“We continue to develop principled and impactful leaders and entrepreneurs, foster innovation for a data and technology driven world, and grow a global presence fueled by local synergies,” said Gareth James, John H. Harland Dean. “I’m proud of our faculty and staff – and energized about the future of our school and students.”

Impacting Business & Beyond

Faculty and staff contribute to the Goizueta and Emory community, but also have significant impact on society and the broader business world. External awards include:

Karen Sedatole, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Accounting, was named as an editor to the Accounting Review. Sedatole was also elected to the position of president elect for the Management Accounting section of the American Accounting Association.

Emma Zhang, associate professor of information systems & operations management, was named an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. Zhang was also named an associate editor to the Journal of the American Accounting Association.

Ruomeng Cui, associate professor of information systems & operations management, was a finalist for the 2022 Management Science Best Paper Award in Operations Management for her paper, “Learning from Inventory Availability Information: Evidence from Field Experiments on Amazon.”

Panos Adamopoulos, assistant professor of information systems & operations management, was named as an associate editor at Management Science.

Giacomo Negro, professor of organization & management, was appointed as the senior editor of Organization Science and also received an honorable mention for the Robert K. Merton Award for his paper, “What’s Next? Artists’ Music After Grammy Awards.” Negro additionally served as the principal investigator for the 2022 LGBTQ Southern Survey.

Erika Hall, associate professor of organization & management, was named as an incoming associate editor at the Academy of Management Discoveries.

Dan McCarthy, assistant professor of marketing and Marina Cooley, assistant professor in the practice of marketing were recognized by Poets&Quants’.” McCarthy was also a finalist for the Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award.

John Kim, associate professor in the practice of organization & management, was designated as one of the top instructors by Coursera for Management Consulting courses.

Vilma Todri, assistant professor of information systems & operations management, was named an associate editor to the Management Information Systems Quarterly Journal, one of the top three leading Information Systems journals.

Tonya Smalls, assistant professor in the practice of accounting, has been appointed to serve on the Inaugural Advisory Board for Make-A-Wish Georgia (MAWGA).

Leading the Future Of Emory and Goizueta

Goizueta Business School and Emory also honor academic professionals and leaders for their dedication to excellence through teaching, content development, experiential learning, scholarly inquisition, and commitment.

“We could not be prouder of our exceptional faculty and staff for their remarkable work and dedication throughout the past year,” says Anandhi Bharadwaj, who will step down as vice dean for faculty and research this summer as Professor Wei Jiang prepares to take on the role. “It has been an honor to work alongside our faculty and staff in developing the school and its programs.”

The recipients of these prestigious honors and awards are listed below:

Rajiv Garg, associate professor of information systems & operations management, was awarded the Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Education. Garg was also honored as the MSBA Distinguished Core Educator.

John Kim, associate professor in the practice of organization & management, was awarded Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Giacomo Negro, professor of organization & management, received the Keough Faculty Award. Negro also received the Jordan Research Award.

Marvell Nesmith, associate dean of academic affairs & instructional design, received the Keough Staff Award.

Marina Cooley, assistant professor in the practice of marketing, was honored as the BBA Distinguished Educator and was also recognized for MBA Teaching Excellence (One Year).

Omar Rodríguez-Vilá, professor in the practice of marketing, was awarded the Evening MBA Distinguished Core Educator and was also recognized for MBA Teaching Excellence (Two Year).

Charles Goetz, associate professor in the Practice of organization & management, was awarded Evening MBA Distinguished Elective Educator.

Ray Hill, associate professor in the practice of finance, was recognized for MBA Teaching Excellence (Classic Faculty).

Alvin Lim and David Sackin were awarded MSBA Distinguished Elective Educators.

Rob Kazanjian, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Organization & Management, was awarded Executive MBA Distinguished Educator (Core).

Kevin Crowley, associate professor in the practice of finance and Narasimhan Jegadeesh, Dean’s Distinguished Chair of Finance, were awarded MAF Distinguished Educators. Crowley was also awarded Executive MBA Distinguished Educator (Elective).

