Tag: research

Associate professor of marketing Robyn LeBoeuf presented research findings to an eager corporate audience in December at the first Praxis Series breakfast. Attendees were surprised to learn that speaking about goals in terms of weeks rather a specific date appeared to motivate people to take initial action toward pursuing goals.

Robyn LeBoeuf

There is more research to be done, as the Q&A time after her presentation proved. There are many more questions about how wording can affect goal-setting to motivate customers or employees.

LeBoeuf’s presentation included research published in her paper, “The Influence of Time-Interval Descriptions on Goal-Pursuit Decisions”. The paper was a top contender in the  2015 Olin Award competition that honors research that impacts business.

Contact or learn more about Professor LeBoeuf here.

Read previous Praxis and Olin Award papers here.

Landmark, Big Data Research of 262,000+ People Reveals Income, Employment, Health, and Age Strongly Relate to Happiness

Pittsburgh, PA (PRWEB) May 13, 2015   Polling and consumer insights company CivicScience today made an unprecedented research study available to the public in hopes of furthering our collective understanding of happiness and its root causes. Called “Profiling Happy” (#profilinghappy), the study looks at reported levels of happiness from over 262,000 Americans and their relationship to thousands of other attributes for demographics, lifestyle traits, media behaviors, and other characteristics.

CivicScience has published the study’s large set of aggregate cross-tabulations to allow researchers, journalists, and other individuals to analyze characteristics that are most correlated with happiness and unhappiness.

It is available for the public to download at: http://info.civicscience.com/profilinghappy/

“Even though many studies have looked at particular aspects of happiness, we believe this may be the largest empirical study ever conducted about human traits and attributes that most strongly align with happiness,” said John Dick, founder and CEO of CivicScience. “Given that May is Mental Health Awareness month, we believe these insights are well timed and should provoke more discussion and societal thinking about things that relate to happiness, and to unhappiness too.”

Examples of some key findings in CivicScience’s Profiling Happy study include:

•     Aggregate Happiness: The good news is that overall, the general population is six times more likely to say they are happy than unhappy.
•     Income: Many higher income traits are closely associated with greater happiness, particularly when looking at how one “splurges” on oneself.
•     Employment: Happiness in one’s job is one of the strongest correlations with overall happiness, and being unhappy in a job more greatly associates with unhappiness than being unemployed.
•     Health: Those who say they are healthy overall are 11X more likely to be happy, while those who say they are not healthy are 133% more likely to be unhappy.
•     Age: Beginning with 30 to 34 year-olds, every age group gets progressively happier than the general population, peaking among those aged 65 and older.

Hundreds of additional attributes ranked by happiness are published in the full online report.

Lamar Pierce, Associate Professor of Organization and Strategy at Olin School, Washington University in St. Louis (and a CivicScience academic advisor), stated: “One of the project’s goals is to harness the collective expertise of the many researchers and thought leaders who study the roots of happiness. These data represent the tremendous potential for CivicScience to facilitate expanding our knowledge on consumers, health, beliefs, and broader public welfare.”

Added CivicScience’s John Dick, “While we’re excited about many of the insights the study uncovered, we hope other researchers, students, writers, designers, deep-thinkers, and even comedians will find things that we missed. We can’t wait to see what people uncover.”

CivicScience invites the public to review the data, talk about it on social sites using the hashtag #profilinghappy and to submit infographics based on the data for inclusion on the company’s blog.

About the methodology for this study:

The consumer sentiment data in the Profiling Happy report were collected from January 1, 2013 to April 24, 2015 from 262,674 respondents who answered CivicScience web polls hosted by a network of hundreds of diverse, third-party publisher sites. Respondents voluntarily answered the polls with no financial incentives. All respondents included in this report answered the question “How happy are you today?” as well as questions about gender and age group, to ensure the data is weighted for U.S. Census representativeness for those demographics. Respondents also answered any number of other possible poll questions spanning a range of topical categories — from core demographics to personal finances, media consumption, shopping preferences, politics and ideology, health and wellness, lifestyle, and more. For any given question highlighted in this report, a minimum of 2,000 respondents were collected. Respondents were further filtered and sorted by other statistical models (refer to the Glossary in the full report).

