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.

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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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Global warming is accelerating severe weather with cataclysmic outcomes for communities all over the world. In 2023, the hottest year on record, no fewer than 23 weather-related disasters struck the United States. These natural disasters claimed hundreds of lives and caused $57 billion in damage. Recently, the federal government has come under scrutiny for uneven aid response to communities affected by hurricanes, fires, and flooding in America.

But might there be other factors at play that see disadvantaged groups more vulnerable to the impact of severe weather events? Weighing into this is award-winning research by Goizueta Business School’s William Schmidt, associate professor of Information Systems and Operations Management. He and Xabier Barriola from INSEAD Business School look at the effect of three major hurricanes in the U.S. in the last 20 years. They find evidence of higher paid prices for basic groceries in the aftermath of each storm that disproportionately impact lower-income communities in affected states. In fact, says Schmidt, when severe weather hits communities, these families end up paying anywhere between one and five percent more relative to high income households for essential food and goods. This puts a major strain on already-strained resources in times of massive disruption.

We see a spike in the prices paid for household groceries of up to five percent hitting low-income groups immediately after a major storm hits.

William Schmidt

“Then you have to factor in the reality that poorer households spend around eight times more of their disposable income on basic groceries than high-income households,” says Schmidt. “It becomes clear that the aftermath of severe weather is harder for them to bear. And in our research, this is an effect that lasts for months, not weeks or days.”

Exposing Hidden Costs on Those Hit Hardest

To get to these findings, Schmidt and Barriola worked from a hunch. They figured that in low-income areas, a lack of infrastructure, lower-quality construction, and fewer grocery store outlets could translate into supply shortages in emergencies. Ensuing stockouts might then lead to knock-on price inflation for customers. These are low-income families for whom inflation has serious and significant consequences, Schmidt says.

We know that inflation hurts poorer communities. High-income families have the option of switching between high and low-priced goods according to needs or preference. But families with lower incomes are already purchasing low-priced groceries.

William Schmidt

“When there are disaster-induced stockouts to their preferred products, those families are forced to substitute to higher priced groceries,” Schmidt continues.

Then there’s retailer behavior. Following large environmental disasters, store managers may be unable to keep necessities in stock. Under those circumstances, it is difficult to justify running promotions or implementing planned price decreases.

To test these ideas, Schmidt and his colleagues looked at data from the weeks and months following Hurricanes Katarina (2005), Ike (2008), and Sandy (2012). They decided to pinpoint those locations immediately impacted at the county level. To do so, they used major disaster declarations issued by the federal government at the time. Then they integrated this with detailed grocery store sales data provided by Information Resources Inc (IRI) with zip code-level household income and demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau. With each hurricane, the researchers looked at IRI data covering 30 different product categories and around 200 million transactions over a 12-week period.

Schmidt and his colleagues then ran a set of analyses comparing prices paid by communities before and after each hurricane. They also contrasted price increases paid by low-income and high-income households as well as communities outside of the areas affected by the storms.

Crunching the Numbers

“Doing this triple-difference regression analysis, we find that lower-income communities pay an average 2.9 percent more for their groceries. That’s in the eight weeks following each of these disasters,” says Schmidt.

The effect varies. But it is roughly commensurate with the overall economic damage wrought by each hurricane, with Katrina being the worst. Here low-income families were seeing a 5.1 percent increase in the cost of food and basic goods, relative to richer households.

William Schmidt

The study points to a variety of mechanisms driving these effects. As Schmidt and his co-authors hypothesize, there is evidence that the same disruptions lead to fewer price promotions. They also see more frequent stockouts of low-priced goods. At the same time, there’s a shift in household purchasing from low to higher-priced products. These effects are long-lasting, says Schmidt.

According to the study, post-hurricane inflation in the prices paid by consumers continues to affect poorer families for eight or more weeks. This amounts to months of economic hardship for those least resilient to its effects. Schmidt calls this “permanent inflation.”

Pursuing Equity in Crisis

Operations managers and policymakers should factor these findings into emergency relief efforts, say Schmidt and his colleague. The goal should be to service communities more equitably. So, there should be more thought to the provision of essential food and household goods. Also, there should be a particular focus on those most vulnerable to natural disasters and their effects.

Current disaster nutrition relief programs are typically short. Authorities might do better by vulnerable communities by also extending things like cash and voucher programs, says Schmidt. And they should prioritize the ordering, shipment, and warehousing of essential goods.

“Our research shows that hurricanes cost certain groups of Americans more than others in the longer run. The permanent inflation on food stuff and household necessities that we find constitutes an additional burden on part of our national fabric. These are people who are least positioned to afford it.”

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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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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Back in the 1990s, U.S. mega-firm Blockbusters dominated the global market in home movie and video game rentals with just shy of 10,000 stores worldwide, and revenues of $5.9 billion at its peak. In 2000, Blockbusters’ leadership faced a business opportunity: to acquire fledgling streaming company, Netflix, for $50 million. Weighing their options, the board decided to pass. What happened next has been thoroughly documented by business scholars, press, and other media. By 2005, Blockbusters had lost 75% of its market value. Just five years later, the firm went bankrupt. Today, Netflix is valued at around $200 billion.