Giacomo Negro, Melissa Williams and Panos Adamopoulos received Goizueta research awards at the levels of full, associate, and assistant professor, respectively.

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

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Estimates suggest that spending on digital ads in the U.S. alone will reach a staggering $201 billion by 2023 – more than two-thirds of total spend. And it makes sense. With consumers increasingly shopping online, advertisers continue to ramp up their use of data and technologies to find innovative new ways to reach target audiences.

The Flip Side to Digital Advertising Success

The sheer ubiquity of online advertisements is driving a corollary upswing in the use of another digital technology. Ad blockers are easy-to-install and free-to-use software that consumers can deploy to hide unwanted ads on their screens, and they are gaining huge popularity worldwide. The numbers are hard to determine, but some evidence points to anywhere from 600 million to two billion Internet users having downloaded some form of ad-blocking in the last three years or so – well over 11% of the global internet population. 

Also hard to gauge is the impact on advertising revenue that ad-blockers are having – that is, until now.

A new paper by Vilma Todri, assistant professor of information systems and operations management at Goizueta, sheds stunning light on the effect of ad-blocking on online search and purchasing behaviors among internet users. And what she has found should give advertisers serious pause for thought.

According to her analysis, ad-blockers decrease consumer online spending by an average of 1.45%. Now, assuming that around 615 million internet users have downloaded some kind of ad-blocking software in recent years, the actual impact puts the loss in revenue from digital advertising around the $14.2 billion mark, year over year. And that’s not all. Todri also finds that ad-blocking seems to have the effect of limiting consumer spending disproportionally on certain brands over others. Users who opt out of seeing digital ads tend to continue to purchase mostly those products or services they are already familiar with, and not engage with new brands; they are less likely to use different search channels or visit new e-commerce websites as a result of ad-blocking.

Analyzing Customer Engagement from 300 Million Internet Visits

To get at these insights, Todri analyzed data from a U.S. web behavior dataset spanning a three-year period, from January 2015 to December 2018. She looked at web-wide visits, transaction behaviors and demographic identifiers across a total of 92,000+ users and more than 300 million internet visits. To measure the effect of ad-blocking, Todri matched all of this data with an ad-blocker dataset from the same source – a well-known U.S. measurement and analytics company – which shows that around 10% of users had installed an ad-blocker at some point during this three-year window.

Crunching the numbers, Todri finds that the effect of using ad-blocking software on these users is to reduce their online search engine sessions by 5.6%. They also spend 5.5% less time visiting e-commerce websites. In other words, consumers who opt out of seeing ads end up browsing and shopping significantly less than others. And in terms of what these users are buying, the data shows that they are much less likely to spend on brands they don’t know or have not experienced before (and conversely, more likely to stick to familiar brands.) Digging even deeper, Todri also finds that this negative effect penalizes the brands that invest most heavily in advertising online more that those that don’t. In other words, ad-blockers are hurting those who advertise online most.

Todri’s paper is the first to expose the quantitative, negative impact of ad-blocking on consumer spending. And her findings should be on the radar of any company looking to market its products and services online, she says.

“The data clearly shows that ad-blockers reduce online spending by 1.45%, which amounts to something in the order of $14.2 billion in lost revenue given that about 600 million people around the world have installed this kind of software,” she says. “And the figures suggest that it’s the brands that heavily invest on online advertising who are bearing the brunt of this drop-off in consumer spending.”

Search Behaviors, Interrupted

“Advertisers also need to look at the fact that ad-blockers inhibit search behaviors,” adds Todri. “The figures point to a drop of around 5% when users have installed ad-blockers, which in turn means that they are not discovering and spending on new brands. They’re sticking with what they already know.”

There’s an imperative here for companies to interpret these findings and reflect on what they say about ad-blocking, and also about what constitutes “acceptable advertising practices,” she says.

“It’s reasonable to assume that people who use ad-blockers simply don’t like ads and aren’t influenced by them. Yet the data points to a different conclusion: if consumer purchasing falls after installing ad-blockers, it would suggest that advertising does work – seeing advertisements does drive searching and purchasing behaviors. So taken together, there’s a likely imperative here for advertisers to find new formats in terms of reaching their targets, and to strengthen their organic channels and social presence online.”

