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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thank you and congrats to Vamsi, Ken, Sriram, Ahmed, Cindy, Dorian, Dean and Rafael for their excellent research.

In Notre Dame,

Martijn

Dear Colleagues,

The many changes through which Mendoza has gone in recent years have included the creation of the Business Honors Program (BHP) and the Business Ethics and Society Program (BESP). I’d like to give you a brief update on both.

The BHP is now completing its second year, and we’ll soon be reviewing applications from current first-year students to join its third cohort. We have 60 students in each of our two current cohorts, so 120 total at the moment. Once we add our next cohort of 60, we will be at 180, which we anticipate to be approximately our steady state. Our students come from all Mendoza majors, and represent a nearly exact male/female split.

The BHP has a distinctive purpose. Honors programs at other institutions typically look only at academic achievement—the top 5% or 10%, say, of student GPAs determine who’s admitted. Our BHP, too, looks at GPAs and other indicators of academic achievement, but we also look at character. Our aim is not merely to reward people who get good grades, but also to encourage character formation that reflects Notre Dame’s distinctive two-fold academic and moral mission.

In other words, we want students who have, and can develop, a personal commitment to “Grow the Good in Business,” to seeking and finding a moral purpose that they integrate into their professional lives. We want our graduates to be ambassadors of not just the skills, knowledge and ability but the integrity and service that distinguish Mendoza and Notre Dame.

The BHP’s core components are honors courses in each major and academic department; Friday colloquia throughout the academic year, featuring prominent businesspeople who discuss the challenges and successes of their journeys; one-on-one mentoring for all BHP students; and optional enhancement events, including everything from service opportunities to bowling, escape rooms and an annual formal ball. This year, the BHP has also assumed responsibility for Mendoza’s undergraduate tutoring program, for which dozens of our BHP students have volunteered.

How are we doing so far? It’s still early, and we have far to go and much to learn, but we have had some initial signs of success:

The BHP is still growing and developing, and we’d love your help! Here are some ways you might consider becoming involved:

If you would like to help, make suggestions, or become involved in any way, please reach out to me or anyone else associated with the Program.

The other program we have begun is connected with the Business Ethics and Society Program, which the College Council officially created in the Spring of 2022.

Our first official act was to hire Mary Hirschfeld, who joined the BESP (with a joint appointment in Theology) in July 2022, and who boasts a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and a Ph.D. in theology from Notre Dame. In partnership with David O’Connor, professor of philosophy here at Notre Dame, we have also developed a new undergraduate minor called Business and the Common Good, which will explore virtue in business by drawing on perspectives including philosophy, theology, economics and Catholic social thought. The “gateway” course for this new minor debuted this spring, and the minor itself will be officially launched in fall 2023. Ann Tenbrunsel and Fr. Ollie Williams, along with Mary Hirschfeld, Dave O’Connor, John Sikorski and me, round out the BESP faculty.

We are in the process now of creating a dedicated website that will detail information regarding the BESP and its minor, so please stay tuned!

On behalf of the BHP and the BESP, we thank you for your support and partnership. We thank in particular Dean Martijn Cremers and the entire Dean’s Office. We thank the members of the BHP team, Crystal Boser, Tess Geishauser and Craig Iffland, and we thank Andy Wendelborn and his Undergraduate Studies advising team for their invaluable advice and support. We also thank our colleagues in the BESP for their wisdom and counsel. And we thank all of our colleagues, too numerous to mention, who have taught honors courses, given us advice and feedback, addressed our students and contributed in countless ways. We look forward to working with you closely as these programs grow.

In Notre Dame,

Jim Otteson

At the start of this semester, I highlighted the new undergraduate courses that showcase our commitment to curricular innovation.

In this column, we are highlighting new courses in our graduate programs, including those that integrate ethics, the moral purpose of business and the role of business in society. 

This spring, we have 808 graduate students enrolled in 180 classes across 11 graduate programs. We have introduced more than 20 new graduate courses during the 2022-2023 academic year that reinforce our mission as a business school to develop servant leaders while introducing new areas of learning, especially in AI and ESG.

You can view the full list of new graduate courses here. Following are a few selections of new courses:

Digital Transformation: Taught by Corey Angst (Jack and Joan McGraw Family Collegiate Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations), the MSBA & MBA course explores the need for organizations to be agile and innovative as emerging technologies disrupt entire industries in today’s global economy and generate new value propositions.

Monetizing Machine Learning and Deep Learning: Ahmed Abbasi (Joe and Jane Giovanini Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations) leads this MSBA-R course examining how artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced machine learning are fundamentally changing business and the broader societal implications. 

Data & Technology for Senior Leaders: In this EMBA class, Nick Berente (Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations) surveys current trends in data and technology — such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, the Internet of Things and a host of other innovations — to provide working knowledge for executives, as well as to reflect on the major ethical issues associated with these trends.