Boards have a huge responsibility to provide the best counsel possible to CEOs. And in times of disruption, innovation, market volatility, and uncertainty, that counsel should come from as broad a palette of expertise, insight, understanding, and perspective as possible. See the bigger picture, and you are less likely to pass on critical opportunities to shift course, evolve, and expand into new markets. Limit your perspective, restrict the diversity of input, and your decisions are more likely to become reactive. It’s no coincidence that the board advising Blockbuster CEO, John Antioco, was essentially homogeneous—all male, all white, and all of them fundamentally committed to bricks and mortar. It’s little wonder that this board was more resistant to change and innovation.

The lessons of Blockbusters and others are clear. To weather market changes and grow your organization, you need your board members to represent different cohorts, different models, and different points of view. Organizations are increasingly embracing diversity at their very highest echelons in order to capitalize more on its well-understood promise. But progress remains slow.  As recently as 10 years ago, for instance, women made up less than 10 percent of all U.S. corporate boards. Only in 2019 did the proportion of female board members climb north of 15 percent for all U.S. publicly listed companies for the first time.

So What’s Behind this Glacial Pace of Change?

Research by Goizueta’s Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Finance, Wei Jiang, situates the blame squarely on what she describes as “slow turnover”—a sort of inertia in the boardroom that is directly tied to the length of time that incumbent directors remain in their positions.

Board members can enjoy a tenure of 10 years or more, says Jiang, making it hard for firms to introduce new voices and perspectives in a way that is as dynamic and prone to change as market forces. Analyzing two decades’ worth of data from BoardEx and Wharton Research Data Services, Jiang finds that these long tenures compare unfavorably with turnover rates among CEOs for instance.

“Looking at the data, we see that around 25 percent of board directors hold on to their seats for 10 years or more; with 8.5 percent of them remaining in place for up to 20 years. That translates into an average turnover rate of just 8.9 percent for public firms in the U.S., which compares with an annual CEO turnover of closer to 13 percent,” says Jiang.

In other words, you have a situation where only one or two people change within the board over the course of a decade.

Wei Jiang

This slow turnover rate leaves a very narrow door for embracing diversity, Jiang says. With societal and marketplace change radically outpacing the makeup of most boardrooms, it raises difficult questions for organizations wondering if decision-makers elected 10 years ago are still the best qualified for the job today—or tomorrow.

Accelerating Diversity in a Purposeful and Sustainable Way

One measure adopted by firms eager to accelerate board diversity has been the introduction of quotas: pushing diverse candidates beyond their natural representation to meet diversity targets as incumbents retire. But Jiang cautions that this practice is innately unfair to others without a diverse profile.

Quota systems produce results by skewing election processes to favor women, for instance. But you have to ask if this is consistent with a goal of fairness. And whether you end up with one demographic unnaturally overrepresented as a result.

Wei Jiang

There is another dynamic at play within election processes that can change the diversity of the boardroom, but effectively as a sort of unintended consequence, Jiang finds. Proxy fights happen when activist shareholders challenge corporate governance for greater control over organizations. When these kinds of unfriendly contests arise, she says, they impact the turnover rate, leaving the door open for women or underrepresented candidates to come in.

“Again, the data shows that wherever you have a proxy battle contesting elections, turnover effectively doubles. In these situations, you end up seeing the number of women and minority directors increase by around 10 percent. This is a kind of unintended consequence, and not because activist shareholders have a clear-cut diversity mission or agenda.”

And while proxy contests can drive boardroom diversity, they are essentially extreme measures predicated on conflict that can affect morale unfavorably.

To accelerate diversity in a purposeful and more sustainable manner, Jiang recommends instituting voluntary turnover at the board level. She says a good approach might be to cap or limit tenure by introducing what she calls milestones.

“Most companies don’t impose limits on board directorships. And human nature is such that simply inviting board members to nominate themselves or others to stand down voluntarily is probably a big ask psychologically,” she says.

A better option is to have committee members agree to hard or soft caps on terms, and to couch tenure in terms of milestones in order to neutralize any sense of stigma for directors who stand down after a few years.

Wei Jiang

Jiang points to the example of France, where directors lose their “independent” status after a few years. She also cites instances in other European organizations, where directors are required to take a hiatus as shorter terms end, but can stand for re-election in future years—especially where re-election is contingent on competing with alternative candidates nominated by the board.

Regardless of the method, achieving regular turnover is the key to releasing the bottleneck holding women and minority directors from corporate board-level leadership, says Jiang. And it’s imperative to get this right.

“If you don’t increase turnover, you risk becoming too blinkered and homogenous in your perspective from the top. To see opportunities in all of their facets, you need decision-makers from diverse cohorts and different backgrounds. Had Blockbusters been able to see the potential for disruption in the shape of Netflix, who knows how differently their business might have fared.”

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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A landmark new study by Goizueta Business School’s Omar Rodriguez-Vila among the top 50 brands in the country finds their marketplace actions are not yet reflecting the diverse demographic makeup of today’s customer bases. His research is unearthing new ways for firms to be more inclusive in the way they behave in the market.