Digital advertising clearly does impact search and purchasing behaviors, says Todri, so firms need to get creative while being cognizant of the fact that some consumers find current advertising practices annoying.

Read more about Vilma Todri’s fascinating research into economics and machine learning, digital advertising and strategy, online consumer behavior, and social media.

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Companies seek local influencers to pitch products. Even though most influencers amass geographically dispersed followings on social media, companies are willing to funnel billions of sponsorship dollars to multiple influencers located in different geographic areas, effectively creating sponsorships that span cities, countries, and in some cases even, the globe. The desire to work with local influencers has spawned advertising agencies that specialize in connecting companies with influencers and may soon redefine the influencer economy.

This trend has merit, our research team finds. In a new Journal of Marketing study, we show a positive link between online influence and how geographically close an influencer’s followers are located. The nearer a follower is geographically to someone who posts an online recommendation, the more likely she is to follow that recommendation.

To investigate whether geographical distance still matters when word of mouth is disseminated online, our research team examined thousands of actual purchases made on Twitter. We found the likelihood that people who saw a Tweet mentioning someone they follow bought a product would subsequently also buy the product increases the closer they reside to the purchaser. Not only were followers significantly associated with a higher likelihood to heed an influencer’s recommendation the closer they physically resided to the influencer, the more quickly they were to do so, too.

We find that this role of geographic proximity in the effectiveness of online influence occurs across several known retailers and for different types of products, including video game consoles, electronics and sports equipment, gift cards, jewelry, and handbags. We show the results hold even when using different ways to statistically measure the effects, including state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning techniques on millions of Twitter messages.

We posit that this role of geographic proximity may be due to an invisible connection between people that is rooted in the commonality of place. This invisible link can lead people to identify more closely with someone who is located nearby, even if they do not personally know that person. The result is that people are more likely to follow someone’s online recommendation when they live closer to them. These online recommendations can take any form, from a movie review to a restaurant rating to a product pitch.

What makes these findings surprising is that experts predicted the opposite effect when the internet first became widely adopted. Experts declared the death of distance. In theory, this makes sense: people don’t need to meet in person to share their opinions, reviews, and purchases when they can do so electronically. What the experts who envisioned the end of geography may have overlooked, however, is how people decide whose online opinion to trust. This is where cues that indicate a person’s identity, such as where that person lives in the real world, come into play.

We may be more likely to trust the online opinion from someone who lives in the same city as us than from someone who lives farther away, simply because we have location in common. Known as the social identity theory, this process explains how individuals form perceptions of belonging to and relating to a community. Who we identify with can affect the degree to which we are influenced, even when this influence occurs online.

Our findings imply that technology and electronic communications do not completely overcome the forces that govern influence in the real world. Geographical proximity still matters, even in the digital space. The findings also suggest that information and cues about an individual’s identity online, such as where he/she lives, may affect his/her influence on others through the extent to which others feel they can relate to him/her.

These findings on how spatial proximity may still be a tie that binds even in an online world affirm what some companies have long suspected. Local influencers may have a leg up in the influence game and are worth their weight in location. For these reasons, companies may want to work with influencers who have more proximal connections to increase the persuasiveness of their online advertising, product recommendation, and referral programs. Government officials and not-for-profit organizations may similarly want to partner with local ambassadors to more effectively raise awareness of—and change attitudes and behaviors towards—important social issues.

Read the full article.

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Since he was four years old, Olympic-hopeful Matthew Jones 21BBA has been passionate about strength sports. For 13 years, Jones hit the wrestling mat until concussion issues sidelined him at the age of 16, forcing him to walk away from the sport he loved. Jones quickly discovered powerlifting and went on to win the 18-Under Powerlifting World Championship in 2017. 

When Jones came to Emory, however, he opted to take a different journey for his sporting career. “During my first year at Emory, I walked onto the Emory Track & Field team as a hammer thrower,” Jones said. “I had never done the sport before, but wanted to represent Emory in athletics. I wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself.”

