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.

“South Africa is a really interesting place to think about drug discovery because they have the most magnificent floral kingdom there,” explains Kristy Towry, John M. & Lucy Cook Chaired Professor of Accounting.

This potential for innovation was what launched the relationship between Emory University faculty and South Africa in 2008. Emory School of Medicine professor Dennis Liotta originally pulled together the partnership, though it has evolved over the decades. Goizueta faculty still continue to travel to South Africa and teach business skills to budding medical entrepreneurs. Now, though, the relationship has expanded to include MBA students, highlighting the importance of this Goizueta global initiative.  

Biomedical Background

Towry was in a classroom one summer, when Michael Sacks popped his head in and asked if she wanted to go teach in South Africa later that year.

It was an immediate yes from Towry—after she checked her calendar.

“Going to Africa was a lifelong dream of mine,” she says.

In alignment with Goizueta’s emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation, the faculty teach biomedical and medical entrepreneurs business basics. It’s a kind of crash course on how to launch a business idea and seek financial backing.

These individuals bring their ideas, medical devices, drug discoveries and cures to a competition. As part of the process, semi-finalists have the opportunity to participate in this weeklong executive education. They learn how to develop a business plan, the importance of team composition, and how to meet potential funders.

“The enthusiasm of the participants is absolutely contagious,” says Sacks, professor in the practice of organization and management, professor of sociology (by courtesy), and faculty director of Woodruff Leadership Academy.

Participating in our program is a huge deal to them, and they are completely invested in learning and applying what we teach. It’s incredible to see such quick learning of complex and challenging material.

Michael Sacks

In addition to Towry and Sacks, Steve Walton, professor in the practice of information systems and operations management, was another core faculty member who collaborated on the experience. More recently, Nikki Graves, associate professor in the practice of organization and management, and Sandy Jap have traveled across the globe to join.

Jap, Sarah Beth Brown Professor of Marketing, has taken Evening MBA students to Cape Town as part of Goizueta’s Global Experience Modules (or GEMs). While there, the group meet with entrepreneurs. Jap found their perspectives fascinating. So, when Towry extended the invite, Jap signed on immediately.

“I thought it would be a great opportunity to complement my previous learnings about what it means to try to start a company in South Africa,” shares Jap.

Towry says every trip—and all the individuals she meets—inspire her.

As a business professor, I don’t often get to feel like what I do saves lives. But that is what happens in this program. We change the trajectories of the businesses we touch, many of which have life-saving potential.

Kristy Towry

“These are entrepreneurs, and yes, they want to make money. But across the board, their main inspiration is to change the world and improve and save the lives of Africans,” says Towry.

Goizueta’s Global Impact

Though things have looked a little different since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Goizueta faculty have interacted with hundreds of teams throughout the years. The competition is also now housed under The Innovation Hub, an agency of the Gauteng Province in South Africa.

“We greatly value the partnership with Emory’s Goizueta Business School through the executive education training in the Gauteng Accelerator Programme Innovation Competition,” shares Phuti Chelopo-Mgobozi, acting senior manager of bio-innovation.

We have created a platform that transcends borders, connecting local entrepreneurs with top-tier business teachers and mentors.

Phuti Chelopo-Mgobozi

“Goizueta is a strategic partner to The Innovation Hub due to its commitment to fostering innovation and entrepreneurship through the holistic and interactive teaching approach,” says Chelopo-Mgobozi. “This brings fresh perspectives and expertise to our entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

The scope of the relationship continues to evolve and expand. Now, Goizueta MBA students act as judges in a virtual Shark Tank style competition for these entrepreneurs. This all takes place about a month after the weeklong executive education course.

In addition, MBA students make the trek to South Africa as part of Global Experiential Modules in the spring. There, they meet with the Innovation Hub leadership as well as the competition participants and winners.

Many South African entrepreneurs worked with Towry, Sacks, and Walton in previous years. The Goizueta MBA students get the chance to see how that education has impacted their entrepreneurial journey—how Goizueta’s partnership has impacted these individuals’ lives.

As Goizueta looks to the future of this relationship, it’s one that’s robust, comprehensive, and ever-evolving.

“We are utilizing these relationships as opportunities to say ‘Are there ways for us to connect our faculty with other researchers, for co-authoring, or for collaborative research grants?’” says Megha Madan, senior associate director of Goizueta Global Strategy and Initiatives.

Keeping these relationships really shows the depth that Goizueta has and the impact on our students, staff, and faculty as global citizens.

Megha Madan

“We are investing in Emory’s commitment to using knowledge to improve human well-being and a global perspective on the human condition.”

Goizueta’s global strategy is designed to equip students to meet the opportunities and challenges of an increasingly interconnected world, empower faculty to lead and influence global scholarship and research, and position Goizueta as a school known for its global impact. Learn more here.