Rodriguez-Vila, who is a professor in the practice of marketing at Goizueta, teamed with Dionne Nickerson of the Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, and Sundar Bharadwaj of The University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business, to measure brand inclusivity. Inclusive brands, he says, are those that “serve the needs of underrepresented communities in ways that enhance their perception of belonging and respect.”

To understand where firms currently are in this kind of marketplace inclusivity, Rodriguez-Vila worked with BRIDGE, the first independent DEI trade group for the global marketing industry, and a committed team of Goizueta Full-time MBA and undergraduate students in the school’s BBA program[1] to assess the top 50 U.S. brands across 10 consumer-facing industries.

Using machine learning and human coders, the team analyzed social media posts on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, looking for patterns of representational diversity across four measures: skin type, body type, hair type, and physical ability. Altogether, they processed just short of 11,000 social media posts made between June 2021 and July 2022.

“We applied the Simpson’s Diversity Index (SDI) to the population of social media posts by the largest brands in the United States. The SDI is a commonly used equation to measure the diversity of a population,” says Rodriguez-Vila. Applying the SDI calculation to measure the diversity in social media messages is a novel idea and one that provides clarity on the state of inclusion in brand communications, he adds. 

According to the 2020 U.S. Census, the racial diversity index in America is 61 percent—with racial diversity consistently increasing across the country over the past 20 years. Rodriguez-Vila and his colleagues compared this data with their findings on brands’ social media output.

We found that the racial diversity index of social media messages by the top U.S. brands was just 41 percent. The last time the racial diversity index was in that range was in the year 2000.

Omar Rodriguez-Vila

Interestingly, this lag between representation and demographic reality is common to brands in virtually all of the industries studied—from airlines to fashion, consumer packaged goods to financial services, and hospitality to retail.

“Brands’ social media activities typically capture many actions that a brand performs in the marketplace, including new products, promotions, ad campaigns, influencer messages, and more. Therefore, it is a fairly complete signal of their level of inclusion across the marketing mix. And by this measure, it’s clear that there’s more we can do to be inclusive of all our customers,” says Rodriguez-Vila. There is a compelling case for doing so.

Representational diversity has the potential to open new markets, new customer bases, and areas for expansion. Not only that: feeling represented and included matters to a large segment of the consumer base, says Rodriguez-Vila.

“To understand the importance of inclusion to customers, we used a discrete choice model where people made trade-offs between price and a collection of product features in order to understand the factors that motivated them to make a purchase,” he explains. “We tested a sample of consumers looking to buy sportswear, and we added representation of diversity and inclusion as a characteristic, to see if it had any impact on their choices.”

Again, the results are stunning. On average, 51 percent of customers took inclusion into account as a primary driver of athletic apparel choices. Inclusion was a priority driver of choice among 38 percent of consumers in historically well-represented communities—slim, white, able-bodied people.

When Rodriguez-Vila and his colleagues expanded the analysis to other, historically under-represented groups, they found a significantly greater impact. Here, inclusion was a primary driver among 61 percent of plus-size, Black consumers and for 87 percent of consumers that identified as non-binary. While this study needs to be replicated across other industries for a more general finding, it suggests inclusion can be a critically important factor to a majority of customers who are making decisions about whether to purchase products and services, or not.

“Our work is set to deliver tools that will help firms institutionalize marketplace inclusion as a function of their day-to-day operations. And it’s exciting to see the DEI thinking by leaders as they start to incorporate practices that focus on marketplace inclusion; practices that are geared to eliminate bias in the way they serve customers.”

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

[1] The students working on the social media analysis were: Stephon Harris 23MBA; Shaun Abraham 23MBA; Suh Yoon 23MBA; Connor Marshall 23MBA; and Yongchen Qian 23C.

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Concerns about the unchecked rise of AI are not new, and global media is increasingly sounding the alarm, citing concerns that range from invasion of privacy to an existential threat to human existence. 

Weighing in on this with compelling new evidence around the “unintended consequences” of AI is research by Goizueta’s Ramnath Chellappa and Information Systems PhD candidate, Jonathan Gomez Martinez.  

Uncovering the Threat 

Their paper, Content Moderation and AI: Impact on Minority Communities, takes a hard look at how the use of AI in social media could disadvantage LGBTQ+ users. And what they find is worrying.  

Chellappa, who is Goizueta Foundation Term Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management, explains that he and Gomez Martinez homed in on Twitter to explore how unchecked artificial language moderation might (mistakenly) censor the use of “otherwise toxic” language by failing to understand the context or nuanced use of the LGBTQ+ lexicon. Examples of this include “reclaimed language”—verbiage that would be a slur in other contexts—but is reclaimed and prosocial if used by the originally targeted community.  

“This is a community that has ‘reclaimed’ certain words and expressions that might be considered offensive in other contexts. Terms like ‘queer’ are used within the community both in jest and as a marker of identity and belonging. But if used by those outside the community, this kind of language could be deemed inflammatory or offensive.” 