On the way to a team meet in Alabama, an accident caused Jones to suffer a severe concussion, tragically ending his moment as an Emory athlete. “It was the worst concussion I’ve ever had,” Jones said. “It was tough because I couldn’t train, let alone complete the level of school that Emory had required.” 

As pivotal moments often require life changes, Jones’ concussion forced him to slow down and reevaluate. He shifted focus solely to Olympic weightlifting, a sport he discovered and grew to love during team workouts. USA Weightlifting noticed and placed him into the Transitional Athlete Program, a program that monitors the progress of weightlifters with potential who have come from other sports. Within a year of starting, Jones finished seventh at Junior Nationals (under-20) and qualified for Senior Nationals within a year and a half. In 2020, Jones ranked 16th in the country for his weight class. 

Winning Performance Prompts Freshman Business Launch

Of his many academic and athletic achievements, Jones is proudest of starting his own business, Matthew Jones Performance, as a freshman in 2018. With a unique business model, Jones uses remote weekly individualized programming, weekly technical video analysis, and frequent communication with clients to reinforce and grow their athletic potential. “I remotely coach athletes of all skill levels from across the country,” he said. “I take pride in the fact that I can help people of all ages reach their physical and mental goals through athletics.” 

Jones credits Goizueta in helping him grow his business, including Senior Lecturer in Organization & Management John Kim’s Strategic Management course, Associate Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management (Biostatistics & Bioinformatics) Donald Lee’s Advanced Decision Analytics, and Assistant Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management Vilma Todri’s Introduction to Business Data Analytics.

“As an Information Systems & Operations Management major, we deal with a lot of data, so we’re looking for business patterns to make operations more efficient,” Jones said. “In coaching, I’m looking for patterns in the weightlifting or in the athlete’s performance so that I can make changes to make it better. I have used this knowledge to better utilize athlete data and also run the business-side more efficiently with more attention to detail.” 

Although Jones will be working full-time at Cintas after graduation, his passion for strength sports will continue as he trains as a weightlifter, as well as works to expand his growing business.  “I’m going to have a lot of challenges ahead of me,” he said. “But I’m looking forward to getting into a routine and seeing how successful I can be and how far I can go.”

The study of Organization & Management is a multi-disciplinary endeavor that draws from various social science disciplines including economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. Goizueta Information Systems & Operations Management faculty teaches future leaders to account for and leverage digital technology and novel operating practices required to compete in business today. 

Emory University’s Commencement Weekend ceremonies will take place May 14-16, 2021. Enjoy other student stories on the Emory Memory wall. 

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The stuff of science-fiction until only recently, internet of things (IoT) technology is beginning to change the way we live and work. Simply put, IoT is a system of interrelated devices—things that can include gadgets, digital objects, or machines, wearables and so on—which have the capacity to send and receive data over a network without human agency or human interaction. As a technology, IoT is novel, and it’s poised to reconfigure a range of sectors and industries—among them, the world of retail.

Amazon is a leader in the consumer-facing space with an ecosystem of apps like Alexa, Fire TV, and the now-defunct Dash Button. Meanwhile, tech-savvy retailers are using IoT to facilitate operations. Smart shelves in stores can detect the status of perishable goods or inventory requirements; radio frequency identification (RFID) sensors can actively track the progress of produce through the supply chain. Retailers can even use IoT to send customers personalized digital coupons when they walk into the store.

As IoT continues to gain traction around the globe, the potential for efficiency-boosting innovation in retail is clear. Less clear, however, is its actual impact on consumer choices and behaviors. Sure, IoT can save time and mental effort, but how does that translate into real-world business outcomes?

This is the question that underscores new research by Vilma Todri and Panagiotis Adamopoulos, both assistant professors of information systems and operations management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School.

They were keen to understand whether consumer behavior is significantly changed under the regime of this new technology as it continues its roll out across the world. Specifically, they wanted to know if IoT technology actually increases demand for products.

And it turns out that it does.