The post Students and Faculty Empower Biomedical Entrepreneurs in South Africa appeared first on EmoryBusiness.com.

“The Goizueta faculty comprises an outstanding community of accomplished scholars, educators, and leaders,” says Wei Jiang, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Finance, “They continually push the boundaries of knowledge and best practices.”

Join us in celebrating these faculty members for their recent honors and accolades:

Faculty Books

Gareth James, John H. Harland Dean and professor of information systems and operations Management

An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in Python, Springer, July 2023

Jagdish Sheth, Charles H. Kellstadt Chaired Professor of Marketing

Customer Centric Support Services In The Digital Age: The Next Frontier Of Competitive Advantage, Palgrave Macmillan, Decemeber 2023

Wesley Longhofer, Goizueta Foundation Term Associate Professor of Organization & Management and executive academic director of the Business & Society Institute

Social Theory Re-Wired (3rd edition), Routledge, June 2023

Research and Teaching Awards

Sandy Jap, Sarah Beth Brown Professor of Marketing, is a fellow for the American Marketing Association (AMA) Fellow as of 2023. The AMA gives this distinction to members who have who have made significant contributions to the research, theory, and practice of marketing, and/or to the service and activities of the AMA over a prolonged period of time.

Jap is also the 2023 Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management James M. Comer Award (2023) runner up for best contribution to Selling and Sales Management Theory, received for The Big Open Spaces in Sales Negotiation Research, with Stefanie L. Boyer.

Sergio Garate, assistant professor in the practice of finance and director of the Goizueta Real Estate Initiative, won the Jonathan Welch Award for best case study manuscript at the 2023 North American Case Research Association meeting.           

Panagiotis Adamopoulos, assistant professor of information system and operations management, won the 2023 Goizueta Business School Alumni Award for Excellence in Research. Adamopoulos also won the 2023 Emory University Goizueta Business School Research Grant.

Prasanna Parasurama, assistant professor of information system and operations management, was the 2023 runner up for the Best Responsible Research Award from the Academy of Management OMT.

Melissa Williams, associate professor of organization and management, won the 2023 Goizueta Business School Holland Award for Excellence in Research, the school’s research award at the associate professor level.

Allison Burdette, professor in the practice of business law, was awarded Poets and Quants Best Undergraduate Business School Professors Award.

Wei Jiang, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Finance, was elected to become the Vice President of American Finance Association (AFA), the premier association for academic finance. She will become President of AFA in 2026.

Community Service

Jesse Bockstedt, senior associate dean for graduate programs and professor of information systems and operations management, joined the board of directors for Georgia Organics Board of Directors in February 2023. He advises the CEO of the nonprofit Georgia Organics and serves on the Finance and Operations committee.

Bockstedt also joined the board of directors for Atlanta Technology Angels in January 2023. In this role, he leads and manages Atlanta Technology Angels with specific committee responsibilities for member education.

Jeffrey Byrne, assistant professor in the practice of accounting and director of master of professional accounting, joined the Board of Advisors for BidBee, LLC in April 2023.               

Peter Roberts, professor of organization and management and academic director of Specialty Coffee Programs in the Business & Society Institute, co-Founded the Research Group for Sustainable and Equitable Specialty Coffee Markets in March 2023. The group is a network of 30+ researchers from more than 25 universities and other organizations.

Tonya Smalls, assistant professor in the practice of accounting has joined the advisory board of Make-A-Wish Georgia as of May 2023.

Andrea Dittmann, Assistant Professor of Organization & Management, was named Co-Director of Research of New Blue in fall of 2023. In this role, she will be leading and cultivating collaborations between researchers and law enforcement fellows aimed at organizational reform and policy change to improve community trust.

Goizueta Business School is proud to present the accomplishments of these and other faculty members within our institution. To learn more about the teaching, specialized research, and core interests of each faculty member, check out our faculty profiles and their related publications. 

The post Goizueta Faculty Shine Bright with Latest Achievements appeared first on EmoryBusiness.com.

As customers do more and more of their shopping online, they are turning in droves to the likes of Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google Reviews to seek out opinions, recommendations, and feedback from other users before pushing through the final part of the sales funnel. As a result, these third-party review sites have experienced exponential growth. But there’s a caveat: and it’s trust.

The success of Yelp and its competitors is wholly contingent on how trustworthy their users perceive them to be; on the transparency and authenticity of the content published and the sources of that content. In an era of disinformation with fake reviews and AI mass-generated content precipitously on the rise, securing—and keeping—user trust is paramount.

