Faculty

Real Estate Professor Admitted to U.S. Supreme Court

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UConn Center of Real Estate and Urban Economic StudiesA professor at the UConn Center for Real Estate and Urban Economic Studies was recently admitted to practice law before the United States Supreme Court. Attorney Lucy Michaud, whose areas of expertise are real estate and business law, has been working with the real estate center at the School of Business as asst. ext. professor and a liaison to the Department of Consumer Protection.

Michaud was among 14 attorneys invited to apply for the special designation by the Phi Alpha Delta Law Fraternity, International (P.A.D.). The accepted group was inducted to the Supreme Court of the United States in a ceremonial ritual on June 2, as part of the 48th annual P.A.D. Day held in Washington, D.C.

Phi Alpha Delta Law Fraternity, International is the largest co-ed professional law fraternity in the United States. Justices Samuel Anthony Alito, Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor are all P.A.D. members. Following the swearing-in ceremony, Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor visited with the group to individually meet the inductees.

Pictured: Lucy Michaud (front, right) and P.A.D. members pose with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (front, center).

Research Study by Professor Bill Ross Finds Charitable Giving Hinges on Perception of ‘Worthiness’

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Charities assisting people perceived as responsible for their plight may have a difficult time attracting donations, says a new study.

With more than $200 billion donated to causes each year in the United States alone, consumers are inundated with donation requests from charities supporting an array of recipients. Contrary to the idea that people who fit the profile of “givers” are uniformly charitable, their donations may be based on information or preconceived notions about the beneficiaries.

“As consumers have limited financial resources to allocate to charitable giving, they may evaluate how ‘deserving’ the recipients are before making donations,” according to William T. Ross, Jr., ING Global chair and professor of marketing at University of Connecticut and the paper’s co-author. “It’s not only the characteristics of the giver that determine their likelihood of donating, but of characteristics they perceive in the recipient.”

The finding contradicts previous studies that have focused on characteristics of people with the option to give suggesting an important boundary particularly among the most charitable—those defined as having a strong moral identity.
Ross was part of a team of researchers led by Saerom Lee, a doctoral student, and Karen Page Winterich, assisting professor of marketing at the Pennsylvania State University. Their findings are published in the latest Journal of Consumer Research.

The team looked at the responses of 600 participants studied in four scenarios.

In one, researchers examined the response of participants who were given an amount of cash to donate to a real nonprofit organization, the Pennsylvania Association of Community Health Centers.

Participants were asked to choose between donating to medical patients described alternately as having a low-level of responsibility for their situations and those having a high-level of responsibility. The recipients were described either as unable to pay for medical treatment because of “low-wage jobs with poor benefits due to economic conditions” or unable to pay for treatment because of inability “to hold a steady job due to their drug and alcohol abuse or gambling addiction.”

The findings indicate that charitable organizations marketing their causes need to be cautious when describing the beneficiaries that they support, particularly if the recipient could be perceived as responsible for their plight and, by extension, undeserving.

According to the researchers, even when charities do not specifically highlight the responsibility of their recipients, consumers tend to assign their own preconceived notions about beneficiaries in stigmatized groups. For example, the plight of the homeless or drug addicts is often attributed to their own behaviors.

The study was funded by a Smeal Small Research Grant from the Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University and is based on the dissertation by author Saerom Lee, which was the winner or the 2013 Society for Consumer Psychology Dissertation Proposal Competition.

UConn Finance Professors Propose New Method to Estimate the Full Value-Effect of an Event

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PPACA Passage EventStorrs, Conn. – Paul Borochin, assistant professor of finance at UConn School of Business, together with finance professor Joseph Golec, propose an event study method using stock and option prices to account for the degree of investor anticipation to more accurately measure the full value effect of an event.

Finance researchers and practitioners both use the event study method to measure whether the announcement of new information has a statistically significant effect on a firm’s stock market value. Paul Borochin and Joseph Golec, professors of finance at the University of Connecticut, recently proposed a method that uses stock and option prices to account for the degree of investor anticipation of an event to therefore more accurately measure the full value effect of that event.

“The purpose of our study is to introduce a general method of estimating the degree of investor anticipation applicable to all significant events that affect firms with traded options,” says Borochin. “We apply this more general method to estimate probabilities to a complex event: U.S. House of Representatives passage of the healthcare reform law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA). We also examine a related event with different potential for investor anticipation: the subsequent 2012 Supreme Court ruling on PPACA constitutionality, which was potentially a greater surprise due to the Court’s higher opacity.”

