credit discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, age, or because a person receives public assistance,” as the Federal Trade Commission explains on its website. If AI-powered programs fail to correct for AI bias, the company utilizing it can run into trouble with the law. In these cases, human reviews are well worth the extra effort for all stakeholders.

The paper grew from Dean James’ ongoing work as a data scientist when time allows. “Many of us data scientists are worried about bias in AI and we’re trying to improve the output,” he notes. And as new versions of ChatGPT continue to roll out, “new guardrails are being added – some better than others.” 

“I’m optimistic about AI,” Dean James says. “And one thing that makes me optimistic is the fact that AI will learn and learn – there’s no going back. In education, we think a lot about formal training and lifelong learning. But then that learning journey has to end,” Dean James notes. “With AI, it never ends.”

Goizueta faculty apply their expertise and knowledge to solving problems that society—and the world—face. Learn more about faculty research at Goizueta. 

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Honoring the Leaders of Emory and Goizueta

The Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award is presented to faculty members from each of Emory’s four undergraduate schools during commencement every year. “The award celebrates the pinnacle of teaching excellence, honoring faculty who have profoundly impacted their students’ academic journeys,” says Wei Jiang, vice dean for faculty and research and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Finance. The award was established by Emory Williams, a 1932 Emory College alumnus and longtime trustee, to recognize a record of excellence in undergraduate teaching.

Emory College of Arts and Sciences selects three award recipients, drawn from the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Each of the other undergraduate schools—Goizueta Business School, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, and Oxford College—selects one award recipient.

The 2024 honoree from Goizueta Business School is Richard Berlin, associate professor in the practice of organization and management.

The remaining 2024 honorees are:

• – Christopher Eagle, associate teaching professor in the Center for the Study of Human Health, Emory College of Arts and Sciences
• – Sarah Fankhauser, associate professor of biology, Oxford College
• – Gillian Hue, assistant teaching professor, Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology program and senior faculty fellow, Center for Ethics, Emory College of Arts and Sciences
• – Brajesh Samarth, teaching professor, Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, Emory College of Arts and Sciences
• – LisaMarie Wands, associate clinical professor, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing

The Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award

The Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Education recognizes outstanding scholars who excel as teachers within formal and informal educational settings. “This award honors exceptional teaching and recognizes those who guide their students with passion and expertise,” says Alicia Sierra, director of human resources and diversity.

One faculty member in each of Emory’s seven graduate and professional schools receives the award in recognition of the important role of exceptional teaching in graduate and professional education. 

The 2024 honoree from Goizueta Business School is J.B. Kurish, professor in the practice of finance.

The remaining 2024 honorees are:

• – Lauren Christiansen-Lindquist, assistant teaching professor, Department of Epidemiology, Rollins School of Public Health
• – Thomas W. Elliott Jr., professor in the practice of practical theology and Methodist studies, Candler School of Theology
• – George S. Georgiev, associate professor of law, Emory School of Law
• – Adriana P. Hermida, professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory School of Medicine
• – Lori A. Modly, assistant clinical professor, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing
• – David A. Steinhauer, faculty, Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Program in the Graduate Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, and associate professor, School of Medicine Department of Microbiology and Immunology, James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies

The Keough Awards

The Keough Awards for Service are named after Don Keough, the legendary President of The Coca-Cola Company and a symbol of business excellence. This award is the business school’s highest service award and is awarded to one faculty member and one staff member. Each recipient receives a $2,000 award. “The recipient is a long-term contributor to the school and makes a significant impact or contribution to Goizueta,” says Jiang.

Keough Faculty Award

The recipient of the 2024 Keough Faculty Award is Professor Kristy Towry. Towry has served in many roles within Goizueta over many years. She has served as vice dean and significantly impacted the culture and comradery at the school. Towry also served as the chair of the executive committee, where she initiated a governance structure that has enhanced decision-making and evaluation. She served as a mentor to numerous junior faculty and doctoral students. In addition, Towry has shown true leadership by appealing to others’ values in helping and supporting the school.