About CivicScience

CivicScience, Inc. provides the leading intelligent polling and real-time insights platform, the InsightStore™. Its proprietary platform powers the world’s opinions and quickly gets that data to the decision makers who care. Every day, CivicScience polls ask millions of people questions related to thousands of topics, while its powerful data science and big data technology analyzes current consumer opinions, discovers trends as they start, and accurately predicts future behaviors and market outcomes. CivicScience polls run on hundreds of premier websites, in addition to its own public polling site at http://www.civicscience.com. CivicScience’s InsightStore™ is used by leading enterprises in marketing research, advertising, media, financial services, and political polling.

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/05/prweb12716463.htm

Image: sciondriver, happiness, Flickr Creative Commons

Each year, a select group of Olin’s top undergraduate students complete a two-course capstone Honors in Management Seminar. Working closely with senior faculty in economics, finance, marketing, and organizational behavior, 12 members of the 2015 class spent the fall term mastering a wide range of research methods and advanced econometric techniques while formulating proposals for in-depth investigation of a complex business problem. After gathering and analyzing data this spring, the students presented their research findings at WashU’s Undergraduate Research Symposium on April 17 and again at a thesis defense with an Olin faculty panel on April 28. The panel members gave the students high marks across the board for the depth of research, overall quality of the presentations, and their ability to field challenging questions about their work. The students remarked on a great sense of accomplishment from having worked together to learn about the research process and specific aspects of business.

These studies will appear in Washington University’s Honors Thesis Digest.

Abstracts with links to the complete research papers are provided here.

Personality and Cognitive Differences Affecting Three-Person Negotiations
Authors: Jonathan Finch, Alex Hinch, Batu Otkeren, Michelle Zhu
Advisor: William P. Bottom, Joyce and Howard Wood Distinguished Professor in Organizational Behavior
Abstract: Research has examined the influence that individual personality and cognitive characteristics have on dyadic negotiation, but not on coalition formation in more complex settings. We investigated the link between outcomes of three-person, asymmetric negotiations by undergraduate students with various Big 5 personality characteristics and need for cognition. We hypothesized that need for cognition and extraversion will have a positive impact on negotiation outcomes, while agreeableness will have a negative impact. Furthermore, we hypothesized that priming subjects on the merits of individualism prior to negotiations will lead to more competitive behavior, while priming teams toward collaboration will have the opposite effect. Participants with high need for cognition may be more inclined to analyze the situation and to develop and implement the strategic planning needed to claim greater value through coalition bargaining. Extraverted participants may be more likely to initiate and sustain the back and forth communication needed to form coalitions easily. Those with high agreeableness, on the other hand, may be more likely to accept offers proposed to them that may give them far lower value than they might be able to extract otherwise. Indeed, the very first coalition experiments on n-person games by Kalisch et al. (1952) made reference to the apparent impact of personality differences in outcomes but these were never directly tested empirically. In our study, participants completed a series of personality measures then were primed with either an article on cooperation or individualism before engaging in a three-person negotiation as either a high power monopolist or as one of two low power players. To examine negotiation outcomes, we analyzed both the payoffs to individuals in the negotiation as well as negotiation time. Analysis shows positive impact of need for cognition and extraversion, varying by negotiation position, and that need for cognition positively impacts length of negotiation. Additionally, our individualistic priming resulted in more competitive negotiations. Future research should seek to replicate the experiment with a larger sample size, stronger incentives, and a more diverse subject pool so as to increase the significance of our results.
Read full thesis here

