Tian Heong Chan Archives - EmoryBusiness.com https://www.emorybusiness.com/tag/tian-heong-chan/ Insights from Goizueta Business School Wed, 12 Feb 2025 22:32:25 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.emorybusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/eb-logo-150x150.jpeg Tian Heong Chan Archives - EmoryBusiness.com https://www.emorybusiness.com/tag/tian-heong-chan/ 32 32 Why Simultaneous Voting Makes for Good Decisions https://www.emorybusiness.com/2025/02/12/why-simultaneous-voting-makes-for-good-decisions/ Wed, 12 Feb 2025 19:00:30 +0000 https://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=34933 How can organizations make robust decisions when time is short, and the stakes are high? It’s a conundrum not unfamiliar to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. 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 […]

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How can organizations make robust decisions when time is short, and the stakes are high? It’s a conundrum not unfamiliar to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

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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“Most & Least Innovative States,” WalletHub https://wallethub.com/edu/most-innovative-states/31890#expert=Tian_Heong_Chan Wed, 23 Mar 2022 18:48:00 +0000 https://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=25086 The post “Most & Least Innovative States,” WalletHub appeared first on EmoryBusiness.com.

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#GoizuetaKnows https://www.emorybusiness.com/2020/10/15/goizueta-knows/ Thu, 15 Oct 2020 19:22:35 +0000 https://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=20350 Goizueta faculty, using rigorous methodologies, focus on researching important problems that affect the practice of business. The following is a sample of recently created new knowledge. To learn more, please visit goizueta.emory.edu/faculty. Recessions also hurt race relations Economic downturns aren’t just bad for businesses and households. Recessions tend to spur heightened animosity towards Black Americans […]

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Goizueta faculty, using rigorous methodologies, focus on researching important problems that affect the practice of business. The following is a sample of recently created new knowledge. To learn more, please visit goizueta.emory.edu/faculty.


Recessions also hurt race relations

Emily Bianchi, associate professor of organization & management
Emily Bianchi, associate professor of organization & management

Economic downturns aren’t just bad for businesses and households. Recessions tend to spur heightened animosity towards Black Americans in the U.S., and this not only drives social inequality but can significantly impair the outlook for Black professionals. These are the troubling findings of research published in Psychological Science by Goizueta’s Emily Bianchi, associate professor of organization & management, and Erika Hall, assistant professor of organization & management. They ran a number of studies to capture people’s responses and shifts in attitude during periods of recession. They also looked at the impact on professional success for Blacks in areas like the arts and politics. What they found is that when times are hard, White people feel more negatively towards Black people and are more likely to stereotype or compartmentalize them. They’re also more prone to seeing racial inequity as acceptable and even “natural.”

Erika Hall, assistant professor of organization & management
Erika Hall, assistant professor of organization & management

Similarly, Black politicians and musicians were less likely to fare well in congressional elections and in the Billboard charts. Bianchi and Hall’s research is striking in that it explores the more nuanced and subtle forms of racism that manifest when communities face financial downturns. It suggests there is a certain fluidity in attitudes towards race that can be shaped by changes in our economic and social context — which may also help explain, at least in part, why Black people are particularly hard hit in times of recession.


Whose side are you on?

Giacomo Negro
Giacomo Negro, professor of organization & management

Protest marches grab headlines. But while heightened visibility for a cause might be good news for the social movement in question, the trade-offs for other affiliated organizations may not stack up so positively. So says a recent article in Organization Science by Giacomo Negro, professor of organization & management at Goizueta. Together with Stanford University’s Susan Olzak, he put together a data set of pro-LGBTQ protest events staged across a range of U.S. cities over 20 years to gauge how these events impacted local organizations — social movement groups on the one hand, and on the other, more loosely affiliated organizations like local businesses with customers and stakeholders both in and outside of the LGBTQ community. What they found was that greater participation in pro-LGBTQ protests lowered the market viability of these neutral organizations. Negro puts this down to having to “choose sides” and being less effective at addressing the needs of multiple audiences in the presence of polarizing events such as protests. Protests by nature pose a type of challenge to society, so people associated with the cause motivating the protest have to take a clear side or stance, explained Negro. And the visibility protests generate comes at a price for any participating organization that engages distinctly different stakeholder groups, from customers or clients to employees. If one group endorses a controversial issue, another can shun it. These insights come at a time when U.S. firms are increasingly involved with social causes, from human rights to race and gender issues. They will need to balance the pros of visibility against trade-offs in terms of their stakeholders.