The Five Keys to Fighting Fakery

Goizueta Business School’s Sandy Jap has some suggestions. Together with colleagues Ben Beck of Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Business and Stefan Wuyts of Penn State’s Smeal College of Business, Jap, who is the Sarah Beth Brown Professor of Marketing, put together a series of studies to test the kinds of measures and mechanisms that platforms can deploy to win user confidence. And it turns out there’s one tactic that works more effectively than any other: actively monitoring the authenticity of user reviews. That and being open and transparent about doing so.

Jap and her colleagues scoured the latest research and data on marketing, governance, and identity disclosure to pinpoint the mechanisms that best mitigate online fakery, while simultaneously building trust among platform users. They identified five.

“We worked through the literature and were able to whittle these down to five core practices that are robustly effective at building trust,” says Jap. “They are monitoring, exposure, community building, status endowment and identity disclosure. Doing these five things can signal to your users that you are committed to being a guardian of their trust, so to speak.”

Monitoring or evaluating reviews for their authenticity and exposing firms that pay for and propagate fake content are mechanisms directed at the rogue firms that spread fakery and misinformation, explains Jap. Meanwhile community building and status endowment focus on reviewers.

Community building is about enabling authentic, transparent interactions between consumers and reviewers. An example of this might be allowing consumers to ask questions and reviewers to respond directly.

Sandy Jap

“Status endowment is where a platform verifies and acknowledges the credibility or helpfulness of a reviewer in some way. Yelp and others use things like badges or reviewer ratings which are earned over time and which make it hard for fake reviewers to game their systems,” says Jap.

Identity disclosure is the practice of having reviewers provide personal information—their name, picture, or location, for instance—before they can post content. And while this approach can keep fabrication and false profiles in check, it also raises certain tradeoffs, says Jap.

“Anonymity online has long been understood as something of an un-inhibitor—a factor that enables users to speak more freely and openly. It can be democratizing in the sense that it removes or lessens prejudice and bias around things like race, social class, or physical appearance,” she says. “Of course, having people share personal data on your platform can also open up a can of worms around privacy and identity theft which are major considerations; so there’s a balancing act needed with this.”

To test the efficacy of all five trust building policies, including identity disclosure, Jap and her colleagues ran a series of experiments and studies. They invited volunteers to rate how the presence or absence of these mechanisms impacted the trustworthiness of a platform. One study saw them parse things like domain authority and traffic across 25 online review sites against how many (or few) of the five mechanisms each deployed. Elsewhere, the team used surveys to assess how users ranked the different mechanisms in terms of platform trust, above and beyond other factors such as the quantity of reviews published say, or the expertise of different reviewers.

The Bottom Line: Bust Bogus Reviews

After crunching the data, Jap and her co-authors found that while all five trust-building mechanisms were valued and important to platform users, the practice of monitoring for fake reviews and reviewers—and broadcasting the fact clearly—was by far the most effective.

“Doing all of these five things—monitoring, exposing, community building, status endowment and ID disclosure—are important if you want to earn and keep the trust of your users,” says Jap. “We found that the more of these mechanisms that platforms incorporate, the better their domain authority, Alexa site ranking, backlinks, and organic site traffic.”

Based on our findings, monitoring your content and communicating that you’re doing this is by far the most powerful cue that you are trustworthy. So that’s where we’d say platforms might want to focus their spend.

Sandy Jap

Many of the biggest review platforms have already taken note of these insights. Yelp recently shared a post to its official blog welcoming the finding that of the 25 sites analyzed in Jap’s study, theirs is one of two platforms that actively implement all five mechanisms.

“After examining 25 review platforms, the study found that Yelp is one of two platforms that applies all five mechanisms and as the research states, has become a guardian of trust for review information.”

Meanwhile, Jap stresses that these findings should be relevant to any business that is focused on “combating online review fakery.”

“All businesses today face the challenge of managing their word-of-mouth reputation. Any firm interested in sharing and leveraging points of view around its products or services, be it a small online retail store or an Amazon, is going to want to go the distance—and be seen to do so—in going to war on fakery and disinformation.”

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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Minority Board Directors Held Back by Glass Ceiling and “Myopic” Biases

Diversity remains a troubling issue in the upper echelons of U.S. business today. A stunning 81 percent of board members in top firms are white and male, according to the Standard & Poor 500 Index. So what prevents women and minority directors making it to the top? Goizueta’s Grace Pownall, professor and area coordinator of accounting,and Justin Short, assistant professor of accounting, together with Zawadi Lemayian of Washington University parsed 12 years of data on gender, ethnicity, and compensation to get insight into who holds power in U.S. board rooms. In Behavioral and Experimental Finance, research results point to two critical roadblocks that continue to stymie the career trajectory of aspiring Black, female, and minority directors: the glass ceiling effect that reduces the talent pool; and what Short et. al. call “myopic” bias entrenched in corporate America.