Demand on the rise

“IoT technology in retail is really in its infancy, so understanding its impact on users and business is key,” Adamopoulos said. “We wanted to shed light on these dynamics at this early point to spark interest and generate more debate around how retailers can leverage this technology.”

Together with Stern’s Anindya Ghose, he and Todri put together a large data-set with information about sales of certain products in countries with existing IoT retail markets and in others where the technology has not yet been introduced.

“We needed to take into account these sorts of variables to really understand the effect,” Todri said. “So, we had our control group of non-IoT retail markets, and we were able to compare sales data for the same products in countries where the technology has been adopted.”

The researchers also controlled for time trends, looking at the impact on sale prior to and post IoT adoption.

“Looking at the data over time and pinpointing the exact moment when a product has been made available for sale via IoT sales channels across different countries and at different moments, we were able to infer the effect of the technology on product sales,” Todri said.

In total, they looked at sales for the same or similar products in six countries between 2015 and 2017. They also compared sales across different retailers.

“By analyzing the same sales information for different products in different markets using different channels across the world, we can see differences in the data that can only be attributable to this new technological feature,” Adamopoulos said. And the differences are significant.

Easing the pain of purchasing

Adamopoulos, Todri, and Ghose find that when a product is made available for sale via internet of things channels, sales relative to other products in the same category increase by between 13 and 14 percent. Interestingly, the surge in demand for these products does not translate into a dip in demand for other, similar products that can only be purchased via other, more conventional means. In other words, IoT purchasing processes are increasing sales in one area without cannibalizing sales elsewhere.

They put this down to three factors.

First is the ease of consumption. As Todri puts it: “IoT takes the friction out of buying something. You have to key in your personal information and payment details just once and never again thereafter. It reduces the mental effort and time involved in interacting with the retailer.”

Then there’s what Todri calls the “endless supply” effect. “When you start to run out of something, you can simply reorder it at the click of a button or using a simple voice command,” she said. “You get that reassuring feeling that you have a seamless, endless supply of something that you need. And that makes it more likely you’ll shop more for this particular product this particular way.”

Finally, there’s the pain factor.

“Reaching for your wallet and punching in your credit card details is intrinsically onerous to us as consumers. We have a heightened awareness of the spend—of the fact we are depleting our income. With IoT it’s all automated, so your purchase pain is reduced,” Adamopoulos said. “In reality, nothing has changed in practice. As a consumer, you are paying the same price you would if you went to the supermarket. But mentally, you feel like you’re not paying and that you have the confidence of having a seemingly endless supply of something important to you.”

New ideas that are here to stay

IoT technology in retail has the potential to deliver a win-win dynamic, Todri said. Consumers save time while retailers see a significant increase in demand; the technology facilitates the sales process which in turn facilitates the sales themselves. According to their findings, it makes “total sense” for retailers to look at integrating this technology as it becomes increasingly available.

Considering this, they caution that transparency and corporate responsibility should remain front of mind. 

“Countries have been uneven in their take up of IoT. France, for instance, was slower than Germany because of concerns about the law, and ensuring that consumers have full and easy access to information about prices,” Todri explained.

It would be a mistake, Adamopoulos warned, for retailers to hike prices for products available for purchase via IoT. Similarly, as the technology becomes more ubiquitous, we are likely to see certain refinements. These might include things like the option to cancel orders if the price is excessive or has increased since the last purchase.

“IoT in retail is really just beginning. And the opportunities to leverage its many benefits will be felt by consumers and retailers alike, provided we understand the importance of ethical business practices and transparency,” the researchers noted. “But as a technology, we are confident it has the potential to disrupt and reshape markets all over the world. These are exciting new ideas, and they’re going to stick around for a while.”

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Recessions also hurt race relations

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.”

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?

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

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.

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)

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

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?

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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The winners of this year’s Roberto C. Goizueta Award for Leadership are Michael Battat 20BBA and Major Jason “J” Waidzulis 20MBA. Nominated by a member of the Goizueta community (faculty, staff or a fellow student), the award recognizes one graduating BBA student and one graduating MBA student who embody the values and leadership qualities exhibited by Roberto Goizueta. Nominations are reviewed by a selection committee composed of BBA and MBA program deans and several professors, and the winners are chosen with six leadership criteria in mind: love of learning; inspirational leadership; creative thinking; courage and commitment; transparency and trust; excellence and integrity.