Towry is a top researcher and has trained numerous influential students. She is a favorite teacher of hundreds of MBA graduates and has made a lasting contribution to the school.

Keough Staff Award

The 2024 Keough staff recipient is Krystle Arnold-Moore, administrative assistant, BBA program office. She has consistently made an impact since she started at Goizueta in the summer of 2019. Faculty and staff across the school quickly noticed her creativity, as she served as an active division student advisory council member and on the committee to build morale after the pandemic. She has helped other units with programmatic support during staff vacancies, all while continuing to grow her expertise in the BBA program office.

Staff Excellence Award: Collaboration

The staff excellence awards recognize staff who have “gone above and beyond in collaborating with others, managing resources, and overall influence at the school,” says Sierra. Each recipient receives a $1,000 award.

The 2024 recipient of the Staff Excellence Award for Collaboration is Brandi Baker, director of registrar services. Baker has worked tirelessly to accommodate Goizueta’s exponential growth as a school. She collaborates with program offices to meet the needs of faculty, students, and administrators and proactively finds solutions that create a more positive learning environment. Baker is in a position where she has to answer to colleagues across numerous academic programs. She is limited in terms of building capacity, and yet she manages to fit all the pieces together. In her work, she maintains a positive attitude and a “get to yes” philosophy.

Staff Excellence Award: Influence

The 2024 recipient of the Staff Excellence Award for Influence is Ron Harris, director of research computing. Harris has been the backbone of faculty research projects for decades. He helps faculty as a thought partner, sharing the work and thinking through choices. This ability requires a deep understanding of the datasets and faculty research challenges. He uses his data manipulation skills to clean data and make it serviceable for research. He also trains the next generation of scholars, our PhD students, in the use of statistical software. It would be fair to claim that the considerable pace of our research is due to Harris’s support.

Staff Excellence Award: Resources

The 2024 recipient of the Staff Excellence Award for Resources is Robin Dittmann, chief business, analytics, and operations officer. Dittmann has been instrumental in helping strengthen school finances. She has worked toward more efficient staffing levels, streamlined processes, and new policies to facilitate efficient resources by faculty and staff. She does so with expertise and transparency that instills confidence in the community.

Department Distinguished Teaching Awards

Emory and Goizueta also award those of exceptional academic excellence in each department. These awards go to individuals who represent their departments with outstanding education and lead the professionals of tomorrow. We would like to recognize them here.

• – BBA Distinguished Educator: Emily Bianchi, Goizueta Foundation term associate professor of organization and management.
• – Evening MBA Distinguished Core Educator: Omar Rodríguez-Vilá, professor in the practice of marketing.
• – Evening MBA Distinguished Elective Educator: Kevin Crowley, associate professor in the practice of finance.
• – Full-Time MBA Distinguished Educator: JB Kurish, professor in the practice of finance.
• – Full-Time MBA Distinguished Educator: Marina Cooley, assistant professor in the practice of marketing.
• – MS in Business Analytics Distinguished Core Educator: Rajiv Garg, associate professor of information systems and operations management.
• – MS in Business Analytics Distinguished Elective Educator: Emma Zhang, associate professor of information systems and operations management.
• – Master of Finance Distinguished Educator: Kevin Crowley, associate professor in the practice of finance.

We are immensely proud to celebrate the accomplishments of our faculty. Through their transformational work, they push industries forward, prepare the next generation of business leaders, and solve today’s toughest business problems.

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For someone who once thought college was out of reach, Jonathan Gomez Martinez 19C 24PhD knows how to take advantage of every opportunity that comes his way.  

Years ago, his older brother was accepted to college and then couldn’t go due to financial constraints. So, Gomez Martinez spent his high school years building on his computer skills and focused on job readiness.

But several events would change the trajectory of his career. He scored well on standardized tests, benefitted from a persistent high school career counselor, and received help from two nonprofits.