Jonathan Gomez Martinez

Gomez Martinez adds: “We wanted to measure the extent to which AI’s lack of a nuanced understanding of what is ‘acceptable’ affects minority users’ online interactions. As humans, we understand that marginalized communities have long used ‘reclaimed words’ both in jest and as a kind of rallying cry. Our intuition was that the machine simply wouldn’t understand this without context—context that is more immediately apparent to people.” 

Determining the Impact of AI-Based Moderation 

To test this, he and Chellappa looked at data from social media behemoth, Twitter. During the pandemic in 2020, the platform made a significant shift to AI-based content moderation to accommodate stay-at-home measures. Data from Twitter’s proprietary Academic Research API afforded Gomez Martinez and Chellappa access to a complete listing of historical tweets and replies before, during and after this period. Together they analyzed a total of 3.8 million interactions (1.8 million tweets and 2.0 million replies) from a panel of 2,751 users, of which 1,224 self-identified as LGBTQ+ in their Twitter bios. Their study ran over four months, from January to May 2020, before, during and after the switch to machine-based moderation.  

Using the same tools that Twitter moderators deploy to moderate interactions, Gomez Martinez and Chellappa were able to measure any increase or decrease in pro-social, in-group teasing and toxic language among LGBTQ+ users: terms such as “bitch” or “queer,” which research shows to be a form of ritualized insults—dubbed “reading” by the community—which can appear inappropriate or incoherent to outsiders, says Chellappa.  

“Analyzing the language, we find a notable reduction in the use of terms that could be considered toxic. When the AI moderation is in effect, you see these users’ language become more vanilla,” he adds. Quantifiably so, in fact.  

Chellappa and Martinez find a 27 percent reduction in the use of reclaimed language among LGBTQ+ users. And while that doesn’t sound like much, it’s significant for the community, says Gomez Martinez. 

“Using in-language and reading each other is one way for this marginalized group to create a sense of community and social status. Not just that, we know from research that LGBTQ+ people use slurs and insults as a way of preparing themselves emotionally and psychologically for hostile interaction with heterosexual individuals. This kind of teasing and playing helps build resilience, so any reduction in it is significant.” 

Jonathan Gomez Martinez

Good Intentions May Breed Unexpected Consequences 

So what does this mean for social media, for the LGBTQ+ community or any marginalized group for that matter, that might be prone to automated censorship? And how does any of this play out in the context of broader concerns around AI? 

For Chellappa and Gomez Martinez, there is a major hazard in granting technology any degree of control over how human beings interact. And it’s rooted in the mismatch between good intentions and unexpected consequences. Their paper, one of the first to dig into the impact of AI on actual business and society, lays bare some of the real-world impact AI has already had on marginalized people. While this study looks at the LGBTQ+ community, it could equally apply to any group that is prone to bias or exclusion—racial minorities or any other underrepresented demographic. 

“Wherever you have user-generated content, you are likely to find communities with their own, unique way of interacting. We looked at LGBTQ+ Twitter users, but you could also look at the African American community, for instance.”

Ramnath K. Chellapa

At a time when social media platforms have become almost newslike in their influence, this is a concern. On the one hand, censoring certain demographics might earn Twitter et al an unwanted reputation for being anti-LGBTQ+ or racist, he adds. But there are even bigger stakes here than bad publicity. 

“Twitter has long aspired to be a kind of global town square,” says Gomez Martinez. “But you end up pretty far from that scenario if only some voices are truly heard, or if 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.” 

AI isn’t there yet, say Chellappa and Gomez Martinez. And they caution against using AI indiscriminately to expedite or streamline processes that impact human communication and interchange. If we don’t keep track of it, their research shows that AI has the potential to start dictating and moving people into normative behavior—effectively homogenizing us. And that’s a problem. 

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

Ready to learn more about AI or level up your career? Learn more about Emory’s full-time MS in Business Analytics—now offering an AI in Business track—for early career professionals, or Emory’s advanced part-time MS in Business Analytics for Working Professionals. 

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The jury for many remains out, though there are enough clouds forming on the horizon to cause consternation for firms eyeing the next financial quarter. But while recessions invariably spell belt-tightening, are they always plain bad for business? Could there be some kind of silver lining to hard times?

New research led by Goizueta Business School’s Emily Bianchi suggests there is in fact an upside to economic downturns: higher employee job satisfaction. Bianchi and colleagues from Oglethorpe and Hong Kong Polytechnic Universities have found that in times of increased financial uncertainty, people tend to think less about other opportunities or openings, and focus more on the jobs they actually have. This in turn makes us see our jobs and workplace more favorably, says Bianchi.

“It might feel counter-intuitive because there’s reason to think that tumultuous times make the workplace and workplace relations more tense or challenging. But we wanted to explore whether the security of having a job in an economic slump might positively impact the way people think about their roles and employers,” Bianchi says.

Our hunch was that fewer available jobs outside the organization may translate into greater satisfaction with the jobs we have in hand when there’s a recession.