Borochin and Golec essentially interpret the financial market as a betting market. “…we get the same information from options prices that we could obtain from looking at the Intrade [or other betting market] website,” says Borochin.

“Indeed, one reason that we select PPACA passage to illustrate our method is that it also had event securities traded on Intrade, the leading prediction market at the time,” he says. “We compare the Intrade-generated probabilities for the 2010 and 2012 events to those we generate from options and stock prices as a robustness check. Our financial market-generated probabilities have two advantages over prediction market-generated probabilities: (1) they are derived from assets with much larger dollar volumes of trades,1 and (2), they can be estimated for any event that impacts companies with traded stock options.”

Borochin and Golec believe that their method could be useful for ex ante as well as ex post public policy analysis, citing legislation that often contains offsetting provisions negotiated among different political factions—in this case, the PPACA fee (tax) on brand name pharmaceutical sales.

They measure the effects ex post, but the method could be used for ex ante analysis by government or industry officials. “For example, Congress could publicly release a bill and a vote date. Based on the option market reaction to the vote announcement, both government and industry officials could determine investors’ estimates of the net effect of the bill’s provisions,” says Borochin.

“Our method could also be used to better estimate public or private damages associated with an event,” he adds. “The Securities and Exchange Commission often estimates damages from corporate fraud and the Federal Trade Commission estimates damages from illegal business practices. As long as some of the firms involved have traded stock and options, our method can give a more accurate estimate of total damages.”

Many event studies do not adjust for the fact that their events are partly anticipated, and in many cases, the degree of anticipation is difficult to measure. For the PPACA House vote event Borochin and Golec consider, the adjustment triples the measured effect of the event on the market value of the affected firms.

“We believe that [our method] is likely to be more precise than alternative methods such as using public data on firm-specific attributes to estimate event probabilities, or using event securities from relatively small prediction markets, because our method employs high-volume assets whose prices may partly reflect nonpublic information. For an event with substantial public information available (House passage), we find our probability estimate and that of a prediction market are quite close. But for an event with little public information (Supreme Court constitutionality), the estimates differ considerably,” said Borochin.

The working paper, “Using Options to Measure the Full Value-Effect of an Event: Application to the Healthcare Reform Act,” can be downloaded here.

>>More about this research

1The daily value of PPACA contracts on Intrade averaged about $90,000 around the 2010 House vote event, while the average daily dollar value of stock ($277 million) and notional value of options ($397 million) traded for each company in our model totaled $674 million. The daily Intrade value was $35,000 during the 2012 Supreme Court event, while the average dollar stock and notional options trade value was $640 million.

Figure 1 –
The model-generated probability of PPACA passage compared to the Intrade-generated probability.
This figure plots the model-generated probability of PPACA passage by the U.S. House of Representatives, which is the probability implied by the stock and options prices of six hospital firms and six insurance firms. The Intrade-generated probability of PPACA passage is the price of an event security traded on the Intrade prediction market. Probabilities are shown for three weeks of trading before the event, the event day (March 22, 2010), and the day following the event.

Employees Recognized for Years of Service

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Dean John Elliott and Associate Deans Sulin Ba, Larry Gramling, and George Plesko recognized employees for their years of service to the University and the State of Connecticut on Friday, May 2, 2014. The Employee Recognition Reception was held in the School of Business Board Room.

The employees recognized were: Continue Reading

Message from the Dean (Spring 2014)

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This article first appeared in the UConn Business magazine, Volume 4, Issue 2 (Spring 2014)

No one would blink an eye if one of our students embarked on a cross-country road trip. But what happens when that ‘road warrior’ is the dean?

During the last year I’ve had the pleasure of traveling across the country to meet many of our bright, successful and very gracious School of Business alumni. From Seattle to Atlanta, all have been exceptionally warm and welcoming.

I’ve noticed that our alumni, whether recent grads or members of a class from the 1930s, have three things in common:

Almost all mentioned a faculty member—sometimes several—who had made a valuable and long-lasting impact on his or her life. That tells me that our professors are more than just great teachers, but that they are caring, involved and respected mentors as well.

Many former students were in awe of how much the School of Business has grown, and how competitive, visible, and prestigious the University of Connecticut has become. They said they feel tremendous pride in their alma mater’s ability to attract high-achieving students.

