(11/12/2014) – A team of real estate students from the University of Connecticut School of Business earned third place in a prestigious international case competition on November 4 in New York City, sponsored by Cornell University.
The UConn team consisted of William Bartol, Drew Harney, Austin Smyth, Kristine Victor and Patrick Nista. Francesca Michel was the alternate.Continue Reading
MIT Sloan Management Review (forthcoming)
Robert Bird. Co-author: David Orozco
CEOs, board members and executives are forced to navigate increased regulation, lawsuits, varying international legal regimes, and the greater prospect of liability due to stiffer legal penalties. Top executives recognize that legal capabilities are a necessary element of long-term corporate success. A Financial Times study found that 24 percent of U.S. companies had lawyer-directors in 2000, and in 2009 that amount notably increased to 43 percent. Corporations generate tangible returns, such as higher stock market valuations, when they employ attorneys who serve as board members, and when top corporate officers have legal knowledge.
Paradoxically, the processes through which corporate legal departments provide competitive advantage remain poorly understood. The law is all too often viewed as a constraint on managerial decisions and is often perceived by executives as a source of costs. This prevailing cost perspective towards the law, while valuable, does not explain how leading companies employ their legal departments to secure long-term competitive advantage for the firm.
Robert Bird and his co-authors explain how viewing the law narrowly as a cost or compliance issue inevitably leads to foregone strategic opportunities, and introduce an actionable framework, the Five Pathways of Corporate Legal Strategy: avoidance, compliance, prevention, value, and transformation. These pathways should enable managers to think about the law strategically and identify value-creating opportunities, thereby creating long-term and sustainable value. Legal rules are not just a checklists to complete, but an opportunity to advance firm goals in a competitive business environment.
Journal of Consumer Research, (forthcoming)
William T. Ross, Jr. Co-Authors: Saerom Lee, Karen Page Winterich
Americans tend to think of donating to charitable causes as a moral, prosocial behavior, but understanding what makes people donate is not well understood. Professor Bill Ross and his colleagues examine how moral identity, defined as “how important being a moral person is” affects prosocial behaviors. Usually having a strong moral identity increases how much prosocial behavior the person engages in. However, sometimes individuals with a strong moral identity make lower donations to charitable causes. Four studies demonstrate that someone high in moral identity gives less when those whom they would be helping, the recipients, are seen by the potential donor as personally responsible for their plight, for example if they have AIDS because they shared hypodermic needles while taking illegal drugs.
Further analyses reveal that empathy and justice underlie these effects. Specifically, people high in moral identity increase donations to recipients who they view as not responsible for their plight out of empathy and decrease donations to recipients who they see as responsible for their plight because of justice concerns. Additionally and interestingly, people who are high in moral identity will donate to recipients who are responsible for their plight if donors are made aware of their own immorality, as it causes them have greater fellow-feeling, or empathy, for these recipients. Study results indicate that moral identity, empathy, and justice in communication programs are likely to affect donations.
Marketing Letters (forthcoming)
Girish N. Punj.
“People hate, hate, hate to subscribe to things on the Internet” (Bill Gates, 2005)
Over the past decade, there has been a substantial increase in the demand for online content, but there has been little change in consumers’ willingness to pay for it.Continue Reading
Journal of Financial Services Research (forthcoming)
Robert Bird. Co-author: John Knopf
Do geographic factors influence the performance and behavior of modern banks? Advances in technology and global information sharing have seemingly made geographic characteristics irrelevant, but a bank with geographic advantages can have a positive impact on bank performance. A key factor influencing the geographic literature is the concept of local knowledge, i.e., information that influences bank decision making but is not readily transmittable beyond a limited geographic boundary. Banks possessing local knowledge can offer products and services to qualified local borrowers that other less informed banks might overlook, including for example a more diverse portfolio of products and services to start-ups and small businesses.
Using a combination of bank performance data, and differences in state laws allowing employers to require and enforce non-compete agreements, Professor Bird and his co-author find that strong not-to-compete laws restricting employee mobility in a state negatively impact the incidence of new bank charters while benefiting incumbent employers. Restrictions on the mobility of local knowledge decrease labor expenses because workers lack the bargaining power of being able to take a job with a local rival. Results indicate that increases in labor restrictions are positively correlated with profitability for established banks. Thus, geographically-specific human capital remains an important differentiating factor that influences bank behavior and competition counter to standard theoretical accounts that might imply otherwise.
Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business (forthcoming)
Stephen Park.
Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are subject to a variety of U.S. laws that require public disclosure of their global activities, including adverse social and environmental impacts. In this article, Professor Stephen Park examines the recent emergence of mandatory disclosure requirements under U.S. federal securities law that require MNEs to disclose certain social impacts in order to address geographically-defined and/or issue-specific public policy objectives, collectively referred to as “targeted social transparency” (or “TST”). Compared to other social transparency laws, TST regimes target a set of intertwined social risks specific to an individual country, region, or industry.Continue Reading
UConn School of Business doctoral student Mark Schneider has won the 2014 Decision Analysis Society Student Paper Award for a work he solo authored. His paper is titled, “Frame Dependent Utility Theory” and it presents a model of decisions under risk which is based on emerging evidence from the neuroscience of decision making. The model generalizes expected utility theory by explicitly modeling how choices are framed and how different frames systematically elicit different preferences. A simple preference foundation for the model is provided, and it is demonstrated that the model resolves important empirical violations of rational choice theory. Schneider, a resident of Mansfield, will receive his award at a meeting in San Francisco in November.
Faculty and Ph.D. students in the School of Business’ management department have been selected for two prestigious awards in recent weeks.
The Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology (JOOP) recently recognized a paper titled “Unpacking the Cross-level Effects of Tenure Diversity, Explicit Knowledge, and Knowledge Sharing on Individual Creativity,” as Best Paper for 2013. The paper was co-authored by UConn graduate students Margaret Luciano and Hyoun Sook Lim and Professor of Management Lucy Gilson. Continue Reading
David Bergman, an assistant professor of Operations and Information Management in the School of Business, has been selected as the winner of this year’s Association for Constraint Programming Doctoral Thesis Award.
The annual award is given to a researcher who has completed his/her thesis in the area of constraint programming. Bergman will present his thesis at this year’s 20th International Conference on Principles and Practices of Constraint Programming in Lyon, France, in September.
Bergman’s thesis is titled, “New Techniques for Discrete Optimization,” and it explores new methodological approaches to discrete optimization problems, an area of operations research which finds an increasing number of applications in fields such as finance, healthcare, and logistics, to name just a few. His thesis provides both theoretical insights and important algorithmic discoveries which together improve upon existing state-of-the-art technology.
He completed his Ph.D. in 2013 at Carnegie Mellon University in Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization, a joint program administered by the Tepper School of Business, the Department of Mathematical Sciences, and the Computer Science Department. Bergman’s thesis advisors were John N. Hooker and Willem-Jan van Hoeve.
An abstract of “New Techniques for Discrete Optimization” is available here.
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.