Jindal School Now – January 2017

Global Strategy Scholar Recognized as Influential Researcher

Dr. Mike Peng was one of two UT Dallas professors recently named to the 2016 list of Highly Cited Researchers from Clarivate Analytics, formerly the Intellectual Property and Science business of Thomson Reuters.

Peng, O.P. Jindal Distinguished Chair of Management, is on the list for the third consecutive year. In his field of economics and business, only 70 scholars appeared on the list.

The list recognizes researchers for having a significant global impact within their respective fields of study. The 2016 list includes about 3,000 researchers in 21 fields of the sciences and social sciences. The citation analysis focused on contemporary research achievement: Only highly cited papers in science and social sciences journals indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection during 2004-2014 were surveyed.

A leading scholar in global business strategy, Peng is best known for his development of the institution-based view of strategy and his insights about the rise of emerging economies, such as China, in global business. His research has investigated business strategies in more than 20 countries.

Peng said he believes a combination of quality and quantity contributed to the repeated high ranking of his research. In 2016 and 2017, Peng has five publications on the UTD Top 100 Business School Research Rankings™ — a database that tracks publications in 24 leading business journals — and he has 10 additional papers in these two years.

“I want to share this accomplishment with my 100-plus co-authors,” Peng says. “I co-authored a majority of my more than 130 papers with colleagues and PhD students — a lot of them are at UTD. The honor is not only mine, but also theirs.”

The second UT Dallas professor named to the highly cited list, Dr. Aria Nosratinia, Erik Jonsson Distinguished Professor and associate head of the electrical engineering department in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, is on the list for the first time.

Associate Dean Earns Outstanding Leadership in Education Award

The US-India Chamber of Commerce recently awarded Dr. Diane McNulty its 2016 Outstanding Leadership in Education Award. At the chamber’s 17th annual awards gala last December in Dallas, McNulty was cited for being instrumental in helping to shape and strengthen UT Dallas educational engagements in India, encouraging student trips and study abroad there, and facilitating opportunities for students from India to experience American university life.

Associate dean for external affairs and corporate development at the Jindal School, McNulty took a memorable trip to India in 2008 with a UT Dallas group that included JSOM Dean Hasan Pirkul and Vice Dean Varghese Jacob. A highlight of that trip was an extended visit with alumnus Naveen Jindal, MBA 1992, whose subsequent support of the school resulted in it being named for him in October 2011. Jindal is a former student of McNulty, who teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in corporate governance and ethics.

Her interest in international relations is a long-held one. She has been a board member on the World Affairs Council of Greater Dallas since 2000 and is active as well on the Dallas Committee on Foreign Relations. She also sits on the board of directors of the Public Affairs Council, a Washington, D.C.-based global association for public affairs professionals.

She shares that interest with Pirkul, who was a 2003 recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to Education Award from the chamber’s predecessor, the Greater Dallas Indo-American Chamber of Dallas.

Jindal Professors Win Best Teaching Case Study Award

Operations management Professor Metin Çakanyildirim and Assistant Professor Serdar Simsek recently earned the 2016 Best Teaching Case Study award from the Decision Sciences Institute at its annual meeting in Austin.

Simsek and Çakanyildirim were among the finalists chosen to present their cases at the Nov. 19 – Nov. 22 conference.

Their case, “RestA Mattress,” provides readers with insights about the operations of recently merged companies while giving them hands-on experience in applying the techniques and principles of operations management in a relevant context. The case asks readers to determine the type of data required for the analysis and to collect them from publicly accessible resources.

The analytical case involves parameter estimation and joint optimization over merged supply networks. It qualitatively lays out synergies in a merger and evaluates them, establishing a link to mergers and acquisitions literature in finance. A link to organizational behavior is made through the discussion of challenges faced by a female, recent-graduate analyst. The case also highlights outsourcing of some logistics operations, the risks involved and hedging strategies.

The Decision Sciences Institute is a professional organization of academicians and practitioners interested in the application of quantitative and behavioral methods to the problems of society.

IS Prof’s Early Career Award Follows Successful Summer Workshop

Associate Information Systems Professor Jianqing Chen in November received the 2016 Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award from the Information Systems Society of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS). The award recognizes and honors early career individuals who have earned a PhD within the past 10 years and who are on a path toward making outstanding intellectual contributions to the information systems discipline.