Emily Bianchi, Goizueta Foundation Term Associate Professor of Organization & Management

To test this possibility, Bianchi and co-authors ran three studies. The first looked at almost 50 years of data from the U.S. General Social Survey, a cross-sectional barometer of people’s attitudes and opinions, including their assessment of the economy and satisfaction with the work they do. Through analyses of respondents’ answers between 1974 and 2016, Bianchi et al. found compelling evidence to support their hypothesis: at both the national and state level, job satisfaction rose during recessions and fell off again when the economy did better.

A second study analyzed data from the U.K. where recessions tend to hit at the same time as the United States, but can be more or less severe. Two surveys conducted by the University of Essex followed the same respondents between 1991 and 2013, allowing Bianchi et al. to measure how individual job satisfaction fluctuated with macro-economic changes. Limiting their analysis to those people who remained employed over the time period and controlling for things like age, gender and income, the researchers were able to isolate the impact of recession based on the way that a group of just over 8,500,000 employees felt about their jobs. They found the same pattern.

“By looking at the same individuals over time, we’re able to eliminate any impact coming from changes in the composition of the workforce across economic cycles,” says Bianchi.

The same pattern emerged: during bad economic times, people reported greater job satisfaction even within the same group.

Bianchi

Unlocking the Upside of Downturns

To dig deeper into the psychological mechanisms undergirding these patterns, Bianchi et al. ran an experiment. One group was shown “bad news” about the economy, while the other read a report on economic growth and “plentiful jobs.” Both groups were then asked to self-report on job satisfaction.

Those who had read the news article on recession and unemployment reported greater contentment with their current jobs. Moreover, when reminded of recessions, they reported that alternative jobs became less salient, which in turn led to greater job satisfaction. In other words, their own jobs were “more satisfying.”

One implication of these findings is that they challenge the notion that job satisfaction is exclusively dictated by what happens inside the organization.

We tend to think of businesses as bubbles that are somehow impervious to the outside world. But these studies show broader societal events can affect us in surprising ways.

Bianchi

A Silver Lining for Employers

Recessions are rarely welcome news. And for employers, they can engender feelings of hopelessness, says Bianchi. The insights shared in her paper should provide some reassurance, nonetheless, that even when the chips are down, they might have one less thing to worry about. But there’s a caveat.

Our findings suggest that there might actually be a bright side to recessions for employers; that greater job satisfaction during these difficult times might help people psychologically weather an otherwise challenging situation.

Bianchi

“Of course, this does not mean that employers should take advantage of this surprising goodwill by asking more of their employees. Rather, while employers likely believe that there is little they can do to bolster job satisfaction during tough times, our research suggests that satisfaction-boosting efforts may be even more effective. Moreover, our findings suggest that employers should be more attuned to bolstering satisfaction when times are good and employees are particularly apt to be looking at other opportunities.”

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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Rosa Parks made history on December 1, 1955, when she refused to relinquish her bus seat to a white passenger. Her simple gesture of defiance ignited a city-wide bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, and has gone down in the annals as a pivotal moment for the social justice movement in the United States. However, Parks was not the only African American to make a stand against racial segregation. Nor was she the first. In March of the same year in the same city, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin also refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a Montgomery bus. So why isn’t she a household name? In part, Colvin’s age was a factor. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other Black civil rights groups got behind Parks, reasoning that an older woman would be better equipped to withstand the controversy. But as Colvin herself stated, there were other factors at play. There was something about Parks’ appearance that gave her more leverage, reasons Colvin explained in Philip Hoose’s award-winning book on the civil rights movement. She had the “right hair and the right look.” Not only that, but her appearance “was the kind that people associate with the middle class. She fit that profile.” 

Success isn’t black or white. It’s shades of…white. 

Colorism has long been documented in the U.S. and elsewhere. Discrimination against human beings on the basis of their facial features, hair, and skin color transcends race—it is prevalent even within groups that share the same ethnic identity, where lighter skin tones are perceived to be more valuable than dark. Research over the years has shed light on the nefarious effects of colorism or shadeism in terms of equity and access to opportunity. But a new landmark study by Associate Professor of Organization & Management Melissa Williams, and Goizueta colleagues, PhD student Tosen Nwadei and Roberto C. Goizueta Chair of Organization & Management Anand Swaminathan, looks at just how Black or white someone appears—and how this shapes the way others see their potential; as well as the kinds of professional outcomes they can expect.  

What Williams and her co-authors, who also include James B. Wade from George Washington University and C. Keith Harrison and Scott Bukstein of University of Central Florida, find in their studies, is that Black professionals are less likely to be promoted to leadership roles. What’s more, for Black professionals whose physical appearance is more Black-stereotypical, their chances drop from 12 percent to a mere seven percent. For white professionals, on the other hand, having a more white-stereotypical appearance is an advantage for leadership – looking more stereotypical as a white person increased their chances of holding a leadership role from 32 percent to 43 percent. 

Williams and colleagues ran both an archival study and a lab experiment with volunteers to discover the extent to which degrees of ethnicity in appearance influence perceptions of a person’s potential for leadership and actually predict their likelihood of success in an industry. 