“The glass ceiling is a bottleneck for diverse talent,” says Short. “But we also see minority directors fail to secure promotions once they’re on the board. We conjecture that this is down to biased or myopic thinking on the part of chairs and peers.” Leaders need to be cognizant of the cut-off points that tie to ethnicity and gender in the U.S. and elsewhere, say the researchers; not least of all because of risk to innovation. “Without diversity, any organization risks deferring to group think, and sourcing creativity and ideas from the same, small pool of shared experience,” says Short. “There’s still work to be done because diversity at top levels of American business should be commonplace.”

B2B Firms Need to Smarten Up before Using AI in Procurement

Procurement, the process of buying in goods, products or services from external suppliers, is critical in the B2B market. But it’s costly, labor-intensive, and time-consuming. To speed and drive efficiencies in supply chain management, procurement managers are turning to artificial intelligence (AI). On the one hand, AI can automate the process of obtaining pricing quotes using tools like AI Assist and chat boxes. Then there’s the “smart control” that AI can leverage to identify the best potential suppliers via algorithms that collect and analyze market information.  Cut-and-dried benefits then for decision-makers? Not quite, says Goizueta’s Ruomeng Cui, assistant professor of Information Systems and Operations Management of research to appear in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. Because unless your AI system is fitted with the smart control, you run the risk of getting higher price quotes from suppliers than you would if you used human procurement purchasers. And it’s down to how suppliers interact with automated chatbots. Together with colleagues from Rutgers University and Tianjin University, Cui ran a large-scale field experiment using China’s Alibaba trading platform and integrated chat program, Aliwangwang. What they found is that suppliers essentially “discriminate” against chatbot buyers when it comes to quoting prices. “Suppliers see chatbots as lacking expertise around their products,” says Cui. “The fact they don’t have to lower prices to build professional relationships with chatbot buyers means they tend to quote higher than they would otherwise.” This effect is mitigated, however, when buyers signal to suppliers that they also use the smart control: an AI-powered recommendation system. Caveat emptor, say Cui and her co-authors: by all means use AI in your procurement processes, just be smart about it. 

Do Multinationals Enjoy an IT Advantage in Emerging Markets?

We know that digital technology helps firms compete globally. But does IT give foreign firms the edge over local businesses for exploiting opportunities in emerging markets? Yes and no, says Goizueta George S. Craft Professor in Information Systems & Operations Management Benn Konsynski, and his co-authors. Their latest paper in Journal of Management Information Systems looks at data from a large sample of local and international businesses operating in India and reveals two key insights. First, they find that foreign players using IT to boost organizational capabilities do tend to have the advantage over incumbents when it comes to partnering with other companies – a key factor in their ability to scale operations in emerging markets. However, in areas like marketing and customer services, technology gives local firms the edge over foreign competitors, likely because of superior knowledge and understanding of local markets. Konsynski and colleagues shed authoritative new light on two critical areas: how both context and contingency shape outcomes for firms leveraging digital technologies to compete; and the perhaps unforeseen challenges that await newcomers looking to expand operations in emerging markets, which remain an attractive opportunity for international companies.

If PPP Relief is so Attractive, why are so few Small Firms Taking it up?

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), part of the U.S. Government’s CARES Act, is a relief package that offers highly subsidized financing to small businesses. With anescalating value, PPP reaches deep into the pockets of Federal Reserve with the aim of helping corporate America weather the economic contraction and job losses due to the pandemic. Yet, despite the “positive shock” it represents to struggling firms, PPP uptake has been far from universal. Not only that, but a significant proportion of firms applying for PPP actually return them to the government without using them. So what’s going on? It has to do with the indirect costs imposed on borrowers, says Goizueta’s Tetyana Balyuk, assistant professor of finance, in the National Bureau of Economic Research: Working Paper. She and colleagues from Johns Hopkins Carey and Fuqua School of Business looked at publicly listed firms that applied for PPP funds using databases maintained by the Securities and Exchange Commission. “These firms are worried about ex-post audits and investigations into recipients of these PPP funds, which are conducted by the government. Specifically they’re worried about subjectivity of these types of audits, and the broad powers the government has to pursue litigation.” The solution to this, she says, is to focus on the objective standards for PPP eligibility, and similarly objective standards for the conduct of ex-post audits. “Among other measures, policy-makers might want to look at delineating safe harbors to circumscribe litigation, which has been a standard practice in securities law since the 1930s.”

What are the Costs – and Opportunities – to Retailers in Returned Merchandise?

In 2018, a staggering 10% of all retail sales –around $369 billion – were returned to the original seller. For retailers, this is vastly challenging. First there’s figuring out how to respond; then there’s the huge financial loss from returned stock. And then there’s simply trying to work out what to do with unwanted merchandise and how to absorb it back into the inventory. But is there an opportunity here for retailers, too? Goizueta’s Ryan Hamilton, associate professor of marketing, and Sandy D. Jap, Sarah Beth Brown professor of marketing,believe so. Together with Wharton Professor and former dean of Goizueta Business School, Thomas S. Robertson, they’ve published their research in Journal of Retailing.

