Here we are, in the last week of classes! Best wishes for all of the work related to the end of the semester.

I hope to see you at our Christmas Party from 3:30-5 p.m. on Wednesday (December 11) in Stayer Commons to celebrate the (almost) end of the semester and the Advent and Christmas seasons. 

We can also celebrate the tremendous accomplishments of our faculty in publishing research in top journals this year. Here are some recent papers:

Ahmed Abbasi, Joe and Jane Giovanini Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Pathways for Design Research on Artificial Intelligence (Information Systems Research)
An expanding body of research is adopting a design perspective on artificial intelligence (AI), wherein researchers prescribe solutions to problems using AI approaches rather than describing or explaining AI-related phenomena being studied. This article highlights six major impediments for such research and uses the explosion in the state of the art for large language models to underscore each. The authors propose pathways for overcoming the impediments and use examples to illustrate how the pathways can be followed for different types of AI-related design artifacts.

Sarv Devaraj, Fred V. Duda Professor of Business
Uncertainty and Complexity in Healthcare Operations: How Hospitals Weather the Perfect Storm (Journal of Operations Management)
The research studies the effect of two sources of uncertainty in healthcare operations  — the variation in patient mix and patient volume — on healthcare outcomes of length of stay and number of procedures. The paper also examines the mitigational role of the operations concepts of focus and capacity utilization. Using a dataset of 830,853 patient discharges, the researchers find support for their hypotheses, while also finding considerable heterogeneity in the effects of uncertainty across hospital types.

Jianna Jin, Assistant Professor of Marketing
Avoiding Embarrassment Online: Response to and Inferences About Chatbots When Purchases Activate Self‐presentation Concerns (Journal of Consumer Psychology)
This research explores when consumers prefer chatbots over human service representatives: In purchase contexts where self-presentation concerns are active (e.g., buying diarrheal pills), consumers prefer chatbots (vs. human) because chatbots are perceived as having no “mind” (i.e., ability to think and feel). However, this preference weakens when chatbots are anthropomorphized (e.g., given human names and human profile pictures), as consumers mistakenly attribute more “mind” to these humanized chatbots.

Leandro Sanz, Assistant Professor of Finance
Unintended Real Effects of EDGAR: Evidence from Corporate Innovation (The Accounting Review)
This study examines the impact of the SEC’s EDGAR system on corporate innovation. While improved disclosure dissemination can lower firms' cost of capital, it may also increase proprietary disclosure costs, potentially discouraging innovation. The researchers find that EDGAR-filing firms reduce innovation investment, while technology rivals and private firms increase theirs. These results highlight how increased disclosure dissemination can deter investment in innovative projects with returns dependent on information spillovers.

Brittany Solomon, Thomas A. and James J. Bruder Assistant Professor of Administrative Leadership
Liberal Versus Conservative Distrust: A Construal-level Approach to Dissimilarity in the Workplace (Journal of Applied Psychology)
This research challenges the assumption that dissimilarity to others uniformly undermines trust in the workplace, where cross-party and cross-race interactions are structurally induced. Five studies demonstrated that liberals tend to view their conservative (politically dissimilar) coworkers as less trustworthy people in the world and refrain from disclosures to them, while conservatives tend to view their racial out-group coworkers as less trustworthy in their jobs and refrain from relying on them at work.

Thank you to Ahmed, Sarv, Jianna, Leandro and Brittany for your research contributions.

In Notre Dame, 

Martijn