IoT boosts online sales

Panagiotis “Panos” Adamopoulos, assistant professor of information systems & operations management

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of smart devices or objects that are connected to the internet — objects that “talk” to each other and that can be combined with automated systems to gather and analyze information. IoT technology is making waves in business today because of a slew of benefits that range from rich data collection, enhanced security and reduced operation costs to enhanced customer-centricity. One space benefitting from the use of IoT is e-commerce. And a forthcoming article in Information Systems Research by Goizueta’s Panagiotis “Panos” Adamopoulos and Vilma Todri, both assistant professors of information systems & operations management, suggests that forward-thinking retailers would do well to understand the advantages of using IoT as an alternative purchase channel for consumers.

Vilma Todri
Vilma Todri, assistant professor of information systems & operations management

Together with NYU’s Anindya Ghose, they tracked sales data from a major multinational online retailer using IoT to automate purchasing and consumers’ convenience. They found that implementing the new technology led to significant statistical and economic gains for the company thanks to increased automaticity and more favorable mental accounting that made these products “easier to consume.” Interestingly, these gains were particularly associated with certain product characteristics, helping retailers determine effective future IoT strategies. As businesses continue to waiver about adopting IoT because of technical challenges that surround its implementation, these findings should provide interesting food for thought.

Learn from experience (just make sure it’s someone else’s too)

Kristy Towry
Kristy Towry, John and Lucy Cook Chair and professor of accounting

Businesses and business managers grow and develop because we learn. We learn from our performance metrics and KPIs — they tell us what we do well and not so well. But it’s challenging. For a start, there’s the issue of the metrics themselves. In today’s complex, fast-changing environment, it can be hard to pin down our KPIs with total accuracy. Then there’s the question of how we learn. Is it better to learn from our own firsthand experience — or from others’? Kristy Towry, John and Lucy Cook Chair and professor of accounting, and colleagues Jongwoon “Willie” Choi 11PhD, Gary Hecht, and Ivo Tafkov 09PhD have explored the science behind learning and decision-making in heightened complexity, and their new paper in The Accounting Review finds that when KPIs are messy, managers learn far better when that learning is vicarious, in other words, when we learn from each other and share our learning. And that’s because vicarious learning helps us to see the bigger picture, the trends and the patterns, Towry said. Learning from our own experience alone tends to make us over-focus on what’s happened most recently and what’s immediately in front of us and miss the greater scheme. The challenge, then, to businesses that want to accelerate their growth is to break through the silos and proactively look for ways to share knowledge, explained Towry. Learn from experience by all means. Just make sure it’s other people’s experience too.

Putting a value on peer pressure

Gonzalo Maturana Falcone
Associate Professor of Finance Gonzalo Maturana

Our colleagues can exert some influence over different aspects of our careers and even our private lives. There’s nothing too surprising about that. However, new research published in The Review of Financial Studies by Associate Professor of Finance Gonzalo Maturana should give households and businesses alike pause. When it comes to making big purchasing decisions — whether or not to refinance our mortgage, say — we could be more susceptible to positive peer influence than we realize. Maturana and Jordan Nickerson from MIT Sloan School of Management leveraged publicly available employment records — public school teachers from Texas — and unearthed something stunning: where there was notable mortgage refinancing activity in a peer network, individuals within that network were 20.7% more likely to refinance their own mortgage and access positive savings. And that’s not all. The peer effect also helped shape individuals’ choice of mortgage lender. And critically, the more savings they were likely to make by refinancing, the more of this activity there was across the peer group. These peer dynamics should be on the radar of policy makers looking to incentivize mortgage refinancing and to drive household liquidity, said Maturana, as well as banks who want to drive their customer base growth responsibly. The latter could leverage the multiplier effect of peer dynamics to make sure that valuable information on mortgage rates reaches more households more efficiently.

Is breakthrough innovation always a team sport?

