News Releases

Advisory: March 1, USC Marshall School of Business Presents Research Visions

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 11, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The 2019 USC Marshall Research Fair is an opportunity to discuss some of the most engaging research developed by our faculty. The fair promotes interdisciplinary alliances, dissemination of knowledge beyond academia, new research ideas, and application of new research into business practices. It is also a chance for participants to stimulate their own curiosity for six highlighted areas of research.

(PRNewsfoto/USC Marshall School of Business)

WHO: Six esteemed faculty members from the USC Marshall School of Business

WHAT: 2019 USC Marshall Research Fair

WHEN: Friday, March 1, 11 am2 pm

WHERE: USC Hotel (formerly the Radisson), Grand Ballroom

Research Details:

  • Gerard Hoberg, Professor of Finance and Business Economics, "Is Business Research Dynamic Enough?":
    • So many successes in business result from effecting change, opening new markets, and being a first-mover.  Yet so much business research assumes that markets change very little. This presentation illustrates past, present and future work showing that the dynamic nature of market structures, in itself, drives much of what we observe in corporate finance decisions, long-term outcomes and stock returns.  Similar thinking applied to financial crises and the path of U.S. and global innovation yield equally stark findings.  Machine learning techniques and open sharing of data repositories have revolutionized our ability to research such dynamic environments.  These works illustrate a surface that has only been scratched and a future that looks far brighter still.
  • Jill Kickul, Professor of Clinical Entrepreneurship and Research Director, Brittingham Social Enterprise Lab, "Catalyzing Social Innovation: Is Entrepreneurial Bricolage Always Good?":
    • Social entrepreneurs face unique challenges in their concurrent pursuit of social and financial value creation to address intractable societal problems. Although social entrepreneurs' actions have been highlighted as an important source of novelty and innovations, this issue has largely been under-researched so far in the field of entrepreneurship. In this presentation, Kickul explores the role of social entrepreneurs' bricolage behavior in enabling the creation of innovations within resource-constrained environments, called "catalytic innovations."
  • Clive Lennox, USC Accounting Associates Professor of Accounting, "The Law of Unintended Consequences":
    • Professor Lennox's talk, "The Law of Unintended Consequences" focuses on impact generated by government intervention. One of the major themes in his research is that government intervention and changes in external regulation can have unintended consequences for accounting firms, accounting clients, and investors. Professor Lennox will illustrate this in his talk with some examples from his published research articles.
  • Joseph Nunes, Joseph A. DeBell Endowed Professorship in Business Administration, Chair, Department of Marketing, and Professor of Marketing, "Selling Status":
    • Status describes one's position within a social hierarchy. There are two ways to acquire status – by exerting dominance or having prestige. The former relies on fear, the latter respect. Marketers leverage both types to sell status signals to customers. This talk explores how consumers use products as status signals and how marketers create and leverage social hierarchies to their advantage. The focus is on how certain types of consumption are used to signal status, how some consumption appears recession proof, the emotional impact of false signals, how endowed status affects one's purchase behavior and how firms can create and leverage their own status hierarchies.
  • Paat Rusmevichientong, Justin Dart Professor in Operations Management and Professor of Data Sciences and Operations, "Alleviating the Curse of Dimensionality in Managing Reusable Products":
    • Professor Rusmevichientong considers the problem of managing reusable products. The problem is motivated by emerging industries that focus on renting out computing capacity and fashion items, where customers request products on-demand, use the products for a random duration of time, and afterward return the products back to the firm. The goal is to find a policy that determines what products to offer to each customer to maximize the expected revenue over a selling horizon. For this problem, the firms must simultaneously consider the inventories of available products, along with the products that are currently in use by other customers. As a result, the number of possible scenarios in the system is enormous. We present a new approach to alleviate the curse of dimensionality, with a performance guarantee. In his presentation, he also provides computational experiments and show that the practical performance of our policies is substantially better than their performance guarantees.
  • Leigh Tost, Assistant Professor of Management and Organization, "Uncovering Unintended Consequences of Diversity Initiatives":
    • Leigh Tost will discuss her findings from a developing research stream that focuses on the causes and consequences of diversity initiatives in organizations. In particular, she will explore some of the unanticipated outcomes of diversity initiatives, including altered perceptions of discrimination, changes in employees' perceptions of the organization, and shifting team dynamics.

Contact
Matthew Simmons
(213) 821-9868
matthew.simmons@marshall.usc.edu  

SOURCE USC Marshall School of Business