Transformational Leadership: Building on research showing that self-awareness is a key competency for leaders, Kris Muir’s (Associate Teaching Professor of Management & Organization) MSM course prepares aspiring business leaders to contribute productively to an organization by focusing on the understanding and development of individual leadership competencies.

Accountability in a Sustainable World: Peter Easton (Notre Dame Alumni Professor of Accountancy) teaches this MBA & MSA course designed to develop future sustainability leaders through active engagement with key participants, critical synthesis of research on the measurement of climate change effects and movement toward quantifiable achievable goals.

Climate Resilience in Business: With a focus on resilience and environmental justice, this new MBA course taught by Jessica McManus Warnell (Teaching Professor of Management & Organization) explores the intersection of business and environmental sustainability as companies and communities around the world respond to a changing climate.

Trading and Markets: John Shim’s (Assistant Professor of Finance) MBA course examines the role of financial markets, the economic forces that determine prices and trading opportunities, and how markets and market participants have evolved with technology.

Strategic Marketing: The strategic marketing EMBA course taught by Shankar Ganesan (Professor of Marketing) provides students with a systematic process for making strategic marketing decisions including the analysis, design, implementation and control of marketing strategies.

Curricular innovation is an ongoing imperative as we educate students within a context of rapid global change and emerging technologies. I’m thankful to our faculty as a whole for their commitment to teaching in ways that honor our mission as a Catholic business school. I especially thank Ken Kelley, Craig Crossland, the department chairs and assistant chairs, the graduate program academic directors, and Christine Gramhofer and the Student Services team for their contributions to the new course offerings.

In Notre Dame,

Martijn

I’m pleased to feature a new installment of our Research Roundup, which includes faculty research recently published in or accepted by top academic journals:

Robert Battalio, Professor of Finance

The Cost of Exposing Large Institutional Orders to Electronic Liquidity Providers (Management Science)

The research begins by showing that relationships between high-frequency traders (HFTs) and brokers allow brokers to avoid paying exchange fees for small pieces of large institutional orders. The researchers conclude by demonstrating that this type of routing strategy allows HFTs to become aware that large order is being worked in the market and to use this knowledge to engage in profitable trading strategies that increase overall trading costs for the large institutional order.

John Donovan, Assistant Professor of Accountancy

Financial Reporting and Entrepreneurial Finance: Evidence from Equity Crowdfunding (Management Science)

The study examines the role of accounting in entrepreneurial finance and provides evidence that greater financial statement disclosure increases capital raised through equity crowdfunding. The research also documents that financial reporting is incrementally more important in raising entrepreneurial capital when the firm has longer historical operations, during periods of greater macroeconomic uncertainty, and when complemented by other sources of non-financial disclosure.

Adam Wowak, Viola D. Hank Associate Professor of Management

John Busenbark, Assistant Professor of Management & Organization

How do employees react when their CEO speaks out? Intra- and extra-firm implications of CEO socio-political activism (Administrative Science Quarterly)

CEOs are increasingly taking public stances in societal debates. The research investigates the influence of such CEO activism on employees’ attitudes and behaviors, particularly their engagement with the firm and with the ideology underpinning the CEO’s stance. The researchers find that employees’ reactions to activism hinge on the alignment between their own values and the CEO’s stance. When they agree, employees respond positively, strengthening their commitment to the firm and support for the CEO’s ideological position. When the stance runs counter to employees’ values, they pull away, experiencing diminished commitment and support for the CEO’s cause.

Katie Wowak, Robert & Sara Lumpkins Associate Professor of Business Analytics

John Lalor, Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations

Sririam Somanchi, Assistant Professor of Business Analytics

Corey Angst, Jack and Joan McGraw Family Collegiate Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations

Business analytics in healthcare: Past, present, and future trends (Manufacturing & Service Operations Management)

The researchers provide a working definition of “business analytics in healthcare,” which had been absent from the literature. The paper leverages a topic modeling technique and network analysis to provide insight into how business analytics in healthcare research changes over time, and new opportunities for research. It provides an in-depth analysis of articles from the UT Dallas journal list published between 2007 and 2020. The study also analyzes another 6,515 articles from PubMed via the research team’s interactive article analysis web application tool, which is publicly available, over the same time period.

Joonhyuk Yang, Assistant Professor of Marketing

Digitization and Flexibility: Evidence from the South Korean Movie (Market Marketing Science)

This paper studies the transition from 35 mm to digital technology in the movie exhibition industry. Once digital movies were broadly available, theaters created increased product variety during less popular time slots on weekdays while offering more showings of consumers’ favorite movies during peak demand on weekend evenings. Overall, the research shows that digitization of movies and projection technology creates flexibility in scheduling, which seems to allow theaters to better respond to consumer demand.

Thank you to Robert, John D., Adam, John B., Katie, John L., Sririam, Corey and Joonhyuk for your important research contributions. My congratulations to all.

In Notre Dame,

Martijn