This month, Gomez Martinez receives his second degree from Emory University. He graduates from Goizueta Business School with a PhD in Information Systems and Operations Management. This fall, he moves to the West Coast to begin teaching as an assistant professor of data sciences and operations at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.

The irony of his position is not lost on him.

“Despite the fact I thought I wouldn’t go to school, I ended up getting my choice of schools for undergraduate then decided to pursue a PhD. Now, I will be teaching at a school,” he muses.

Early Passion for Computers Sparks Academic Journey

The road to Emory, much less obtaining a doctorate degree, was far from a straight line Gomez Martinez. His interest in computers, however, began early.  

For his eighth birthday, he surprised his parents by asking for a computer. His fascination for making the computer “do stuff,” led him to dive into Excel. It resulted in a side hustle by the time he reached his late middle school and high school years. For a fee, he would perform statistical analysis for clients, selling his services on Craigslist.

“Customers didn’t know how old I was, and there was no Zoom,” he says.

His computer prowess grew in high school. There, he learned programming and SAS, statistical software, which combines programming with data. He and a classmate even presented a poster at the SAS Global Forum, a major conference in the industry.

“Most people were just interested in our age, not the project,” he says of the experience. “In hindsight, it makes sense. Nobody is going to believe our stats.”

Chasing a Dream

Even with his academic success, the goal remained to graduate and get a job. Born in Mexico, Gomez Martinez came to the United States with his mother and siblings in 2000, joining his father. Their move fulfilled one of his father’s dreams. He had become enamored with the American education system, and had been working in the United States already—saving to create a home for the family in North Carolina. While Gomez Martinez’s parents stressed the importance of education, financing college was out of reach.

His high school counselor would guide Gomez Martinez to resources that would open doors for him. These included Golden Door Scholars, which is an organization for undocumented students, and QuestBridge, a nonprofit that connects the nation’s most exceptional, low-income youth with leading colleges and opportunities.

“Between the two organizations, I could apply to schools for free,” he says. “So, I just applied to both programs, and to eight partner schools for each of them. If I got matched with either organization and a partner school, I would get a full ride. At the end of the day, I ended up with my choice of full rides.”

Ultimately, he chose Emory for its innovation and research. A visit to campus during Essence of Emory helped seal the deal. The invitation-only program is for admitted students from underrepresented backgrounds with high academic achievement, just like Gomez Martinez.

Finding His Own Path on the Academic Journey

The transition to college wasn’t easy, especially since his high school focused on work readiness, not college preparedness. But some soul-searching and extra-curricular events would help in his adjustment. Gomez Martinez began to make friends and took on leadership roles in Emory’s Jiu-Jitsu club. He also began dating a girlfriend who supported his study habits, and he immersed himself in a new quantitative theory program.

Originally, Gomez Martinez wanted to focus on computer science. However, the theoretical classes and math weren’t his favorite. Enter Cliff Carrubba, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor and department chair for Quantitative Theory and Methods—or QTM. Carrubba pitched there was going to be a big market for data scientists. He said the new QTM program would equip undergraduate students for jobs that used to require a higher degree.

“I was still thinking workforce preparedness. So, if I could get a master’s degree job after four years, that seemed like a good deal,” he adds.

The program offered Gomez Martinez the perfect balance. It involved a variety of coursework, including bioinformatics, calculus, regression analysis, data structure, and algorithms, along with artificial intelligence, with room to “churn through computer science courses.”  

A Mentor Lights the Way

The search for an internship would introduce him to Goizueta Business School.

My friends in consulting told me I needed to get an internship after my junior year because that opens up the door for full-time jobs.

Jonathan Gomez Martinez

The problem was he didn’t know how to approach the search. Specifically, his computer science colleagues all wanted to work for Google. However, Gomez Martinez had other plans in mind.

With nothing to lose, he turned to the business school and “threw a hail Mary.” He sent a cold email for help to Ramnath Chellappa, professor of information systems and operations management and associate dean and academic director, MS in Business Analytics.

