We have already entered the season of Lent, and mid-term break is just around the corner. During this upcoming break, our students will be working on experiential learning projects across the globe. A few examples include:
- Business on the Frontlines is sending 25 MBA students and 13 faculty advisors to Uganda, South Africa, Colombia and Kyrgyzstan.
- Graduate Business Programs Interterm has a total of 212 students involved in 37 projects: 82 MBA students in 14 international projects, 112 MBA students in 18 domestic projects, and 15 MNA students in five domestic projects in Orange County, California.
- Wendy Angst and 20 students from the Applied Impact Consulting or Innovation and Design Thinking classes will be traveling to Uganda to work on six projects with St. Bakhita Vocational Training Center
I greatly appreciate the efforts of faculty and staff to provide our students with truly unique, hands-on learning experiences. Our Frontlines team — Viva Bartkus, Kelly Rubey, Joe Sweeney, Drew Marcantonio, Samantha Fisher and Paige Risser — continue their groundbreaking work. The Experiential Learning team of Megan Piersma, Ben Wilson and Jim Cunningham is doing some exciting things with reimagining interterm and other programs (more to come on that). Wendy and many others who have come together to support the work with St. Bakhita are making a difference in an entire region in Uganda.
Further, I am glad to share a selection of recently published or accepted papers by our faculty:
Vamsi Kanuri, Viola D. Hank Associate Professor of Marketing
B2B Online Sales Pushes: Whether, When, and Why They Enhance Sales Performance (Production and Operations Management)
B2B sellers are increasingly deploying a direct online channel to supplement their traditional in-person salesperson channel. However, online channel rollouts exhibit a cold-start problem, wherein the customers are either unaware of the online channel or do not fully trust the channel to deliver the same level of experiences that salespeople deliver and, hence, do not adopt it. To overcome this problem, B2B sellers are launching online sales pushes that are targeted at salespeople to encourage them to nudge customers to migrate to the online channel. However, whether, when, and why salespeople embrace online sales pushes, when in fact they are likely to steer customers away from the salespeople, and how online sales pushes affect the seller's sales performance across the online and offline channels remains largely unknown. This study offers the first insight into these questions.
Vamsi Kanuri, Viola D. Hank Associate Professor of Marketing
B2B Online Sales Pushes: Whether, When, and Why They Enhance Sales Performance (Production and Operations Management)
B2B sellers are increasingly deploying a direct online channel to supplement their traditional in-person salesperson channel. However, online channel rollouts exhibit a cold-start problem, wherein the customers are either unaware of the online channel or do not fully trust the channel to deliver the same level of experiences that salespeople deliver and, hence, do not adopt it. To overcome this problem, B2B sellers are launching online sales pushes that are targeted at salespeople to encourage them to nudge customers to migrate to the online channel. However, whether, when, and why salespeople embrace online sales pushes, when in fact they are likely to steer customers away from the salespeople, and how online sales pushes affect the seller's sales performance across the online and offline channels remains largely unknown. This study offers the first insight into these questions.
Ken Kelley, Edward F. Sorin Society Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Sriram Somanchi, Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Ahmed Abbasi, Joe and Jane Giovanini Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Examining User Heterogeneity in Digital Experiments (ACM Transactions on Information Systems)
As digital experiments have become increasingly pervasive in organizations, their growth has prompted new challenges for large-scale experimentation platforms. One challenge is that experiments often focus on the average treatment effect (ATE) without explicitly considering differences across sub-groups, i.e., heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE). The researchers propose a framework for detecting and analyzing these heterogeneities based on user characteristics. Analysis of 27 real-world experiments spanning 1.76 billion sessions from a large digital experimentation platform demonstrates the effectiveness of our framework relative to existing techniques.