Pictured: John A. Elliott with Allan Weiss (Founder/CEO Weiss Residential Research LLC) and David Francione '96 MBA at the Real Estate Alumni Networking Reception in Boston, MA.
John A. Elliott with Allan Weiss (Founder/CEO Weiss Residential Research LLC) and David Francione ’96 MBA at the Real Estate Alumni Networking Reception in Boston, MA.

Whether in Chicago, Boston, Houston or New York, I was struck by the pride our alumni exhibited for their university, and their unwavering True Blue Husky spirit.

Many have offered to help our current students as they seek impressive internships, that all-important first job, or a transfer to a new industry. At the School of Business, we hope to continue engaging and expanding our network of successful alumni as they create, shape, and lead businesses, not only in Connecticut, but across the country and throughout the world.

Our spring issue of UConn Business highlights a tremendous program that I certainly wish were in place when I was an undergraduate. The Business Connections Learning Community (BCLC) welcomes freshmen business students to a portion of a dormitory dedicated exclusively to them.

From their inaugural day on campus, our BCLC students are treated like future business executives—with unique opportunities to learn, network and travel. The first students to participate in the BCLC program will graduate this spring.

Four prominent executives—all from vastly different industries—kept the audience enthralled during a “CEO Evolution” roundtable hosted at our Stamford campus in January. Corporate leaders and students alike were able to enjoy the wisdom, advice and honest reflection of some of Connecticut’s sharpest business leaders.

Inspired by what she learned about sustainability during a UConn-organized trip to Australia, Professor Katherine Pancak developed a one-credit Sustainable Real Estate course back home. The “Green Business: Australia” program is hosted by the UConn Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) and is open to our faculty, as well as professors from other colleges.

In closing, I want to wish our newest alumni, the Class of 2014, tremendous success and fulfillment as they begin their new journey in life. May your careers be rewarding, your aspirations limitless, and your UConn education a source of confidence, pride and preparation. Keep us apprised of your new endeavors as you enjoy the very best of what life has to offer.

John Elliot Signature

John A. Elliott
Dean

Bill Ross and Co-authors Receive Prestigious Lehmann Award

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Bill Ross, ING Global Professor, and his colleagues, Sanjay Puligadda (Miami University) and Rajdeep Grewal (Penn State University) were awarded the coveted Lehmann Award for their article, “Individual Differences in Brand Schematicity,” Journal of Marketing Research (February 2012). The Lehmann Award (in honor of Donald R. Lehmann, Columbia University) is given annually to the best dissertation-based paper (within the past 2 years) in either of the two premier marketing journals, Journal of Marketing and Journal of Marketing Research. The article was Puligadda’s dissertation, which he completed at Penn State with Ross and Grewal as his advisers.

If you had decided to buy a camera, would you focus on which brands the store carried? Or, would you focus on the characteristics of the different cameras the store had in stock?

This paper suggests that if you are high in brand schematicity, you would be more likely to attend to the different brands the store carried, whereas if you were low in brand schematicity you would be more likely to attend to the characteristics of the cameras the store carried.

A schema is a set of expectations a person has about what will happen in a certain situation. Most folks, for example, have a schema for what they will experience in a fast food restaurant. Schematicity is the tendency on the part of consumers to process information using specific schema. People who are high in brand schematicity are likely to process products in terms of brands, not product characteristics, whereas people who are low in brand schematicity are likely to process products in terms of product characteristics not brands.

Don’t confuse brand schematicity with brand loyalty. Someone who is high in brand schematicity does not necessarily have a preference for a certain brand; instead, they have a preference to organize their thinking by brands.

In this article, Ross, Puligadda, and Grewal built a theoretical basis for brand schematicity and report on three studies that develop measures of brand schematicity; three studies that consider brand schematicity in the context of associated constructs and establish its predictive validity; and a final study that reveals that a consumer’s brand schematicity influences brand extension evaluations.

OPIM Research Productivity Ranked Among the Best Worldwide

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UConn’s Operations & Information Management Department was recently ranked among the best business schools internationally—and #1 in the Northeast—for information systems research productivity over the last five years.

“These rankings are a clear indicator that we have one of the top research faculty groups in the country and around the world,” said Ram Gopal, professor and department head of OPIM. “Some of the most cutting-edge research in areas such as intellectual property rights, healthcare IT, auction markets, and advanced analytics is going on right here at UConn.”Continue Reading

Professor Jain, Recipient of 2013 AMA Global Marketing Award, Retires

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Professor JainProfessor Subhash C. Jain received the 2013 Significant Contributions to Global Marketing Award, honored by the Global Marketing Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Marketing Association for his preeminent contributions advancement of global marketing and thought. The award ceremony occurred during the American Marketing Association 2013 Summer Educators’ Conference in Boston.

Professor Jain joined the faculty at the University of Connecticut in 1976,after completing graduate work at the University of Oregon, Stanford University, and the University of Rajasthan, India. He has served, with distinction, as Professor of Marketing and Department Head of the Marketing Department. Since 1995, Dr. Jain was Director of the UConn CIBER(except in 1999),and also served as Director of the GE Capital Global Learning Center, School of Business. His teaching, consulting, and research activities included marketing strategy and multinational marketing. Dr. Jain is the author of more than 100 publications, including articles in Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of International Marketing, Journal of Economic Abstracts, Long Range Planning, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Columbia Journal of World Business. He is the author of several books, including Marketing Planning and Strategy, 9th edition (South-Western), International Marketing Management, 7th edition (South-Western), Export Strategy (Quorum Books), and Market Evolution in Developing Countries (Haworth Press).

Dr. Jain has served on the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Marketing, Journal of International Business Studies, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and a number of other international journals. He is an active member of a number of professional organizations, including the American Marketing Association and the Academy of International Business. In addition to the American Marketing Association’s Global Marketing Special Interest Group’s 2013 Significant Contributions to Global Marketing Award, he has been honored by the Swiss Management Association for his life-long achievements. Dr. Jain has presented seminars in the United States and abroad, and has frequently served as a consultant to foreign government agencies on their trade problems, as well as to organizations such as Xerox Corporation, General Electric, GATT (now WTO), and United Technologies Corporation.

Dr. Jain has been active in the community as a Treasurer of the Mansfield Democratic Party, and has served on the Boards of the World Affairs Council of Connecticut and Windham Hospital. In 2005, he was appointed as a member of the Connecticut District Export Council by the Secretary of Commerce. In 2006, Dr. Jain was honored by Governor Jodi Rell as a worthy immigrant to the U.S. and a fine representative of the State of Connecticut.

Professor Frank Franzak, Secretary of the Global Marketing SIG, Virginia Commonwealth University; Robin Coulter, Department Head; Subhash Jain, Former Director of CIBER.

School of Business Welcomes 11 New Faculty Members

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The University of Connecticut has embarked on an ambitious hiring initiative to expand its faculty and senior academic leadership across disciplines, investing in 500 tenure-track faculty positions over the next four years.

As a result of this initiative, the School of Business is delighted to welcome 11 new faculty members in the 2013-2014 academic year. These new faculty bring a diverse array of expertise and research interests to the school and our students, with specialty areas in accounting, finance, management, marketing, and operations and information management.

Sulin Ba Named Associate Dean of Academic and Research Support

Posted on by Claire Hall

The UConn School of Business is pleased to announce that Professor Sulin Ba has accepted the new position of associate dean of academic and research support in the Dean’s Office of the School of Business, effective September 6, 2013. Ba joined the UConn faculty in 2002 as an associate professor in the Department of Operations and Information Management (OPIM) after beginning her career at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California (USC). She was promoted to full professor in 2011.

Professor Ba holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. She has a distinguished research record and works on health IT, various issues around online behavior, and on internal market mechanisms. Several of her papers have been recognized by best paper awards including Best IS Publication of the Year (2010) and MIS Quarterly Best Paper of the Year (2000). She was recently awarded the School of Business Research Excellence Award for her nationally and internationally recognized scholarship and long term impact on UConn research. She is the co-principal investigator (co-PI) on two National Natural Science Foundation of China research grants.

Ba has extensive international experience including associations with Fudan University, Universitat Mannheim, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and City University of Hong Kong. She has been active with the Connecticut Information Technology Institute (CITI) and Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) at the School of Business and has been involved in experiential learning for the last eight years. Recently, Ba led a team of Management Information Systems (MIS) students in developing a Microsoft SQL Server based Enforcement and Examination Tracking System for the Consumer Credit Division of the Connecticut Department of Banking. Her corporate engagements have included many Connecticut companies, nonprofits, and government organizations.