Tian Heong Chan
Tian Chan, assistant professor of information systems & operations management

If you’re looking to innovate, conventional wisdom says you need to build a team. You only get the breakthrough ideas when you have different people working together, collaborating and sharing knowledge, right? Not necessarily, says Tian Chan, assistant professor of information systems & operations management at Goizueta. Chan and colleagues put together a study, published in IdeaWatch, that reveals something striking: in certain circumstances, individuals can be just as effective as teams in creating breakthrough innovations. It all depends on how easy it is to break down your invention into different components or modules, he said. With design patents that cover innovations on the way something looks — think the iconic curved bottle of a Coca-Cola or Apple’s sleek iPhone — innovations tend to be holistic and don’t easily divide into chunks, and a team might get bottlenecked by coordination or communication issues. With utility patents that cover innovations on the way a product functions, you can have inventions that are very modular (such as the Dell PCs) to inventions that are hard to break into components (such as the internal combustion engine). So here, teams do tend to do better than individuals. His advice to business? If you want to increase your chances of a breakthrough, align your human resources and collaboration structures around the type of invention in your sights. But don’t assume you always need a team.

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Innovation: Should it always be a team sport? https://www.emorybusiness.com/2020/08/17/innovation-should-it-always-be-a-team-sport/ Mon, 17 Aug 2020 20:55:51 +0000 https://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=20121 Conventional wisdom has it that innovation is very much a team sport. To create a breakthrough innovation that is vastly more successful than its predecessors, you need to prioritize teams over the individual.   Not always, according to Tian Heong Chan, assistant professor of information systems & operations management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. It […]

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Tian Heong Chan
Tian Heong Chan, Assistant Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management.

Conventional wisdom has it that innovation is very much a team sport. To create a breakthrough innovation that is vastly more successful than its predecessors, you need to prioritize teams over the individual.  

Not always, according to Tian Heong Chan, assistant professor of information systems & operations management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. It depends very much on the degree to which the invention can be broken down into discrete chunks of work.

Chan and colleagues from INSEAD published a paper, “Revisiting the Role of Collaboration in Creating Breakthrough Inventions,” in the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management journal in 2020. In it, they look at more than one million U.S. patents for new products filed between 1985 and 2009. The majority of these patents were awarded for innovations in function—machines, processes or products that delivered some kind of utility. The others corresponded to design; in other words, the distinct visual form or aspect of a product, like Coca-Cola’s iconic curvy bottle or the Apple iPhone.

Sifting these patents for breakthroughs (those ranked by citations as being in the top 5 percent of their product class), Chan and his colleagues were able to look at whether standout innovations were the product of teamwork or whether any of them had actually been developed by a lone innovator. And what they found sheds fascinating and useful new light on the dynamics undergirding the innovation process.

As a rule, breakthrough functional products—those awarded patents for some kind of utility—do tend to be created by teams. But when it comes to inventions that are centered on breakthrough designs, it’s a whole different ball game. Here, the solo inventor is every bit as likely to create a breakthrough as an entire team.

This is probably down to what Chan calls the “holistic nature” of design.

“The way we think about an iconic design—think the iPhone, or the Coke bottle—is essentially holistic. In other words, we think about it as a whole thing, defined by the entirety of its design and not by its individual parts or its components.”

Functional inventions, on the other hand, tend to be more modular in nature. A computer, for example, has functions that are much easier to partition into different modules or components.

Take the Dell PC. These are computers that are configured to work with interchangeable parts that can be easily connected, said Chan. It’s no surprise that teams of collaborators build Dell PCs, because the modularity of the product means that different members can work fairly independently on different parts, sharing resources and leveraging the advantages of knowledge and skill diversity.

But with a more holistic design invention, it’s a very different dynamic, he said.

“Imagine a team trying to work together to create something like a logo or even a painting. It’s feasible, but the time they will spend trying to coordinate and communicate ideas among different people is likely to create bottlenecks that the lone inventor simply doesn’t face.”

With design inventions, the “divide and conquer” dynamics of teamwork can actually slow progress down. The lone inventor, on the other hand, can mentally assess, iterate and discard elements with relative ease.

Chan and colleagues found that the same logic applies to functional inventions that are less modular in nature. Consider the two-stroke internal combustion engine first developed by Karl Benz—every component in the engine is specifically designed to fit with other components in a tightly integrated manner. Similar to design inventions, Chan and his co-authors found that lone inventors do relatively better on these types of integral inventions.

Does this mean that collaboration is a disadvantage for firms looking to create a breakthrough design? Not at all, said Chan.