Established in the fall of 2018 and endowed by The Goizueta Foundation, each student receives $25,000 as part of the award. Student recipients also identify the faculty member most influential in shaping their time at Goizueta. Battat selected Jeff Rosensweig, associate professor of finance and director of The Robson Program for Business, Public Policy, and Government.

Waidzulis identified Ken Keen, senior lecturer in organization & management and associate dean for leadership. Rosensweig and Keen will each receive a $5,000 honorarium.

“It’s an honor to be recognized for leading in a way that reflects the legacy of Roberto Goizueta,” said Waidzulis. “It’s also extremely meaningful because selection required nomination and support from a community of world-class faculty, staff and colleagues at the Goizueta Business School. They have inspired me over the past two years, and it makes me feel good knowing that I have been able to pay it forward by impacting the lives of others.”

For more details about the award recipients, visit emory.biz/leadershipaward.

Faculty accolades

Karen Ton, assistant professor of accounting, received the Emory Crystal Apple for Excellence in Undergraduate Business Education in February. Sponsored by the Residence Hall Association, the Crystal Apple Awards honor faculty members who go above and beyond in their search for knowledge and involvement in the Emory community. Students provide the nominations, and this year the committee received more than 200 nominations.

In March, Emory’s Office of Technology Transfer recognized Daniel McCarthy, assistant professor of marketing, and David Schweidel, professor of marketing, at their 14th Annual Celebration of Technology & Innovation. The pair were highlighted for their 2019 technology innovation—a software that can derive brand insights from mobile location data.

While mobile location analytics software has existed for a while, McCarthy and Schweidel have developed a privacy-preserving methodology to infer a brand’s customer base size and share of wallet within a category by separately identifying customers’ location and time-invariant preferences both for brands and specific stores.

Ruomeng Cui, assistant professor of information systems & operations management, was awarded a 2019 Alibaba Innovative Research Award for her proposal entitled “Causal Inference and Optimization: Dynamic Treatment Strategies in Coupon and Pricing Applications.” The awards are given annually by the Alibaba Innovative Research (AIR) program, a bridge that connects the Alibaba Group with researchers from top universities and research institutes around the world. AIR provides research funding, real-life business scenarios and other necessary support to successful applicants.

Vilma Todri, assistant professor of information systems & operations management, is this year’s recipient of the Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. The award recognizes faculty with a record of excellence in teaching and was established by Emory Williams, a 1932 Emory College alumnus and long-time trustee.

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Securitized loan modification and loan performance

After the collapse of the housing market, the wave of foreclosures in the US changed the economic landscape of many neighborhoods across the country. Some academics and policymakers have argued that the renegotiation of those loans was a much better alternative than foreclosure and that incentives should have been offered to financial institutions to encourage it. However, little research exists to understand the performance of loans that were modified. Gonzalo Maturana, assistant professor of finance, takes a close look at loan modifications made early in the recent housing crisis to better understand the value of offering incentives to modify securitized non-agency loans. According to Maturana, researchers contend that the small number of loan modifications added to the number of foreclosures during the subprime crisis. His analysis consisted of slightly more than 835,000 non-agency securitized loans that became delinquent between August 2007 and February 2009. Maturana found that loan “modification reduces loan losses by 35.8% relative to the average loss, which suggests that the marginal benefit of modification likely exceeded the marginal cost.” Additionally, modifications resulted in fewer liquidations. He also found that modifications were particularly useful “in preventing future loan losses in times of large increases in delinquencies when servicers are more likely to be working at full capacity.” Review of Financial Studies (2017)