While the science unequivocally shows that white people enjoy advantages over Black people in opportunity and outcome across the board, Williams et al. were also interested in exploring what she calls the “continuum of race:” the more nuanced racial characteristics and differences that shape how the world sees us.  

There’s an assumption that everyone within the same ethnic group—Black or white—will experience the same degree of bias and prejudice, or acceptance and success. And we wanted to push back on that idea to really explore how degrees of whiteness or Blackness play out in people’s minds and shape how they read you physically. 

Associate Professor of Organization & Management Melissa Williams

Previous research shows the link between persisting in STEM-based majors in college and how much students are perceived to look “like their race,” she says. Those who are perceived to look less typically Black tend to make more friends outside their ethnic group—a boundary-crossing behavior that can help drive careers.  

To test these ideas, Williams and co-authors ran two studies. First, they accessed publicly available data including photographs, professional background, and positions from one large industry within the U.S.: American college football. 

College football is really rich in data. You can access job titles, photos, leadership, and non-leadership roles; and you can separate individuals out into head coaches and position coaches who have overseeing roles but who are not leaders per se.  

Separately, Williams et al. recruited a group of volunteers to look at the images of the football coaches: a mix of Black and white head and position coaches. These volunteers were asked to rate how typical they perceived each individual’s appearance to be of European or white Americans, or of Black Americans, ascribing each person a score out of five based on features such as their skin color, hair, eyes, nose, cheeks, and lips. These scores were then regressed—or cross-referenced—with the position held by the individuals in the photos to determine the relationship between their racial stereotypicality and their leadership role.  

Crunching the numbers, Williams found a direct correlation between the degree of perceived whiteness or Blackness of the coaches and how likely they actually were to be successful leaders.  

“We do find a kind of consensus in people’s view of what it means to be Black or white straight off,” says Williams. “So we do all seem to agree on the physical attributes of race. But it gets really interesting when you regress the scores that these photos get and compare them with the actual jobs these guys hold.”

What we see is that, controlling for their age, attractiveness, and professional experience, the white guys who look less stereotypically white are 32 percent likely to occupy leadership roles. This rises to 43 percent with the men who look more like a stereotypical white guy. 

For Black professionals, the inverse is true, she notes. The more typically Black an individual looks, the less probability there is that he occupies a leadership job. Specifically, that figure drops from 12 to seven percent. So benchmark leadership probability is not only already lower for Black individuals, but drops even further when people are deemed to look “more typically Black,” says Williams.  

A follow-up experiment invited volunteer football fans to compare how they saw the potential future success of two same-race college football players—one more stereotypical in appearance than the other. The results confirm what Williams et al. suspect: 70 percent of the time, participants chose the more-typical white individual over the less-typical white individual as having greater leadership potential. In other words, the more white a white person looks, the more they are seen as leadership material.  

These findings should translate into an imperative, says Williams; and that is to think more broadly about race and how it impacts life outcomes. Because race is not a uniform experience, she says.  

“Organizations might want to look beyond just ticking the box when it comes to diversity and inclusion, and give deeper thought to who they want to recruit, support and push forward in representation. For white people, paying attention to whiteness—the types of white people who enjoy advantages in leadership—can be useful in reframing certain questions. A good place to start might be for leaders to ask: do I want to support people who look like me? Because the face you choose can ultimately help disrupt, or reinforce, the stereotype.” 

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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In December 2022, The New York Times ran a piece looking back on the year’s biggest consumer tech updates. The review was mixed. Ownership shifts in the world of social media garnered special mentions, but hardware innovations had been largely “meh,’ mused the Times. There was one breakthrough area that warranted attention, however: AI-powered language-processing tech capable of generating natural-looking text, the same technology that powers familiar chatbots. And one such technology could well be poised to “invade our lives in 2023.”

Earlier in December, AI research lab OpenAI, released the latest update to its Generative Pre-Trained Transformer technology, an open source artificial intelligence. It’s latest iteration, ChatGPT, immediately went viral. Here was an AI assistant that sounded intelligent. Not only could it answer any question thrown its way without supervised training, but when prompted, it could also write blog posts, as well as find and fix bugs in programming code. ChatGPT could draft business proposals and even tell jokes. All of this at a speed that beggared belief.

Since its first release in 2020, OpenAI’s GPT technology has powered through a slew of updates that have seen its capabilities leap forward “by light years” in less than 24 months, says Goizueta Professor of Marketing, David Schweidel. For businesses looking to harness this rapidly-evolving technology, the potential is clearly enormous. But aren’t there also risks that industry and consumers alike will need to navigate?

Schweidel is clear that the academic community and initiatives such as the Emory AI Humanity Initiative have a critical role in asking hard questions—and in determining the limitations and dangers, as well as the opportunities, inherent in tech innovation—because, as he puts it, “these things are going to happen whether we like it or not.”