Lone inventors still benefit from collaborating with others. In fact, the study found that solo inventors with extensive collaboration networks of their own reap many of the team-oriented benefits of creative feedback and resource sharing that lone operators who do not collaborate simply don’t have. So individuals still need to build a collaboration network as a channel of valuable information. 

The key takeaway for businesses looking to increase their chances of a breakthrough is to think about the type of innovation that they have in their sights, Chan said, and to align their human resources and collaboration structures around how holistic or modular that innovation is.

“Our study clearly shows that the cost-benefit trade-offs for teams depend on the modularity of the invention they’re working on,” Chan said. “The advantage a team brings will vary greatly depending on how much and how easily that invention can be partitioned into independent modules and components. If your focus is design and integral inventions, you would do well to see lone creators as a highly valuable resource. Especially those with an extensive collaboration network.”

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Knowledge Creation: A look at research from Fall 2017 https://www.emorybusiness.com/2017/10/15/knowledge-creation-a-look-at-research-from-fall-2017/ Sun, 15 Oct 2017 12:00:53 +0000 https://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=14158 Using rigorous methodologies, Goizueta faculty focus on researching important problems that affect the practice of business. The following is a sample of recently created new knowledge. To learn more, please visit goizueta.emory.edu/faculty.

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Using rigorous methodologies, Goizueta faculty focus on researching important problems that affect the practice of business. The following is a sample of recently created new knowledge. To learn more, please visit goizueta.emory.edu/faculty.


Managing style and product design

Mobile phones look very different now than they did ten years ago. With access to all of the design patents available from the US Patent & Trademark Office (including ones from products in the telecommunications industry), Tian Heong Chan, assistant professor of information systems & operations management, and coauthors Jürgen Mihm (INSEAD) and Manuel E. Sosa (INSEAD) show how one can cluster them according to their visual similarities. The process results in an evolutionary timeline charting the successive styles of mobile phones from “clamshell” to “touchscreen slate” and everything in between. This approach creates a novel data platform from which researchers can start testing hypotheses about how product forms evolve. With the data, the authors show that there is increasing turbulence (or unpredictability in the change in product forms) across all product categories. In other words, it is much harder now than in the past to predict what the next hot style will be based on current trends. This is especially salient in non-tech categories, such as furniture and fashion. The authors conclude that companies with the capability to manage this increasing uncertainty will have a significant competitive advantage in the future. Management Science (2017)


Relational signaling and gift giving

Morgan Ward

Prior research indicates that gift givers are motivated by competing goals. Often, they will simply select an item of the recipient’s choosing. However, gift givers are also likely to select an item on their own to help show knowledge of the recipient and further define and maintain a personal connection. Morgan Ward, assistant professor of marketing, and coauthor Susan Broniarczyk (U Texas) take the research a step further by analyzing how the closeness of a relationship further impacts the gift-giving decision when a gift registry is readily available. The duo employed five separate studies with human subjects presented with various gift-giving scenarios. The paper notes, “We find that despite their stated primary intention to please recipients, close (vs. distant) givers ultimately are more likely to ignore recipients’ explicit registry preferences in favor of freely chosen gifts.” Ward and Broniarczyk conclude that divergence from the registry was not necessarily about finding a better gift. Instead, it occurred only when givers specifically received attribution for their selection. The closeness of the personal connection resulted in a “perceptual distortion of the gift options in favor of relational-signaling gifts.” Distant givers were much more likely to pick an item from the registry, selecting gifts closely aligned with recipients’ preferences. Journal of Marketing Research (2016)


The link between corporate alliances and returns

Tarun Chordia

Strategic alliances are agreements between two or more firms to pursue a set of agreed upon objectives while remaining independent organizations. Alliances are formed for a number of reasons, including licensing, marketing or distribution, development or research, technology transfer or systems integration, or some combination of the above. Tarun Chordia, R. Howard Dobbs professor of finance, and coauthors Jie Cao (Chinese U of Hong Kong) and Chen Lin (U Hong Kong) find evidence of return predictability across alliance partners. If the alliance partner or partners have high (or low) returns this month, then the firm has high (or low) returns over the next two months. Using a sample of alliances over the period 1985 to 2012, the authors find that a long-short portfolio sorted on lagged one-month returns of strategic alliance partners provides a return of over 85 basis points per month. This long-short portfolio return is robust to a number of specifications, including different adjustments for risk, controlling for different proxies for cross-autocorrelations, and excluding partnerships with customer-supplier relationships, as well as controls for industry returns. They theorize, “If investors are fully aware of the impact of strategic alliances on returns and pay attention to the firm-partner links, then the stock price of a firm should quickly adjust to price changes of its partners’ stocks.” The evidence suggests that investor inattention may be the source of a firm’s underreaction to its partners’ returns. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (2016)