The rise of ETFs and market impact

As the popularity of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) continues to grow at a rapid pace, the role that these basket or index-linked products play in the market is an ever-growing concern. For instance, ETFs now constitute more than 30% of the daily value traded in US exchanges. Suhas A. Sridharan, assistant professor of accounting, and coauthors Doron Israeli (Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya) and Charles M. C. Lee (Stanford U) dive into the issue by examining the impact of ETF ownership on the availability of information on individual securities and the market for those same securities. The trio analyzes a sample of 443 unique ETFs for the firm-year between 2000 and 2014. They note that ETFs are a particularly attractive investment vehicle for less informed traders. With trading costs for individual securities rising as a result of the flow to ETFs, more informed traders have less of an incentive “to expend resources to obtain firm-specific information.” As the depth and size of the ETF market grows, individual stock prices become less informative. Review of Accounting Studies (2017)

Understanding economic development and its environmental impact

While fears about the environmental impact of economic development remains under discussion, the number of proenvironmental international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) continues to grow. But little is known about their influence on countries to create more eco-friendly industrial processes and technologies. In new research from Wesley Longhofer, assistant professor of organization & management, and coauthor Andrew Jorgenson (Boston College), the pair determined which nations they believed were “more embedded in the proenvironmental world society,” determining the level of influence of INGOs, as well as global treaties and professionals, on the countries they studied. The data took into account GDP per capita to find the effect of economic development on carbon emissions. The research examined whether countries that were more likely to feel this global pressure to “enact pro-environmental policies or invest in cleaner technologies” subsequently experienced a drop in rates of carbon emissions. Longhofer and Jorgenson created a measure to analyze the effects of development over time on carbon emissions in 79 countries, using data from 1970 to 2009. They found that “nations that are the most embedded in the environmental world society experienced a moderate decrease” in the impact of economic development on carbon emissions. Essentially, larger and more developed nations were more likely to feel the influence of proenvironmental INGOs than less developed countries, ultimately showing a small drop in carbon emissions. Social Science Research (2017)

Consumer word-of-mouth and social media

Certainly, marketers are well aware of the value of the consumers’ word-of-mouth (WOM) endorsements of a product or service. But the ubiquitous nature of social media demands that advertisers find new ways to tap into how consumers interact and communicate to leverage the power of WOM online. Panagiotis Adamopoulos, assistant professor of information systems & operations management; Vilma Todri, assistant professor of information systems & operations management; and Anindya Ghose (NYU-Stern) take a close look at the role of hidden personality traits of online users and how they play into the effectiveness of product WOM on Twitter. The trio used big data, machine learning methods, and causal inference econometric techniques to study consumer purchases made through Twitter accounts. The research showed an increase in the likelihood of a purchase by 47.58% when there was exposure to WOM tweets from a sender who had similar personality traits to the recipient of the information. The trio found that introvert users were much more accepting of WOM versus extrovert users. They also noted agreeable, conscientious, and open social media users are more effective influencers. The combinations of personality traits of disseminators and recipients of WOM impacted the decision to buy a product, with the researchers noting that a “WOM message from an extrovert user to an introvert peer increases the likelihood of a subsequent purchase by 71.28%.” Information Systems Research (2018)

Speculation and its impact on trading volume

Financial researchers have long wondered exactly which economic forces cause variation in asset prices and returns. For instance, traders will often target financial instruments due to their volatile and highly liquid nature, such as US treasury bonds. This speculative behavior takes advantage of the frequent price movements of the product. But the influence of that behavior remains the subject of debate. Francisco Barillas, assistant professor of finance, and Kristoffer Nimark (Cornell U) take a deep dive into the issue by investigating the impact of speculative trading activity on the variation of long maturity US bond yields. For their analysis, Barillas and Nimark use public information to develop a rational model to track “informed traders that take on speculative positions to exploit what they perceive to be inaccurate market expectations about future bond prices.” They argue that their research takes a more “suitable approach for empirical work” by factoring in how traders exploit private information that other traders may not have. The authors note that bond prices alone are not enough information for predicting bond returns. The two write, “If traders have access to different information, this price may differ from what an individual trader would be willing to pay for the bond if he had to hold it until maturity.” Ultimately, they find that this speculation remains a key driver of trading volume, accounting for a “substantial fraction of the variation in historical US bond yields along with the usual analysis of estimating returns based on bond prices.” Review of Financial Studies (2017)

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