Tag: faculty research

Anjan Thankor, professor of Finance, contributes a commentary on the financial fallout from climate change in the new issue of Engineering Momentum, published by Wash U’s School of Engineering & Applied Science.

Thakor finds opportunities in dealing with challenges of climate change. He writes,

Anjan Thakor

“It will lead to an explosion
of new technologies, change the way we farm and eat, and lead to the emergence of many innovative financial instruments that will provide a plethora of new investment opportunities and hedging/risk management opportunities for farmers and firms.” 

Professors from all seven schools at Wash U contributed to the article.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression, right?
Oh, but you do, thanks to the fact that any given day is full of firsts: First day of school, first day on the job, first day back after vacation.

That’s the finding of a new study on forming impressions led by Robyn A. LeBoeuf, PhD, associate professor of marketing at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis.

“By connecting an everyday experience to a first – even an unrelated first – you can turn that experience into a first experience,” LeBoeuf said. And there are a variety of ways to do so. For example, a person’s 17th visit to a neighborhood coffee shop is unlikely to change his or her opinion of that shop very much.

However, the study finds that when that visit is linked to an unrelated “first,” such as the first visit of the month, first visit after starting a new job, or first visit during a special promotion, a mental “reset” button is pushed, leading that visit to have a larger impact on a person’s impression, just as a true first visit would.

The study, “Forceful Phantom Firsts: Framing Experiences As Firsts Amplifies Their Influence on Judgment,” was published in the August issue of the American Marketing Association’s Journal of Marketing Research. Co-authors are Elanor F. Williams, PhD, of the University of California, San Diego and Lyle A. Brenner, PhD, of the University of Florida

“Customers may evaluate their old standby restaurant in a new light after the first dinner since they moved into a new house, or if the manager welcomes them to ‘the first dinner of the summer,” LeBoeuf said. “This may allow familiar products – and even people – a chance to make a fresh impression.”

Even an experience as fraught with peril as a dentist office visit can be seen in a new light. In one study, people read descriptions of five visits to the dentist. The fifth visit had a greater impact on impressions of the dentist when that visit was the “first” one after a presidential election (vs. when it happened “near” the election).

In another study, people read six hotel reviews, similar to those on travel websites. The final review was more influential when it was the first review of the year vs. just another review.

The findings have implications throughout the business community, particularly in reversing poor impressions of products or services – or proprietors themselves.

“Look for a positive experience, and when you find one, connect it to a first, by pointing out that it is, say, the first meeting after vacation or the first shopping trip of the season,” LeBoeuf said. “This can give you a second chance at that first impression.”

Media release from WUSTL News

What? That headline must be wrong. Women are known for boosting team collaboration and creativity, and they are not afraid to compete. But new research from associate professor of organizational behavior Markus Baer finds that men become more creative and women less so when intergroup competition heats up.

“Women contributed less and less to the team’s creative output when the competition between teams became cutthroat, and this fall-off was most pronounced in teams composed entirely of women,” Baer says.

The findings are counterintuitive because previous research has shown that women generally are more collaborative than men when working in teams.

“If teams work side by side, women tend to perform better and even outperform men – they’re more creative,” according to Baer.

“As soon as you add the element of competition though, the picture changes. Men under those circumstances gel together. They become more interdependent and more collaborative, and women just do the opposite.

“So, what is true for non-competitive circumstances, flips when it gets competitive,” he says.

The study should serve as a caution to managers attempting to use competition among teams to spur creativity. It shows that intense competition can erase the creative advantage that women tend to enjoy over their male counterparts.

Markus Baer discusses his research on how competition kills creativity for women working in groups in the video above.

The simple lesson, Baer said, is that competition should not be used in all situations to stimulate creativity. It’s not going to help women and probably hurts their creativity, so managers should look for different methods of motivation.

“Given that women represent a growing portion of the workforce, using competition as a means to enhance the creativity of groups, regardless of how they are composed, implies that the creative potential available to businesses is seldom fully realized,” the study contends.

Baer emphasizes that nothing in his study suggests women are inherently bad at competition. Rather, it shows that gender stereotypes continue to influence behavior in the workplace.

“It’s not that women stink at competing, it’s that the way society views women and the way we view competition, gender specific, has an impact and that impact is observable in the lab as well as in the field,” Baer said. “It changes behaviors and outcomes.”

Published in the May-June issue of the journal Organization Science, the study is titled “Intergroup Competition as a Double-Edged Sword: How Sex Composition Regulates the Effects of Competition on Group Creativity.”

Findings are based on an experiment involving male and female college students working together in groups, as well as data gathered in the field from 50 teams of scientists, engineers and technicians at a global oil and gas company.

Co-authors include Abhijeet K. Vadera, PhD, of the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, India; Roger T. A. J. Leenders, PhD, of the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Tilburg University, The Netherlands; and Greg R. Oldham, PhD, of the A. B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University.