Understanding the influence of mobile promotions

Michelle Andrews, assistant professor of marketing, and coauthors Jody Goehring (RetailMeNot), Sam Hui (U Houston), Joseph Pancras (U Conn), and Lance Thornswood (JCPenney) cull together divergent streams of research to provide a framework to better understand how mobile promotions influence the in-store shopping behavior of consumers. Online promotions allow merchants to reach shoppers easier and faster, enabling traditional stores to text out online discounts or highlight specific products. Merchants can also use geolocation on mobile phones to text and target shoppers once inside of their store to feature merchandise or advertise a special offer. The authors identify a number of key areas for additional research to “enable long-term, value enhancing relationships between consumers and marketers.” For instance, they note the need for a better understanding of the role of privacy concerns on personal data collection via mobile devices. Andrews and coauthors also find that a deeper investigation of such things as return on investment, loyalty programs, upselling, proximity to purchase, and global promotions are required to get a true sense of the effectiveness of mobile promotions. Journal of Interactive Marketing (2016)


Significance of pricing and product-line strategies

Ramnath Chellappa

In new research, Ramnath Chellappa, associate professor of information systems & operations management, and coauthor Amit Mehra (U Texas) investigate the business practice of IT “versioning,” whereby a company creates different models of a product in order to charge varying prices for each one. Much research takes into account economies of scale and a company’s marginal costs—the price of making an additional unit of a product. However, Chellappa and Mehra note that companies also need to consider consumer usage costs when they decide to create various versions of the same IT product. But for IT products and services, the “costs” are not monetary. The pair note the “time commitment and physical effort” to use IT products or services. They use the example of mobile devices: “One cannot enjoy these information goods without them consuming resources such as memory and processing power.” They determine that “this consumption-related disutility” is critical to feature bundling and consumer segmentation. The researchers create a model to test the consumer cost impact, using a “digital goods firm with a unique production cost structure and agents—consumers who face resource constraints in consuming these goods.” Given the usage costs, they determine that individuals may not necessarily prefer products with more features to lower-quality items. The pair concludes “marginal cost and consumers’ usage costs have the same impact on versioning strategy.” Management Science (2017)


The impact of behavioral bias on decision-making

Diwas KC

For business leaders, the ability to make critical decisions in a dynamic work and industry environment is essential to the success of an organization. However, Diwas KC, associate professor of information systems & operations management, and coauthors Francesca Gino (Harvard U) and Bradley R. Staats (UNC) note that behavioral traits can sometimes impact the ability to weigh new information and make a logical decision, even in the face of negative news. KC, Gino, and Staats analyze 147,000 choices made by cardiologists during a six-year period when they were presented with negative news from the FDA about drug-eluting stents used in angioplasty. The experienced cardiologists were more likely to continue using the questionable stents than their less-experienced peers, even after being informed of the problem. The role of influence also played a factor in the decision-making. They add, “Given that those who feel they are expert are less likely to react to negative news, those around them show the same tendency, thus making worse decisions than those in groups with less perceived expertise.” The seasoned cardiologists were better able to “generate counterexamples to the negative news and thus be susceptible to confirmation bias.” The authors note managers should be aware that more experience and the perception of expertise may bias decision-making. Management Science (2017)


The process behind auditor judgement

Auditors are required to use considerable judgment in their job, assessing information from a number of sources to create financial reports, critique accounting estimates, and assess a company’s internal controls over financial reporting. But an auditor’s decision-making process is not well understood. In their paper, Kathryn Kadous, professor of accounting, and coauthors Emily E. Griffith (U Wisconsin) and Donald Young 13PhD (Goizueta, Indiana U) provide a framework for researchers to better evaluate the judgment of auditors and, in turn, improve audit quality. Prior research in this area presumes that “decision makers typically engage deliberate, analytical processes to solve problems (i.e., pursue goals) that they have specifically chosen, that they limit their decision inputs to items they view as relevant, and that they have access to the details of their own cognitive processing.” The trio notes that “nonconscious goals” and “intuitive processes” are also influential in the decision-making process and in the factors driving these processes. Kadous, Griffith, and Young conclude that their framework indicates researchers approach their investigation by taking into account “conscious and nonconscious goals” and “decision makers with conflicting incentives, as well as differing capabilities.” Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory (2016)