The researchers dive into literature surrounding the returns market – a market so valuable it is “ripe for more research” – and found that returns policies can build reputation, drive customer loyalty, and secure competitive advantage. “Consumers today increasingly expect to be able to return goods easily,” says Jap, “and it’s a burden for retailers. But also an opportunity to deliver a customer experience that drives brand loyalty.” For those retailers, returns provide the chance to exchange goods, or even cross or upsell to customers who return to stores or sites to bring back original purchases. The trick, says Jap, is to “get it right.”An easy returns policy may build erputation for great customer service; too lax a policy and you might end up “training” customers to make returns, she says. There’s the risk to reputation, too, in how retailers absorb or dispose of returned goods: are their policies sustainable and environmentally friendly? More to explore in the potential trade-offs here, says Jap, and she and her co-authors call for more research into this evolving stage in the purchase journey.

Achievement? It’s All in the Eye of the Beholder

There is a well-documented gap in achievement between U.S. social classes  that hurts the perception of, standing, and prospects for people from lower-class, high-school educated backgrounds, vis a vis their higher-class counterparts with college degrees. One way of attenuating this gap might be to rethink the way society measures achievement, says Goizueta Assistant Professor of Organization and Management, Andrea Dittmann. Instead of assessing people’s skills and aptitudes through the lens of individual achievement, might it not be just as helpful to measure ability based on how well people work together, as a part of a team? Together with Nicole Stephens of Kellogg and USC Marshall’s Sarah Townsend, Dittman ran four studies of outcomes for students working alone or in groups. The work published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology portrayed consistent results: when working individually, higher-class students are better able to showcase their strengths. But in groups, this advantage disappears. In fact, when people from lower-class contexts work in teams, they demonstrate unique strengths that can set them apart from more privileged counterparts. Dittman and co-authors call for gateway institutions – institutes of higher education and workplaces – to integrate these findings into practices and procedures that reflect that one style of achievement is not superior to the other, but simply different.

Is There a Case for Sharing Less Information in Financial Statements?

There’s broad consensus in the world of finance. Disaggregation – the practice of breaking down different components or sources of earnings in a financial statement – is good. After all, for investors looking to predict a company’s earnings from one year to the next, all information is good information, right? Not necessarily, says Goizueta Professor of Finance, Teri Yohn; it all depends on what type of information is being shared. Together with colleagues from Colorado, Indiana, and OSU, Yohn hypothesized that not all disaggregated components in earnings statements are heterogeneous. Not all information might be specific to one year, and that’s problematic. “Investors assume that disaggregation highlights one-off specificities that impact earnings – things like restructuring costs– but won’t have a de facto impact on the future earnings of a company,” says Yohn. However, her research, published in The Journal of Accounting Studies, shows that disaggregation also trawls up homogeneous things – the same components that impact earnings year over year. This can lead to confusion on the part of investors, and actual mistakes in forecasting future earnings. “Our paper has two clear takeaways,” Yohn says “For investors: don’t assume that disaggregation only highlights the one-offs in earnings specific to a given timeframe.” For regulators and standard-setters who have pushed for more disaggregation in recent years, Yohn and her co-authors urge deeper reflection about what type of disaggregation should be included in financial statements, or not.

Learn more about our Goizueta Business School faculty, their research, specialties, and areas of interest. #GoizuetaKnows

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Sustainability and corporate social responsibility are crucial for brands. Consumers and stakeholders expect it, and brands must deliver it.

What exactly is socially responsible corporate behavior? Karen Anne Wallach 07MBA 21PhD believes it is an authentic commitment on the part of corporations to reduce their negative impact on the world—to function more sustainably—while also being profitable and successful. The key to helping reach that goal, she contends, lies in her research.

Wallach’s dissertation “adds novel insights to the academic literature and proposes actionable recommendations for marketers, with the hope that products that better serve society and our planet will flourish,” she explains. “My results aim to provide evidence to better understand consumer sentiments that help overcome challenges that brands may encounter with sustainability efforts.”

“Some students might question if the sole responsibility of business is making money,” but Wallach’s findings show consumers expect more. “This is where the magic of research comes into play. Numbers and data prove my point – consumers expect brands to be more than focused on profits, to behave responsibly with meaningful commitments and transparent communications.”

Because brands are so recognizable and concrete to students today- the golden arches, for example—it is the place where she tries to make the “real world relevant to what’s happening in academia.” Wallach aims to conduct research that backs up and supports these ideas, or as she describes it, research that “finds ways to industrialize less harmfully.” That sweet spot lies at the intersection of brands and sustainability.