An Exploration of Donor Giving Patterns and Optimal Solicitation Strategies
Authors: Ruicong Yan, Ryan Geczi, Alexander Zaiken, Matt Puzder
Advisor: Seethu Seetharaman, W. Patrick McGinnis Professor of Marketing
Abstract: Charitable donations stem from four major sources: individuals, corporations, bequests, and charitable foundations. Growth in monetary charitable gifts has exploded in recent decades, more than doubling the growth of the S&P 500 (List 2011). Typically focusing on individual giving, traditional predictive metrics used by fund-raising campaigns emphasize the importance of the overall contribution rate (as a percentage of solicitations) and cumulative individual contribution levels. Separation of “cold-list” and “warm-list” donors typically postulates a larger economic value of a warm-list donor due to both a greater likelihood to contribute and a larger donation amount. In allocating outreach budgets, fund-raising campaigns face a cost trade-off between rekindling a donor on the warm list and canvassing a potential new donor on the cold list. Our research explores the returns on marginal solicitations and the effect of a recent large donation on subsequent probability of donating. We examine a dataset featuring the donation habits of individuals and the demographics associated with the postal (zip) code that the donor lives in. Using LPM models of past donation patterns and demographic controls, we predict the likelihood of a future contribution. Results indicate that greater number of cumulative solicitations significantly improves odds of donating up to a certain threshold, after which the impact of marginal solicitations declines sharply. We also identify a “cooling” period between solicitations to maximize the aggregate contribution made across all solicitations for an individual. These effects are observed to be consistent across four solicitation types, holding constant regional differences between individuals. Implications of these results can be used by fund-raising campaigns to better plan outreach strategies to maximize cumulative returns and better allocate spending across warm- and cold-list donors. Based on differing costs of reaching new and recurring donors, these findings aid in outreach trade-offs given fixed budget constraints.
Read full thesis here

What If God Was One of Us? Assessing the Links between Religiosity and CEO Decision Making
Authors: Matthew Ayanian, Mathias Gesser, Michael Lory, Michael Postetter
Advisors: Mark Leary, Associate Professor of Finance and Robert Pollak, Hernreich Distinguished Professor of Economics
Abstract: Previous research in the field of financial economics has demonstrated a link between the personal characteristics of executives and corporate decision making. Some of this work has suggested a relationship between religious affiliation and attitudes towards risk, which may influence financial policy choices such as leverage and dividend yield. Our team explores how a chief executive’s religiosity affects decision making in a corporate environment. We expand on previous studies by including a range of firm-level indicators that reflect investment decisions, financial policies, and market performance. Our analysis relies on a sample of nonfinancial firms from the 2002 S&P 1500 Super Composite Index, whose performances we track until 2014. Since there are no official databases specifying CEO faith, we use county-level rates of religious adherence in each CEO’s place of education and location of corporate headquarters as a proxy for CEO religiosity. Although several of the religiosity variables assessed in this study proved to be statistically significant across our models, such as Judaism and Eastern Orthodoxy, the majority of our findings proved to be both economically and statistically insignificant. We did see, however, that our findings became more significant when we restricted our sample to only include the smallest third of S&P 1500 firms, indicating that CEO religious characteristics are increasingly influential within more intimate corporate environments.
Read full thesis here

“What the Two Most Innovation-Friendly States Have in Common,” an article by Prof. Anne-Marie Knott appears on the Harvard Business Review website. Based on her research that measures R&D metrics she finds what California and Minnesota do to promote and keep innovative companies in their states.

Standing instead of sitting at meetings has several known benefits, but until now, researchers didn’t have empirical data to prove that it really leads to more creativity and better overall performance.  Organizational behavior professors Markus Baer and Andrew Knight use wearable technology in experiments to measure how people behave in meetings whether sitting or standing. Read an executive summary of their research in the newest issue of Praxis, Research that Impacts Business. Baer and Knight discuss their research in this video:

Forward magazine, a publication of the Metals Service Center Institute (MSCI): “The Cyber Threat: just a click away” features findings from a recent BCTIM project that Olin students conducted with MSCI and recommends IT security measures for the metals industry.