The role of the economy on individualism

Past work has shown that as countries become wealthier, people often become more individualistic. In new research, Emily Bianchi, assistant professor of organization & management, takes the investigation a step further and finds that even subtle fluctuations in the economy are associated with changes in individualism. She finds that during good economic times, Americans are more likely to seek out ways to signal their uniqueness and individuality. For instance, during boom times, Americans tend to give their children more uncommon names and are more likely to prize autonomy and independence in child-rearing. They are also more likely to favor music featuring self-oriented lyrics. Conversely, during recessions, Americans tend to focus more on fitting in and tend to give their children more common names, listen to more relationally oriented music, and encourage their children to get along with others. Additionally, Bianchi discovered that recessions engender uncertainty, which, in turn, decreases individualism and encourages interdependence. The study results indicated that the “link between wealth and individualism is driven not only by differences in how people live, work, and learn but also by their sense of the predictability, orderliness, and certainty of the surrounding environment.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2016)

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Goizueta Business School welcomes new faculty https://www.emorybusiness.com/2016/12/01/goizueta-business-school-welcomes-new-faculty/ Fri, 02 Dec 2016 02:27:58 +0000 http://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=11338 Goizueta welcomes new faculty including (from left to right) Vilma Todri, assistant professor of information systems & operations management; Rohan Ganduri, assistant professor of finance; Jesse Bockstedt, associate professor of information systems & operations management; Cassandra Estep, assistant professor of accounting; Karl Schuhmacher, assistant professor of accounting; Inyoung Chae, assistant professor of marketing; Demetrius Lewis, […]

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Goizueta welcomes new faculty including (from left to right) Vilma Todri, assistant professor of information systems & operations management; Rohan Ganduri, assistant professor of finance; Jesse Bockstedt, associate professor of information systems & operations management; Cassandra Estep, assistant professor of accounting; Karl Schuhmacher, assistant professor of accounting; Inyoung Chae, assistant professor of marketing; Demetrius Lewis, assistant professor of organization & management; Morgan Ward, assistant professor of marketing; and Tian Heong Chan, assistant professor of information systems & operations management. John Kim, not pictured, is a lecturer in organization & management.

“We are thrilled about these additions to our team,” says Kristy Towry, vice dean for faculty & research, Goizueta Term Chair in Accounting, and professor of accounting. “They are all innovators in their fields, and I can’t wait to see what new knowledge they’ll bring to the table here at Goizueta.”

To read more about our amazing new faculty, see the online faculty guide: http://emory.biz/thoughtleaders.

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Nine new faculty members join for Fall 2016 https://www.emorybusiness.com/2016/09/22/nine-new-faculty-members-join-for-fall-2016/ Thu, 22 Sep 2016 21:12:58 +0000 http://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=10983 "I am both privileged and honored to help this group achieve new heights as researchers and educators," said Kristy Towry, Vice Dean of Faculty and Research.

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Goizueta Business School welcomes many new faculty members in the Fall 2016 including:

“I am both privileged and honored to help this group achieve new heights as researchers and educators,” said Kristy Towry, Vice Dean of Faculty and Research.

The group will provide support in teaching and research.

“In recent years our programs, under faculty leadership, have undergone wholesale curriculum updates designed to provide more industry-specific and contemporary coursework,” Towry added. We have also doubled-down on experiential learning by adding project-based learning requirements.

“We continue to publish in top scholarly journals. In fact, faculty members have sat on boards at more than 40 journals. Countless more have reviewed submissions at a variety of publications.”

More Faculty Experts

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Goizueta adds more key thought leaders http://www.emorybusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Emerging-Thought-Leaders.pdf Wed, 21 Sep 2016 16:45:41 +0000 http://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=10912 In recent years, under faculty leadership, Goizueta has undertaken wholesale curriculum updates designed to provide more industry-specific and contemporary coursework. Meet some of the new -- and very well-connected -- faculty in the classroom.

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