In hindsight it is easy to see Wallach’s evolution, a series of steps toward a comprehensive theoretical position that encompasses real-world solutions, along with a moral outlook, to address business problems that desperately need to be solved. “Corporations don’t automatically eschew responsibility for their actions by taking advantage of customers and abusing the public trust,” she says. “I truly believe that businesses can benefit people, and my research involves matching people to brands along with helping corporations find the right consumers for their products and services.”  

Shaping a Future from Goizueta MBA to Goizueta PhD

One Goizueta class where reality meets the theoretical is the Goizueta Marketing Strategy Competition (MSC) in which a specific class is appointed a client – an actual company, with a problem to solve. Classes compete to determine who best solved the problem at hand. For students, this competition provides real experience in the real business world. For Wallach, the class was a highlight of her own MBA program, bringing abstract thinking to bear on concrete issues.

“I love research,” says Wallach. The fifth year PhD candidate at Goizueta Business School also loves teaching and seeing how her classes can enlighten students, much as one of her mentors, Jag Sheth did for her. By helping Wallach discover the possibilities of socially responsible business practices, “He literally changed my life,” she says. She feels lucky to have been surrounded by so many brilliant minds at Goizueta – professors like Sandy Jap and Wes Longhofer. “This experience has evolved my thinking on how business, education and society can work together.” 

Back in the academic world after more than a decade in corporate environments, Wallach loves research and teaching. As a marketing guru, she worked for several Fortune 500 companies in brand management and product development, but found the role not quite as fulfilling as she’d hoped. For Wallach, “Just climbing titles and salary ladders wasn’t the way,” she says. The result was a pivot in her path that would provide more personal satisfaction. Already equipped with an MBA from Goizueta, she returned to her alma mater to earn her PhD. When she graduates in May, she will embark on a tenure-track role at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Wallach’s teaching philosophy and research boil down to one central theme that defines her career goals. As she puts it, “I want to make a difference in the world.”

Learn more about The Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Institute, newly formed to reimagine business to solve society’s biggest problems.

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In December 2020, Linne Fulcher, vice president, customer strategy, science and journeys at Walmart U.S., published a blog post that outlined Walmart’s new return policy. Dubbed “Carrier Pickup by FedEx,” the service was just in time for the holidays, free, and “here to stay,” Fulcher wrote. He described the policy as “an incredibly convenient way to make that unwanted gift ‘magically’ disappear,” whether customers bought items in a store, online, or from a third party vendor. “We want the returns experience to be easy, safe and seamless,” he added.

Returns are big business. According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), U.S. consumers returned an estimated $428 billion worth of merchandise last year—approximately 10.6 percent of total U.S. retail sales. The numbers for ecommerce are even more startling: online shopping accounted for roughly $565 billion of 2020 retail sales, of which $102 billion in merchandise—about 18 percent—was returned. However, retail advisory firm Optoro noted in 2019 that of 117 top retailers, not even a third of them quantify the full cost of returns.

Even before the pandemic hit, Sandy Jap, Sarah Beth Brown professor in marketing, Ryan Hamilton, associate professor of marketing, and former Goizueta Business School dean, Tom Robertson, were perplexed at how little academic research existed regarding returns. “Instead of viewing returns as a nuisance and an added cost, they are an opportunity to engage with customers and build brand loyalty,” explained Robertson, currently the Joshua J. Harris professor and professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, academic director, Jay H. Baker Retailing Center at Wharton, and the executive director of the Wharton-INSEAD Alliance. “Returns are part and parcel of the new retail landscape. This has been exacerbated by the strong uptick in online.”

To help retailers identify opportunities, Jap, Hamilton and Robertson wrote “Many (Un)happy Returns? The Changing Nature of Retail Product Returns and Future Research Directions,” published in Journal of Retailing last year. The article is essentially a researcher’s road map for exploring this “strategically important area,” said Jap.

Some retailers, such as Warby Parker and Stitch Fix, have built returns into their business models. Others, like Zappos and Nordstrom, have made consumer-generated returns easy, assuming that doing so engenders brand loyalty and repeat business. Yet most retailers seem “to lack a coherent philosophy” on returns and “appear not to have built return rates into their business models at all,” the trio state in their paper.

“There are so many interesting and important questions to be answered around product returns,” said Hamilton. “Important as returns are, the academic marketing research has barely scratched the surface.”

“Many (Un)happy Returns” highlights five specific areas where advancements in theory and practice would provide opportunity for greater understanding:

1. How product returns transform the customer journey
2. The “dark side” of returns—exploring the gray area between justified returns and outright fraud
3. The effects of returns on traditional retailer supply chains
4. Customer response to easy product returns and practices
5. The effect of retailers’ product return practices on their reputation

“These questions represent a range of important directions for assembling a body of work on retailer-initiated and customer-initiated return behaviors and processes,” they write. “Ultimately, these might serve to improve the performance of return forecasting models, illuminate optimal go-to-market strategies and distribution processes in the evolving, technology-oriented marketplace that characterizes retailing today.”