Sriram Somanchi, Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Ahmed Abbasi, Joe and Jane Giovanini Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Examining User Heterogeneity in Digital Experiments (ACM Transactions on Information Systems)
As digital experiments have become increasingly pervasive in organizations, their growth has prompted new challenges for large-scale experimentation platforms. One challenge is that experiments often focus on the average treatment effect (ATE) without explicitly considering differences across sub-groups, i.e., heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE). The researchers propose a framework for detecting and analyzing these heterogeneities based on user characteristics. Analysis of 27 real-world experiments spanning 1.76 billion sessions from a large digital experimentation platform demonstrates the effectiveness of our framework relative to existing techniques.
Cindy Muir (Zapata), Professor of Management & Organization
Dorian Boncoeur, Assistant Professor of Management & Organization
Matches Measure: A Visual Scale of Job Burnout (Journal of Applied Psychology)
The research presents a better way to assess the serious problem of employee job burnout, which can lead to reduced productivity, increased absences and leaves, job turnover and even hospitalization. Existing methods of identifying job burnout are lengthy and sometimes proprietary. The Matches Measure offers a faster and easier way through a visual tool that helps managers and organizations better understand how prevalent job burnout is amongst their employees. Given that it is a single item, the Matches Measure is also better suited to help organizations capture whether and how job burnout fluctuates over time.
Dorian Boncoeur, Assistant Professor of Management & Organization
Matches Measure: A Visual Scale of Job Burnout (Journal of Applied Psychology)
The research presents a better way to assess the serious problem of employee job burnout, which can lead to reduced productivity, increased absences and leaves, job turnover and even hospitalization. Existing methods of identifying job burnout are lengthy and sometimes proprietary. The Matches Measure offers a faster and easier way through a visual tool that helps managers and organizations better understand how prevalent job burnout is amongst their employees. Given that it is a single item, the Matches Measure is also better suited to help organizations capture whether and how job burnout fluctuates over time.
Dean Shepherd, Ray and Milann Siegfried Professor of Entrepreneurship (Management & Organization)
Bounding and Binding: Trajectories of Community-Organization Emergence Following a Major Disruption (Organization Science)
The paper conducts a qualitative study in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake to explore differences in the interactions between emerging organizations and communities. Despite all organizations facing the same external shock, they differed in how they interpreted the nature of crisis, established boundaries to build communities and created connections to bind themselves to their communities. We find three trajectories of community-organization emergence and demonstrate how organizations reestablish communities while simultaneously emerging within those communities.
Bounding and Binding: Trajectories of Community-Organization Emergence Following a Major Disruption (Organization Science)
The paper conducts a qualitative study in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake to explore differences in the interactions between emerging organizations and communities. Despite all organizations facing the same external shock, they differed in how they interpreted the nature of crisis, established boundaries to build communities and created connections to bind themselves to their communities. We find three trajectories of community-organization emergence and demonstrate how organizations reestablish communities while simultaneously emerging within those communities.
Rafael Zambrana, Assistant Professor of Finance
Capital Commitment and Performance: The Role of Mutual Fund Charges (Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis)
How does the scarcity of committed capital affect the equilibrium distribution of alphas in the asset management industry? The research proposes a model of active portfolio management where committed capital is in short supply. In the model, a portfolio's excess return is not fully appropriated by the asset manager but shared with long-term investors. Empirically, the researchers show that capital commitment allows asset managers to take advantage of slow-moving arbitrage opportunities. Consistent with the model, committed capital generates higher value-added, which, net of fees, accrues to long-term investors.
Capital Commitment and Performance: The Role of Mutual Fund Charges (Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis)
How does the scarcity of committed capital affect the equilibrium distribution of alphas in the asset management industry? The research proposes a model of active portfolio management where committed capital is in short supply. In the model, a portfolio's excess return is not fully appropriated by the asset manager but shared with long-term investors. Empirically, the researchers show that capital commitment allows asset managers to take advantage of slow-moving arbitrage opportunities. Consistent with the model, committed capital generates higher value-added, which, net of fees, accrues to long-term investors.
Thank you and congrats to Vamsi, Ken, Sriram, Ahmed, Cindy, Dorian, Dean and Rafael for their excellent research.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn