From the Dean's Desk

Guest column: Erin Bellissimo

Erin Bellissimo

Erin Bellissimo

Monday, 7 March 2022
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The Notre Dame Institute for Global Investing seeks to be a preeminent, university-based investment management research and education program worldwide, convening ideas and people around critical industry topics. One of our key priorities is to promote more inclusivity within the investment management industry. NDIGI recognizes that the industry is stronger with diversity of thought leadership and background. Therefore, our research, curriculum and events encourage and promote diversity within the industry, focusing on women, underrepresented minorities and first-generation students.
Women’s History Month is an excellent opportunity to highlight how NDIGI aims to expand the pipeline of women entering financial services, especially asset management. Launched in 2019, the annual Women’s Investing Summit (WIS) is an opportunity for all students at Notre Dame to hear from senior female executives in financial services. Patty Brady of NDIGI took charge of planning WIS ’22 and brought an outstanding group of female role models to campus in February.
In addition, we see an opportunity to help expand the pipeline to Mendoza for women. We are grateful to Mark Dumich, who worked tirelessly to partner with the Admissions office and several finance faculty, to launch a high school pre-college leadership program (The Power of Investing) that targets diversity.  Beyond the classroom, Mark serves as an ambassador to enrolled students to support their questions and application process to Notre Dame. Mark’s personalized attention and support are making a real difference for these high school students in getting to know Notre Dame and Mendoza.
We are also thankful for Professor Carl Ackerman who has partnered with NDIGI on nearly every diversity issue we come up with. From leading Girls Who Invest on campus to now heading our pre-college Power of Investing class this summer, Carl puts in so much time with NDIGI and we appreciate his support for women in finance.
Finally, our partnership with student clubs has been a central part of realizing our mission and priorities at NDIGI. Tess Swain is on the frontlines of supporting our professional clubs, including Smart Women in Securities, which aims to introduce undergraduate women to finance and investing.
The NDIGI team serves as a resource for all students – organizing executive fellows to meet 1:1 with students, offering focused groups of women to have coffee chats with campus visitors and executives, and partnering with Bob Rischard in career services to advise and mentor students on an as needed basis. We help with internships, advice and programming with an intention to continue to change the face of investing. Our hope is that the work of NDIGI and our campus partners will result in increasing the brand of Notre Dame and the Mendoza College of Business within the investment space, allowing us to draw the best students, faculty and investors to Notre Dame.
In Notre Dame,
Erin Bellissimo
Managing Director of the Notre Dame Institute for Global Investing

Guest column: Ryan Retartha

Ryan Retartha

Ryan Retartha

Monday, 28 February 2022
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I’m happy to share a few updates and statistics regarding our Mendoza alumni engagement efforts for this year.
Facts and Figures
While it is always difficult to track all alumni engagement, I’m confident to report that so far this academic year, we have more than 360 individual instances of alumni connecting directly with students across at least 64 different initiatives. These include club interactions, social and networking events, and career support, just to name a few. My endless thanks to my student, faculty and staff partners who constantly innovate new ways for our alumni to elevate the student journey at Mendoza.
Alumni Book Club
In January, we launched the Mendoza Alumni Book Club to wild success. This initiative includes an online portal where users can discuss the book, receive regular email communication with reminders and new discussion topics, and engage in live author chats. As of this week, we have 768 alumni members, 268 discussion posts and almost 16,000 pageviews. As we begin our second book next month, “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out,” I’m very pleased to invite all Mendoza faculty and staff to join as well. You can sign up to participate at this link. We’ll also be introducing some Notre Dame faculty selections later this year, so keep an eye out for those!
Commencement 2020
The Class of 2020 will finally get an opportunity to celebrate its graduation this coming Memorial Day weekend. The Registrar has assigned each college a time to host their own adjacent celebration to the University commencement on May 29 (Sunday) in the Notre Dame Stadium. Mendoza will be hosting our celebration brunch for all business alumni — undergraduate and graduate — at 10 a.m. on May 28 (Saturday).
We have about 200 alumni who have RSVP’d so far, and University Enterprises and Events will determine a venue after they see our headcount as of April 1. We will also need the usual slate of Faculty Marshals for the Sunday Commencement exercises in Notre Dame Stadium; please let me know if you are interested in serving. To complement the May events, we also look forward to providing a Mendoza Class of 2020 reunion event on the weekend of the Notre Dame versus California football game on September 17. 
Yours in Notre Dame,
Ryan
Ryan Retartha
Director of Mendoza Alumni Relations

February Research Roundup

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 21 February 2022
Following are highlights of recently published papers:
Ahmed Abbasi, Joe and Jane Giovanini Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
David Dobolyi, Assistant Research Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
"The Phishing Funnel Model: A Design Artifact to Predict User Susceptibility to Phishing Websites" (Information Systems Research)
Phishing is a security risk that affects both individuals and organizations alike. To better protect against it, we (along with our co-authors) developed a model that is better able to predict user susceptibility to phishing in real-time by evaluating the entire phishing process holistically.
John R. Busenbark, Assistant Professor of Management & Organization
"Corporate-level influences on internal capital allocation: The role of financial analyst performance projections" (Strategic Management Journal)
Research on internal capital allocation — the practice by which corporate managers of multidivisional firms distribute financial resources to the business units — offers perplexingly mixed insight as to whether managers benefit from helping financially stimulate underperforming divisions or rewarding the top performing segments. In our research, we theorize and find that firms performing well below or above expectations are incentivized to engage in the former, whereas firms performing consistent with expectations allocate capital consistent with the latter.
Zhi Da, Howard J. and Geraldine F. Korth Professor of Finance
"Extrapolative Beliefs in the Cross-section: What Can We Learn from the Crowds?" (Journal of Financial Economics)
Using novel data from a crowdsourcing platform for ranking stocks, we investigate how investors form expectations about stock returns. We find that investors extrapolate from stocks’ recent past returns, with more weight on more recent returns, especially when recent returns are negative, salient, or from a dispersed cross-section.
Dean Shepherd, Ray and Milann Siegfried Professor of Entrepreneurship“Grounding Business Models: Cognition, Boundary Objects, and Business-model Change” (The Academy of Management Review)
This study builds on grounded-cognition theories and the notion of boundary objects to offer a grounded-cognition framework of business-model change. By developing this framework, we advance understanding of the micro-foundations of strategy; offer a new pathway by which stakeholders inform value creation and value capture; and explain nuances in the relationship between boundary objects, business-model coherence and the decision to change a business model, and illustrate how the mechanisms that help create a viable new business model can also help overcome an actor’s psychological obstruction to making a pivot.
Joonhyuk Yang, Assistant Professor of Marketing
"High-energy Ad Content: A Large-scale Investigation of TV Commercials" (Journal of Marketing Research)
A trend reported by both academics and practitioners is that advertising on TV has become increasingly energetic. Using a data set of over 27,000 TV commercials delivered to U.S. homes during the period between 2015 and 2018, this study investigates the association between the energy level in ad content and consumers’ tendency of ad-tuning. The authors find that more energetic commercials are likely to be tuned in more or avoided less by viewers, while the association varies across product categories and program genres. The main implication of this study is that advertisers should pay attention to components of ad content other than loudness, which has been regulated by law.
Congratulations, Ahmed, David, John, Zhi, Dean and Joonhyuk on your publication success.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn

Guest column: Rob Easley

Rob Easley

Rob Easley

Monday, 14 February 2022
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The ITAO Department is pleased to announce a new Master of Science in Business Analytics focused on Sports Analytics. This is a natural fit for the University of Notre Dame with its deep connection to collegiate athletics, and also for the Mendoza College of Business with the GAMA Lab (Gaming Analytics & Business Research Lab) and new Ph.D. offerings in Analytics and Management.
There is no better time for us to embark on this journey — the stars are aligned with both ITAO’s analytical strength and Notre Dame’s athletic excellence.
The MSBA in Sports Analytics offers the same baseline instruction in business analytics as the standard MSBA while using required courses in sports and human performance analytics in place of electives. Other coursework will emphasize either front-office (e.g., ticketing, pricing, fan experience, etc.) or athletic performance analytics problems where such examples are applicable. Many aspects of this program align with our imperative to Grow the Good in Business, such as using analytics in human performance to predict and prevent injury or to maximize wellness.
This program requires the same rigor and provides the same degree that is currently offered through our MSBA-Chicago and MSBA residential programs. With its focus on sports analytics, we anticipate attracting a number of post-graduate and graduate-transfer student athletes. Therefore, we developed the program to be delivered across a full year that starts in the summer session. We also arranged classes to avoid early mornings and later afternoons to minimize scheduling conflicts for student athletes. We anticipate launching the program this summer (2022) if we have sufficient student enrollment.
Assistant Teaching Professor Brandon Erlacher will serve as the Academic Director of MSBA-Sports Analytics. In addition to teaching, Brandon has experience helping brands find and communicate insights, optimize customer journeys, design digital products and personalize customer experiences to drive engagement and conversions. He is a Double-Domer with both an EMBA and an MSBA earned as part of the first MS in Business Analytics cohort in Chicago.
In this program, Assistant Teaching Professor Martin Barron will provide courses on Machine Learning, Sports Analytics and Human Performance Analytics. Martin earned both his M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics (ACMS) at Notre Dame, working with statistical machine learning techniques. A native of Dublin, Ireland, Martin worked as a data scientist for Kitman Labs, a human performance optimization firm, prior to joining the ITAO department. While at Kitman Labs, he developed machine learning pipelines and collaborated with elite sports teams on projects in the areas of injury prevention, performance maximization, player growth and maturation, and strategy analysis. He is also the faculty advisor to Notre Dame’s Sports Analytics Club, which provides analytics services to many ND athletic teams.
More information is available on the website, which we will continue to modify and build out over time.
Special thanks to Corey Angst, Kristen Collett-Schmitt, María Stutsman y Márquez, Brian Connelly and the Mendoza Graduate Business administration for collaboratively working to get this going in such a short time frame.
Rob Easley
John W. Berry Sr. Department Chair
IT, Analytics, & Operations