Returns and the customer journey

According to eMarketer, 70 percent of consumers make purchase decisions based on a retailer’s return policies. Consumers tend to use returns strategically, especially online, where they often buy multiple sizes or styles with the expectation that they’ll keep only a portion of what they ordered and return the rest. “Too often, product returns are treated strictly as an operations problem,” Hamilton explained. “But they are increasingly an integral part of the customer journey and something that marketers need to account for in their business model.”

Jap would like to see retailers “rethink the purchase process from the user’s point of view,” she said. With the use of technology and data, returns can be a source of information gathering, she explained. Does the return lead to an exchange and to a happy customer? Does the customer abandon the retailer and start a journey with another one?

The dark side of returns

According to the NRF, nearly six percent of total returns in 2020 were fraudulent. Jap, Hamilton and Robertson admit that there is a needle to thread when deciphering what is and isn’t a fraudulent return. They contend that regarding returns, retailers will likely need to choose between a strict approach (perhaps not granting returns to those who have genuine claims) or a lenient one (possibly granting returns to those who do not warrant them) based on their overall customer strategy.

Research in this area could help retailers identify conditions that minimize rewarding fraudulent returns or punishing legitimate ones. Research would also help retailers develop customer “risk scores” based on return behavior. Some retailers, like Amazon, already analyze customer data to weed out excessive returners.

Returns and supply chain

“Retailers aren’t used to processing a lot of returns and they don’t necessarily have good or effective processes to handle them,” explained Jap. Returned items need to be inspected, sorted, restocked, or disposed of, all factors that increase operational costs. “Customers now expect generous returns policies, but unless businesses plan well, the way they handle those returns can eat up all the profit they make on sales—and more,” added Hamilton.

“Research is needed on the optimal resolution and handling of risk allocation, inventory management, and product handling practices that arise from increased returns at retail,” the authors write.

Are we training consumers to return?

While it’s likely true that ease of customer returns leads to future sales and brand loyalty, “it is also true that easy customer returns almost certainly encourage more returns,” the authors state in their paper. Companies with easy return policies are effectively training shoppers to expect similar policies from other retailers. “Research could investigate the factors that speed or inhibit the changing of customer returns behavior,” Jap, Hamilton and Robertston write. “What are the best ways for a retailer in a return-friendly marketplace to reduce returns without damaging the brand or evoking customer backlash?”

The effects of return policies on a retailer’s brand.

Each year, an estimated 5 billion pounds of landfill waste is attributed to returns that can’t be restocked or sold to off-price outlets. Prestige brands such as Burberry, whose customers expect exclusivity and quality, have come under fire for destroying millions of dollars of returned and/or unsold apparel. “From this perspective, return policies may be an important part of brand image management,” the professors note in their article. They suggest that research would help retailers determine how best to balance “competing image concerns.”

Fulcher addressed the issue of items “going to waste,” in her blog post to customers. Last year, through its various recycling programs, Walmart was able to recycle enough of its returned products to produce approximately 1.9 million pounds of plastic resin that the retailer will use to manufacture more than 9.2 million products. “These are all things retailers should think about,” said Jap. “They are opportunities, not problems.”

The new normal and a call to action

“Enlightened retailers are recognizing that returns are a key component of their business model,” explained Robertson. Academic research would help retailers tailor insightful return policies that help their bottomline and engage customers. “Customer expectations, norms, and behavior have shifted dramatically in a short period of time,” the authors write. “The dynamism of retailer innovations in handling customer returns has not—yet—been matched by academic research as to the questions these new practices have raised.”

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The reason companies such as Twitter are moving to distributed workforces isn’t to combat future viral outbreaks. It’s because top talent doesn’t always live within commuting distance of a company’s headquarters. And even when the majority of a company’s workforce is tethered to a physical office, most of them don’t want to be there every day. According to “The Remote Work Report,” published by Zapier.com in November 2019, “95 percent of U.S. knowledge workers want to work remotely and 74 percent would be willing to quit a job to do so.” And nearly 60 percent of knowledge workers (those employees whose main capital is information and the flow of information) say that working remotely is “one of the perks they’d most prefer to be offered” by an employer—ranking well above extras like daily free lunch or unlimited vacation time.

That said, companies wouldn’t be able to embrace remote workers without recent innovations in technology that make a remote workforce efficient and effective. From fast and consistent connectivity to improvements in webinar applications such as WebEx and Zoom, the quality of virtual communications has created a viable alternative to travel and led to changes in organizational practices and processes. This, in turn, has led to an increase in virtual employment structures, including the ability to create well-functioning virtual teams of “distributed expertise” that aren’t co-located, explained Anandhi Bharadwaj, vice dean for faculty and research, Goizueta Endowed Chair in Electronic Commerce and professor of information systems & operations management.

