His advisor, Dr. Tongil (T.I.) Kim, an assistant professor in the Jindal School’s Marketing Area, was impressed by Roshangarzadeh’s placement among such a steep level of competition.
“This is one of the most prestigious dissertation awards in marketing doctoral education,” Kim said. “It is fantastic that Reza’s work is recognized as one of the top five this year, along with dissertations from schools such as UC Berkeley, Duke, USC, and Chicago.”
The dissertation focused on two main areas — transparency, or lack thereof in healthcare information, and a look at the effect of the removal of dislikes for videos on YouTube.
“For the social media project, the YouTube platform got rid of showing users the number of dislikes, a policy considered to be controversial by many critics as a step towards less transparency,” Roshangarzadeh said. “This was done with the justification of protecting content creators against the toxic behavior of targeted dislike attacks by some users. Surprisingly, people went over to the comments section and wrote more negative comments.”
They were trying to make a major difference when it came to a problem, but they didn’t seem to foresee that it would spill over into another area, he said.
The healthcare project was partly inspired by Kim’s encouragement to look at kidney disease patients’ choices empirically.
“In the healthcare project, our focus was to recover unobserved recommendations that physicians make to their patients — an important piece of information that is usually missing in many healthcare data, so that we can look at relevant policy changes with the focus of saving more lives,” Roshangarzadeh said. “At the heart of it was this idea of providing more information to physicians with the mindset of facilitating a better level of shared decision-making between physicians and patients. Something that we found encouraging is that more lives can be saved as the result of the proposed policy change.”
The project also looked at the effect of not allowing physicians to make recommendations in line with their affiliations – a potential conflict of interest.
“For this, we found that not allowing physicians to make recommendations in line with their affiliations could hurt patients by increasing mortality among patients,” he said. “An explanation for this surprising result is that physicians with a high volume of patients are more likely to be affiliated with better quality dialysis centers, and banning those recommendations can, in turn, increase the chance of patients finding themselves in lower quality centers.”
According to MSI’s website, there were close to 70 submissions this year, and honorable mentions will be invited to attend MSI Summit 2024 and have their work acknowledged at the event.
Roshangarzadeh was elated by the recognition and the encouragement it gave his work.
“I am passionate and driven to do research in areas that have important implications for industry-related issues and the public in general,” he said. “The outcome of the dissertation competition is very promising to me, because it shows that the awarding committee also sees the high potential of my research, and this encourages me to continue my work in social media and healthcare marketing. To see, for example, the development of what started as a mere hobby of watching videos and interacting with other users and content creators on the YouTube platform into empirical research that can help other practitioners was a joyful moment in my PhD life.”
And Kim knows just how far Roshangarzadeh has taken that inquisitive mind.
“Reza is an exceptional doctoral candidate who dedicated endless hours to his dissertation,” he said. “I’m glad his effort received the recognition it deserves.”
Roshangarzadeh will be joining the University of Washington as an assistant professor of marketing in 2024.
