Happy Easter! The Lord is risen, alleluia!

I’m pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025 Mendoza Mission Research Awards, an annual recognition for Mendoza research papers published in high-quality academic journals that exemplify the College’s imperative to “Grow the Good in Business.” 

I also invite you to attend a presentation on May 2 from 3:00-4:30 p.m. in Mendoza 161, where the award winners will briefly describe their research findings. A reception will follow in the atrium.

Here are the recipients for 2025:

John Donovan, Gerspach Family Associate Professor of Accountancy
Yadav Gopalan, Assistant Professor of Accountancy
Pay for Prudence (Journal of Accounting and Economics)
This study introduces "pay for prudence" (PfP) in banker compensation, showing how it balances shareholder risk preferences with regulatory requirements. Detailed PfP terms correlate with equity incentives while reducing tail risk, bad loans, and regulatory downgrades without sacrificing profitability. PfP serves as "guard rails" complementing traditional equity incentives in guiding investment decisions.

Gregory Robson, Associate Research Professor of Business Ethics and Society
James Otteson, John T. Ryan Jr. Professor of Business Ethics
Freedom in Business: Elizabeth Anderson, Adam Smith, and the Effects of Dominance in Business (Philosophy of Management)
This paper strengthens Anderson's critique of workplace dictatorships by incorporating Smith's insights on labor division's harmful effects. The authors argue that workplace unfreedom is more severe than Anderson acknowledges, requiring stronger institutional remedies than she proposes to address worker domination.

Ben Matthies, Assistant Professor of Finance
Benjamin Golez, William and Cassie Daley Associate Professor of Finance
Fed Information Effects: Evidence from the Equity Term Structure (Journal of Financial Economics)
This study explores whether Fed interest rate decisions signal information about the state of the economy to investors. The authors use option prices to construct a short-horizon equity asset, a claim to aggregate dividends over the next six months, and study its response in a narrow window around FOMC announcements. The authors find a positive relationship between monetary policy surprises and short-horizon asset responses, revealing that short-term and long-term equity assets move in opposite directions on average following Federal Open Market Committee announcements. This pattern suggests that market participants interpret central bank policy decisions as conveying information about economic conditions. As a result, surprise accommodative monetary policy actions intended to stimulate economic growth may prove counterproductive if market participants interpret them as indicators of deteriorating economic conditions and curtail investment accordingly.

John Lalor, Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Ahmed Abbasi, Joe and Jane Giovanini Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Kezia Oketch, Ph.D. in Analytics Candidate
Should Fairness be a Metric or a Model? A Model-based Framework for Assessing Bias in Machine Learning Pipelines (ACM Transactions on Information Systems)
This paper introduces FAIR-Frame, a framework for modeling fairness across multiple protected attributes in ML models. Extensive testing showed that FAIR-Frame’s representational fairness measures better align with and predict allocational harm observed in downstream applications. FAIR-Frame has important implications for various ML contexts, including information retrieval, user modeling, digital platforms, and text classification, where responsible and trustworthy AI are becoming an imperative.

Cindy Muir, Professor of Management & Organization
Supervisor integrity empowers employees to advocate for diversity in problematic climates (Journal of Applied Psychology)
This research explores why supervisors often struggle to inspire employees to engage in diversity advocacy — moral, value-centric behaviors that actively support equity in the workplace for all employees. The authors propose that a key reason may be that employees don’t feel empowered to take such action. However, they argue that when supervisors demonstrate strong integrity by consistently adhering to valued, acceptable principles, it can inspire employees to step up as advocates, especially in environments where the diversity climate is perceived as poor because that’s when employees may feel their actions are most needed. The theory is tested through three studies: a field survey, an experimental vignette, and a behavioral experiment.

Shijie Lu, Howard J. and Geraldine F. Korth Associate Professor of Marketing
Within-Category Satiation and Cross-Category Spillover in Multiproduct Advertising (Journal of Marketing)
This study examines how privacy-preserving policies, such as reduced consumer data retention, affect consumer behavior, advertiser profits, and platform revenues in the context of multiproduct ads (MPAs). While enhancing privacy, these measures lower ad variety, reducing consumer engagement and ad effectiveness due to intensified within-category satiation and weakened cross-category complementarity. The findings underscore the challenge for ad platforms in balancing privacy with consumer interest and advertiser profitability.

Please join me in congratulating the winners and I hope to see you at the presentations on May 2.

In Notre Dame,

Martijn

Martijn Cremers
Martin J. Gillen Dean
Bernard J. Hank Professor of Finance