But integrating a remote workforce is not without challenges. The move from physically co-located environments to virtual environments can exacerbate or increase conflict. That’s because it’s easier to personalize disagreements when coworkers lack context or can’t interpret the body language of the person they’re communicating with. “Seeing someone’s expression, mannerisms and gestures is a large part of the human aspect that upholds a team’s efforts,” said Sandy Jap, Sarah Beth Brown Professor in Marketing. “It really does make a difference.”

Jap believes the best way to manage potential issues and conflicts is to share expectations regarding the team and the project up front. Sometimes just answering the simple questions of how often, when and how a virtual team will interact can get the team off on the right foot. “Research shows that not setting real, simple expectations can be the downfall,” Jap noted. “People’s assumptions about what those expectations can be are particularly faulty.”

Deconstructing conflict

When conflict does arise, Bharadwaj suggests ascertaining whether the conflict is “task related or personality related. Is it a poor choice of technology or a poor use of that technology?” she said. “You can’t just take the same process and have it work in tech-mediated environments.” If the technology isn’t set up to build team trust, it can be much harder to manage team trust, she added. For example, if some team members are physically gathered in a conference room in one place and other individual team members are participating in the meeting via satellite, the satellite-center employees may not see or understand everything that’s going on in the conference room. This can lead to misunderstanding and conflict. “It takes time to work through these issues to know how to use the technologies effectively from a cost perspective and to feel that the work is productive,” explained Bharadwaj. “Case studies document that this impacts team quality and performance.”

When various groups come together to form a larger virtual team, it’s not uncommon for some members of the team to identify more with their subgroup than with the formal group—especially if team members are located in different cities and/or countries. “Sometimes subgroups can work against each other rather than with each other for the good of the team,” said Jill Perry-Smith, Goizueta Foundation Term Professor of Organization & Management. In such cases, it’s important for the team leader to “create a systematic way of building relationships that brings the team together in a psychological way.”

The ability to identify potential problems within a team is extremely important, and those who lead virtual teams need to act as “social sensitivity managers,” said Perry-Smith. Can the team leader read the people on the team? Can he or she identify those people on the team who aren’t forthcoming about how they’re feeling? When the potential for subgroups to sabotage the formal group exists, Perry-Smith finds it helpful to create space for team members to interact face-to-face and/or have team members from different subgroups work together to solve a particular issue.

It’s also important to have a process for handling conflicts when they do arise. “At what point do we accelerate to another level or have people from outside the team get pulled into this?” asked Jap. Perry-Smith suggested establishing something akin to the
“elephant in the room” process at Kayak.com. At the travel website’s Massachusetts headquarters, there is a dedicated conference room (outfitted with a large, stuffed animal elephant) where employees go to discuss disagreements and work through conflict. “It’s critical to have a process for team members to address problems quickly and preferably one-on-one,” said Perry-Smith. A process that encourages them “to deal with the elephant in the room,” she added.

Enhancing global business

One of the most difficult things Colleen Pritchett 02MBA, president of Aerospace, Americas Hexcel Corporation, has dealt with in her 20-plus year career is turning around a business in financial crisis. Pritchett did so with the help of a virtual team. The experience made her realize how important it is “to assess the situation quickly, formulate and communicate a compelling vision and strategy to move forward and have the courage to make tough decisions quickly”—all while, she explained, “showing genuine care” for members of her team so they could work well together and succeed.

To ensure individual team members were getting what they needed, Pritchett scheduled regular one-on-one calls with team members to check in. She did her best to have the same type of discussions they’d have “if we were in the office together,” she said. Pritchett invited input, asked whether they needed support and listened. “It helped us stay connected. We learned more about one another through each interaction. It built trust,” she added.

Pritchett, who continues to lead a number of virtual teams, finds it useful to make sure there is “a clear agenda” regarding the information to be discussed prior to virtual meetings or calls so that the team can “review and absorb it—especially when English is not someone’s first language,” she said. “Team members come from different functions and different cultural backgrounds, and that diversity of thought will help the team operate more effectively and better represent the diverse needs of our global customer base and business. This open environment and discussion will help show respect for one another and help the team operate more effectively as a virtual team.”

Regardless of whether companies are ready to shift their knowledge-based workforces to virtual team structures, a global pandemic can force them to consider it as a viable alternative. “Meeting face-to-face doesn’t necessarily mean a more productive meeting,” Bharadwaj reminded. Technology gives virtual team members “more opportunities to bring more” to meetings, she said. “It’s all a question of what you’re trying to accomplish and how best to accomplish it.”

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