Man Versus Machine

To that end, Schweidel and colleagues from Vienna University of Economics and Business and the Modul University of Vienna have put together a study looking at how well natural language generation technologies perform in one specific area of marketing: drafting bespoke content for website search engine optimization, better known as SEO. What they find is that content crafted by the machine, after light human editing, systematically outperforms its human counterparts—and by a staggering margin. Digging through the results, Schweidel and his colleagues can actually pinpoint an almost 80 percent success rate for appearing on the first page of search engine results with AI-generated content. This compares with just 22 perfect of content created by human SEO experts. In other words, the AI content passed to a human is roughly four times more effective than a skilled copywriter working alone.

Reaching these findings meant running two real-time, real-world experiments, says Schweidel. First, he and his colleagues had to program the machine, in this case GPT 2, an earlier incarnation of GPT. GPT relies on natural language generation (NGL), a software process that converts manually uploaded input into authentic-sounding text or content—comparable in some ways to the human process of translating ideas into speech or writing. To prepare GPT-2 for SEO-specific content creation, Schweidel et al. started with the pre-trained GPT-2, and then let the machine do the heavy lifting: searching the internet for appropriate results based on the desired keyword, scraping the text of the websites, and updating GPT-2 to “learn” what SEO looks like, says Schweidel.

We partnered with an IT firm and a university to run our field experiments. This meant creating SEO content for their websites using GPT-2 and actual human SEO experts, and then doing A/B testing to see which content was more successful in terms of landing in the top 10 search engine results on Google. So this was an opportunity to put the AI bot to the test in a real-world setting to see how it would perform against people.

Schweidel

The results point to one clear winner. Not only did content from GPT-2 outperform its human rivals in SEO capabilities, it did so at scale. The AI-generated content scored a daily median result of seven or more hits in the first page of Google search results. The human-written copy didn’t make it onto the first result page at all. On its best day, GPT showed up for 15 of its 19 pages of search terms inside the top 10 search engine results page, compared with just two of the nine pages created by the human copywriters—a success rate of just under 80 percent compared to 22 percent.

Savings at Scale

The machine-generated content, after being edited by a human, trounces the human in SEO. But that’s not all, says Schweidel. The GPT bot was also able to produce content in a fraction of the time taken by the writers, reducing production time and associated labor costs by more than 90 percent, he says.

“In our experiments, the copywriters took around four hours to write a page, while the GPT bot and human editor took 30 minutes. Now assuming the average copywriter makes an annual $45K on the basis of 1,567 hours of work, we calculate that the company we partnered with would stand to save more than $100,000 over a five-year period just by using the AI bot in conjunction with a human editor, rather than relying on SEO experts to craft content. That’s a 91 percent drop in the average cost of creating SEO content. It’s an orders of magnitude difference in productivity and costs.”

But there are caveats.

First off, there’s the quality of the machine-generated content to consider. For all its mind-boggling capabilities, even the newly released ChatGPT tends to read somewhat sterile, says Schweidel. That’s a problem both in terms of Google guidelines and brand coherence. Human editors are still needed in order to attenuate copy that can sound a little “mechanical.”

“Google is pretty clear in its guidelines: Content generated by machines alone is a definite no-no. You also need to factor in the uncanny valley effect whereby something not quite human can come off as weird. Having an editor come in to smooth out AI content is critical to brand voice as well as the human touch.”

Asking the Big Questions

Then there are the moral and metaphysical dimensions of machine learning and creativity that beg an important question: Just because we can, does that mean we should? Here, Schweidel has grave reservations about the future of ChatGPT and its ilk.

The potential of this kind of technology is extraordinarily exciting when you think about the challenges we face from productivity to pandemics, from sustainable growth to climate change. But let’s be very clear about the risks, too. AI is already capable of creating content—audio, visual and written—that looks and feels authentic. In a world that is hugely polarized, you have to ask yourself: How can that be weaponized?

Schweidel

At the end of the day, says Schweidel, the large language models powering these generative AIs are essentially “stochastic parrots:” trained mimics whose output can be hard to predict. In the wrong hands, he warns, the potential for misinformation—and worse—could well be “terrifying.”

“Shiny new tech is neither inherently good nor bad. It’s human nature to push the boundaries. But we need to ensure that the guardrails are in place to regulate innovation at this kind of pace, and that’s not easy. Governments typically lag far behind OpenAI and companies like them, even academics have a hard time keeping up. The real challenge ahead of us will be about innovating the guardrails in tandem with the tech—innovating our responsible practices and processes. Without effective safeguards in place, we’re on a path to potential destruction.”

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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Indeed, Google and other companies routinely suppress college degree requirements and other kinds of information in their recruitment processes to widen the pipeline. Although this is well and good, what happens once minority talent makes it into the organization? How effective are organizations–even those with the best intentions–at nurturing, engaging, and retaining that talent?

The statistics suggest that the Great Resignation is a massive problem for Corporate America, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reporting record numbers of workers quitting their jobs in Fall 2021. Among minority employees, the situation is even more grim. The BLS reports that with Black and other racial minority groups, turnover is a full 30 percent higher than among White counterparts, meaning that firms fail to realize full returns on their inclusive recruitment expenditure. Tackling this kind of attrition should be a priority for employers who are “authentic” and committed to diversity in their organizations, says Goizueta’s Arielle Lewis 26PhD.