The two would hit it off, and Gomez Martinez would become Chellappa’s teaching assistant for the business analytics program and, later, his research assistant.

At this point, [Professor Chellappa] was already talking to me about getting a PhD, but in my mind, the goal was to get a job.

Jonathan Gomez Martinez

Plus, Gomez Martinez had landed an internship with Equifax, the global data, analytics, and technology company, which had an interesting problem for him to solve. Still, Chellappa advised him to keep an open mind and to take the GRE.

Changing Course

The internship would provide another course correction. Gomez Martinez was tasked to help ensure the company didn’t suffer another security breach.  

“The Equifax internship was really cool for about a month,” Gomez Martinez says.

That’s when I finished the project, and they didn’t have another project. I think they expected it to take me a lot longer.

Jonathan Gomez Martinez

Indeed, a year before, a team of students had attempted to solve the problem but didn’t get far. With nothing more pressing to do than run reports, Gomez Martinez spent the down time studying for the GRE.

When he returned to campus from summer break, Gomez Martinez shared the experience with his mentor. “So, are we doing this?” Chellappa asked.

At that point, I said, ‘If y’all will pay me to stay at school for a while. Sure, why not?’

Jonathan Gomez Martinez

Decision made, he set off for the latest path in his journey.

Notes Gomez Martinez: “When I started the program, I took a research seminar where we would discuss papers with the dean of the program, which at that time was Kathryn Kadous, Schaefer Chaired Professor of Accounting. After submitting our first paper for the semester, her answer was something along the lines of ‘Jonathan, this is a lovely essay, but this is not what research is about.’ I always remember that. It was such a small thing, but she was there to redirect me at just the right time.”

Pursuing Impactful Work

Over the years, several faculty members at Goizuteta helped him refine his research and hone in on an area of focus. In addition to Chellappa, Gomez Martinez lists Anand Swaminathan, Roberto C. Goizueta Chair of Organization & Management as instrumental in this process. “I feel the two of them have co-parented me into learning what research is,” he adds.

Currently, he is working with Emma Zhang, associate professor of information systems and operations management, “who is helping me with statistical methods for modeling how users interact online across multiple social media platforms,” he says.

Gomez Martinez wants his work to have impact. His research examines the unintended consequences of digital platform strategy. In addition, he is exploring the social cost of AI-based automation, Microsoft’s release strategy, Apple’s privacy policy, and the efficacy of content moderation.

Examples of his work include a paper with Chellappa entitled “Content Moderation and AI: Impact on Minority Communities,” which explores the use of AI in social media. Specifically, the research examines how X (formerly Twitter), could disadvantage LGBTQ+ users, or other groups, by automatically censoring certain words or phrases that are deemed bias, but may, in fact, be ways in which a particular group interacts with each other. A possible result, Gomez Martinez shared in an Emory Business article, is that some voices might not be truly heard or “…You start reinforcing biases because you are using a time-saving technology that is not equipped yet to understand the complexity and nuance of human interaction.”

In addition, his research project with Chellappa entitled “Platform Policy Changes: Impact of Auto Moderation on Minority Community Rights,” has received two awards. The work received first place in the 2023 INFORMS DEI Best Student Paper Award competition and runner-up for the Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE) 2023 Best Student Paper Award.

Ultimately, Gomez Martinez notes, “I would like to either start working directly with platforms to see how their methods, in particular, can be readjusted or work with government entities in order to determine what a path forward should look like in determining legal liability and [other issues surrounding] platforms and AI.”

For now, he plans to spend the months between graduation and starting his new role at USC pursuing his research.

“I look forward to continuing to enjoy the remainder of my doctoral program and pushing out ongoing research in preparation for my new role in Los Angeles.”

The future of business education is here, and it’s bold. Goizueta has transformed the traditional classroom into a dynamic digital ecosystem with virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), and holographic capabilities. Learn more about innovation at Goizueta here.

Interested in pursuing a business degree? Learn more about the unique programs Goizueta has to offer.

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