Thanks to Gerry Everding, WUSTL Newsroom, for his contributions to this post.

CNBC unveiled a new ranking of the most innovative companies in the market based on research and a ranking system devised by Olin professor of strategy Anne Marie Knott. The CNBC RQ 50 includes companies from a wide swath of industries from oil, gas, and defense to Silicon Valley’s stars. RQ stands for Research Quotient.

The CNBC RQ 50 is a unique list of publicly traded companies that derive the greatest shareholder value from their research and development spending (at a minimum of $100M annually), created in partnership with Washington University in St. Louis professor Anne Marie Knott, inventor of the Research Quotient (RQ). The RQ is calculated based on Professor Knott’s proprietary formula and is designed to help investors know what a company can expect to gain in revenue from an increase in R&D investment. – CNBC website

“Economic growth comes from innovation and R&D is the biggest source of innovation,” says Prof. Knott. “So if we can get each firm to increase their RQ a little bit that will lead to a permanent increase in economic growth.”

Prof. Anne Marie Knott

“The longer-term benefits are even greater,” Knott says, “as RQ also allows companies to more closely link changes in R&D strategy, practices and processes to profitability and value.”

Knott’s research led to the development of the RQ measurement tool. It is designed to help companies address several key questions that underlie R&D strategy:

• How does a company know what kind of return it is getting from R&D?
• Is it better at R&D than the competition?
• How much should it be spending and what can it do to improve the effectiveness of those investments?

“I had been hoping for a measure like this since before becoming an academic,” Knott says. “Existing measures of innovation, such as R&D intensity and product/patent counts, don’t allow firms, policy makers or academics to know the answers to these big questions.”

Knott’s RQ metric allows companies to estimate the effectiveness of R&D investment relative to the competition.

“It lets them see how changes in their R&D expenditure affect the bottom line and, most important, their company’s market value,” Knott says.

Images:  CNBC video screen shot from CNBC website

New research from Olin Prof. Lamar Pierce, Associate Professor of Strategy, has been attracting national media coverage in the past week. Prof. Pierce is featured in a report on NPR’s All Tech Considered that looks at the software surveillance options available to employers who want to protect sensitive data from their own employees. On Sunday, June 22, a front page article in The New York Times, “Unblinking Eyes Track Employees” by Steve Lohr, examines the pros and cons of workplace surveillance as it becomes increasingly ubiquitous and cites Pierce’s research extensively.

The research is published in a paper, “Cleaning House: The Impact of Information Technology Monitoring on Employee Theft and Productivity,” by Pierce and co-authors Daniel Snow (BYU), and Andrew McAfee (MIT). The paper received the Olin Award for research that impacts business earlier this year.

The paper details analysis of data generated by a software surveillance program used to detect employee theft in hundreds of restaurants across the U.S. The researchers found that when employees knew they were being monitored, they not only stopped stealing from the till, but they actually changed their work behavior to increase productivity, tips, and profits for the restaurants.

Watch video of Lamar Pierce discussing his Olin Award-winning research on IT monitoring and its effects on employee theft and productivity below.

Listen to Lamar Pierce on NPR here.

In preparation for an upcoming summit on working families, Robert Pollak, PhD, an expert on family economics at Washington University in St. Louis, recently attended a meeting at the White House with other academic leaders and senior administration officials. They gathered to discuss the implications of demographic and other changes for 21st-century workplaces.

Pollak is the Hernreich Distinguished Professor of Economics in Olin Business School and in Arts & Sciences.

Pollak joined 10 other researchers to discuss how the United States can best meet the current needs of families and employers, concentrating on changing patterns of childbearing, cohabitation and marriage and the resulting need for greater workplace flexibility.

“The meeting provided senior administration officials with an overview of current research on changes in American families and work that have taken place over the last 50 years,” Pollak said. “These changes include increases in women’s education, which now surpasses that of men, and increases in women’s work outside the home — women now make up about half of the U.S. workforce. The discussion focused on the ways in which workplaces have adapted or failed to adapt to these changes.”

The meeting was designed to engage in a research-oriented discussion to inform policymakers’ thinking ahead of the White House Summit on Working Families, which will take place June 23. The summit will convene business and labor leaders, economists, policymakers, advocates and citizens to discuss policy solutions that can make a difference in the lives of working families and ensure America’s global competitiveness in the coming decades.

Pollak is co-author of the influential paper “Cohabitation and the Uneven Retreat from Marriage in the U.S., 1950-2010.” He also has published on family decision-making, power couples and household time allocation. His paper “Family Proximity, Childcare, and Women’s Labor Force Attachment” recently was published in the Journal of Urban Economics.

by Neil Schoenherr, WUSTL News