“It’s not just getting people through the door; it’s about hanging onto them once they get there.”

How Do Race and Gender Influence Stigmatization?

For Black women coming into new organizations, there’s the dual “risk” of stigmatization on account of both race and gender, says Lewis. It is, therefore, all the more critical to ensure feelings of identity-safety for Black female employees through cues and signals that the workplace environment and culture welcomes and values them and their contribution as individuals.

One such cue may be the presence of other Black women who are thriving within the organization, with whom they may have common ground and shared life experiences of discrimination or bias growing up or in school. While this might work in theory, in practice, it’s a lot harder, says Lewis, and it’s because of the chronic underrepresentation of Black women in the American workforce. There just aren’t enough potential mentors to make it work in every organization.

Lewis advances a novel solution to this problem in her working paper with Evava Pietri, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at University Colorado, Boulder, and India Johnson, associate professor of psychology at Butler University. And it’s based on the notion of stigma solidarity.

“Stigma solidarity happens when we identify with other people who might not be exactly the same as us, but whose life experience of stigmatization–race or gender-based discrimination and bias–is similar,” she explains. “Our theory is that a Black woman entering a workforce would expect a Latina employee to have similar experiences with racial discrimination and would, therefore, be able to identify with her. She’d also expect her to hold more positive views about Black women, which is key to enhancing identity safety.”

To test this, Lewis et al. ran two studies–online surveys–looking at whether Latina employees can act as identity-safety cues for Black women. They also looked at whether racial phenotype–skin tone, hair, and other characteristics–might enhance or decrease feelings of identification or expectations of having similar experiences.

“To do this, we analyzed the way that Black women expressed feelings of identification with white and Afro-Latina women,” she says.

Across both studies, Lewis et al. found that the Black women surveyed believed Latina women–whether white- or Afro-Latinas–have faced generalized bias in their lives, significantly more so than white female employees. When it came to the actual degree of bias or discrimination they had faced, the respondents felt that only Afro-Latina women were on a similar level as Black Women. In other words, they identified significantly more with this group than with white-Latinas or white women.

Interestingly, however, when white Latinas expressed their own previous encounters with racism, Black women’s feelings of identification and solidarity toward them increased significantly with the belief that these women would be more positive, supportive, and understanding in their perception.

Lewis et al. findings shed light on the ways in which marginalized individuals can forge connections with others in the workplace, based on identity and similarity.

For organizations and leaders looking to drive psychological safety and feelings of belonging among Black female recruits, a promising path forward could involve processes or initiatives that bring them together with women who’ve experienced bias or discrimination akin to their own.

That said, inclusive practices that simply “lump people together” should be avoided at all costs, cautions Lewis.

“Our study shows that shared experience of discrimination can be a critical mechanism in forging identity safety for people coming into an organization from marginalized backgrounds, especially Black Women dealing with the double stigma of race and gender,” she says. “Organizations and leaders interested in pursuing inclusive strategies around mentorship based on similarity also need to be sensitive to the differences and variability that exist within groups.”

Goizueta PhD students push the boundaries of what the world currently knows, examining critical issues that face business today. Learn more about this collaborative and research-driven program.

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For an average property worth $240,000, the mean discount works out to around $7,000. Not only that, these homes take considerably longer to sell than comparable houses on streets that are named for secessionists.

Green and his co-authors reviewed data from home sales across 35 states in the U.S., analyzing nearly 6,000 transactions between 2001 and 2020. Their data set looked at properties located on streets named after Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, as well as the more generic options of “Confederate” and “Dixie.” The majority of these streets are located in former Confederate states, though some are also found in California and Massachusetts, as well as a number of Midwestern and Western states that had not been created before the U.S. Civil War.

To be certain of their findings, Green et al looked at homes with similar features and characteristics such as lot size, age, building type, and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. The findings are unequivocal, says Green, although the effect is not equally distributed across states.

What is the Confederate Discount?

“The discount in prices for homes of Confederate-named streets is geographically variable. In those states that make up the former Confederacy, the effect is more muted at around two percent,” he notes. “And in some states where you find the most Lost Cause memorials, there may even be a fraction of a percentage point boost in sales for properties on streets with secessionist names.”

Beyond the South, the “Confederate discount” effect is notably more visible. The debate around changing street names in the U.S. has gathered momentum in recent years, with some 1,400 streets still named after Confederate figures. Much of the discussion, however, has focused on what Green calls the “principled reasons” for name changes–arguments that may or may not stack up favorably against the cost of changing signs.

This new study lends more economic clout to the cause of revising street names in the U.S.–albeit that the effect is more pronounced in Democratic-voting areas or areas with a higher share of Black or highly-educated residents. “In these places, sales on streets with Confederate names dipped even further, going for eight percent less on average, and this is particularly noticeable after events that have shone a spotlight on race inequity or white supremacy in the U.S.”

We seek new ideas for doing business. We’re driven by scholarship that redefines. That’s why the work we do at Goizueta is vitally important. We’re at the cutting edge of thinking. Our goal: lead the way, create knowledge, and move beyond business as usual. Gain more insight into faculty research at Goizueta.

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