New undergraduate business core

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 7 February 2022
I would like to share with you an update on a major revision to our undergraduate program (i.e., our Bachelor in Business Administration — BBA — degree).
This past fall, working closely with department chairs and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies Jim Leady, we revised the Business Core curriculum to significantly reduce requirements and increase flexibility in our students’ plans of study. The new curriculum meets our ultimate objective to expand students’ academic opportunities and improve their journey here at Notre Dame.
The Business Core includes the business courses that all BBA degree students must take regardless of their major. The key change (pending any minor amendments that may be added via College Council votes) is that the new Business Core will reduce the number of required courses from 18 (49.5 credit hours) to about 10 courses (26.5 credit-hours) plus nine credit hours of “broadening” business electives.
Importantly, all undergraduate students will still experience a foundational course from each business discipline. The reduced number of core courses primarily involves the upper-level courses currently required; these in part will be replaced by the new nine credit hours of broadening business electives that students will take in multiple departments outside of their own major’s department.
The new Business Core provides students with greater choice in their individual curricula, enabling them to better design a curriculum suited to their particular academic interests and career aspirations. It will give students more opportunities to specialize in a secondary discipline, both in other colleges and within business, while maintaining the overall balance between liberal arts and business coursework. The reduced requirements and enhanced flexibility also will enable further course innovation in the future, allowing for our faculty to offer new courses aligned with their academic and social interests.
This change to the Business Core is the first step in our broader curriculum revision. After a rigorous, constructive and open debate, the College Council approved the revised Business Core outlined above by a 2:1 margin on December 3, with the expectation that the Council would consider various amendments over the coming weeks and months. The College Council subsequently considered several amendments when it met again on December 17 (none of which had a majority vote in favor of adding to the core) and will consider more amendments at its next meeting scheduled on February 17. I expect that meeting will conclude the first step of the revision process.
The next step is already occurring in our five academic departments. Each department is considering the impact of the reduced Business Core coursework on the requirements for its major. Some departments will adjust requirements if a course that was eliminated from the Core is critical for the major. The potential revisions to each of the majors will be completed this spring, allowing the new Business Core and major requirements to apply to the new First Year business students starting in Fall 2022 (i.e., the Class of 2026). None of the changes will apply to any of the students currently enrolled in our undergraduate program.
The third step is the curriculum innovation enabled by the substantially reduced Business Core requirements and the increased flexibility for our undergraduates. We envision the development of minors in each department that are open to all business majors, including cross-disciplinary minors with courses across multiple departments as well as cross-college minors.
In addition to the new minors, our hope is that BBA students may be able to double-major within business for the first time in the College’s history while maintaining the overall balance of a liberal arts education. We also hope to work toward offering a cornerstone interdisciplinary course with experiential learning for undergraduates similar to the Meyer Business on the Frontlines Program for MBA students.
As with any change, I realize that there will be significant disruption as the College transitions to the new curriculum. This transition may be particularly disruptive to faculty who have been teaching courses that will no longer be required in the new Business Core. I commit to fully supporting affected faculty transitioning to new teaching opportunities over the next several years as they retool to teach other courses.
I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the new curriculum design process and look forward to the future innovation in our undergraduate program.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn

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