The award came after Chen co-chaired the 10th China Summer Workshop on Information Management (CSWIM 2016) in Dalian, China, last June. The workshop provided researchers and practitioners in information management and related areas an opportunity to present original ideas and share insightful opinions. The theme of CSWIM 2016 was Internet Plus, Business Innovation and Analytics.

The workshop attracted more than 250 participants, a record number, including scholars from the U.S., Canada, China, Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea.

Keynote speakers included Dr. Arun Rai, editor-in-chief of MIS Quarterly, and Dr. Vijay Mookerjee, Charles and Nancy Davidson Chair in Information Systems at the Jindal School.

IS Prof Earns Young Researcher Award

Information Systems Assistant Professor Mehmet Ayvaci received the Best Young Researcher Award last October from the Workshop on Health Information Technology and Economics for the paper “Classification in the Presence of Anchoring Bias: A Model and an Application to Breast Cancer Diagnosis.” Co-authors are IS faculty member Dr. Srinivasan Raghunathan and Dr. M. Eren Ahsen, a 2015 UT Dallas biomedical engineering PhD alumnus, from IBM Research.

Ayvaci, Raghunathan and Ahsen developed a new approach to optimize classification in systems subject to anchoring bias. Such bias can be described as the propensity to return to or depend upon the first piece of information provided — the anchor — in categorizing subsequent information.

“Anchoring bias has been observed in many classification contexts in business, medicine and in everyday life,” Ayvaci and his co-authors wrote in their abstract. “For instance, a financial adviser’s estimate of the future performance of a stock is often influenced by the historical data, which is shown to resemble anchoring. In a supply chain, an inspection agent’s assessment of quality is affected by the supplier’s history and reputation. When hiring a job candidate, the interview assessment — a significant input to the decision-maker in addition to the candidate’s résumé — is influenced by the candidate’s academic pedigree, such as the schools he attended. Radiologists’ interpretations of images (such CT scans and X-rays) are often biased by the clinical history of patients.”

The trio’s research derived the optimal aggregation of attributes and classification under anchoring bias for a linear classifier. They also analyzed the impact of bias on the classifier design and its performance, and they derived the conditions under which using the anchor attribute for classification is not beneficial.

In their study, they applied their findings to breast cancer diagnostic-decision contexts in which the radiologist’s interpretation of a mammogram is biased by the patient’s clinical profile information.

Information Systems Prof Leads Local Grant Team Building Health Informatics Platform

Dr. Indranil Bardhan, professor of information systems and the Jindal School’s Information Systems Area coordinator, is serving as senior investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded project to design and construct a patient-focused and personalized health system that addresses the fractured structure of healthcare information.

The project, “Large-Scale Medical Informatics for Patient Care Coordination and Engagement,” received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Big Data Initiative. A three-year effort that began last September, the project involves close cooperation with the South Region Big Data Hub, located at Georgia Tech.

By using information about the environment gathered through real-time, mobile and wearable devices and social media data, the team will create a detailed and comprehensive picture of a patient’s health and a tool to help manage patients’ engagement with their healthcare providers.

Successful completion of the project will accelerate progress in addressing challenges related to health disparities, healthcare access and precision medicine, Bardhan says. Progress will come by “improving care coordination, longitudinal health-record creation and cohort tracking; and by creating a system to enable closed-loop feedback once the patient is discharged,” he says. “Simply put, the integration of patients’ sensor-based data with clinical data from electronic health records will enable improvements in diagnosis, monitoring and care coordination between patients and providers.”

The team also includes researchers from Emory University, Georgia Tech, Morehouse School of Medicine, University of Arkansas, Little Rock; UT Southwestern Medical School; University of Virginia; and West Virginia University.

Jindal Professor Receives Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award

Dr. McClain Watson’s outlook and success in teaching helped him earn a 2016 Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, a UT System-level award for performance excellence. The regents’ award, presented last August, follows the campus-level President’s Teaching Excellence Award he earned in 2015.

In his courses, Watson, director of Jindal School business school communication programs, discusses with students the importance not only of being knowledgeable in a business context but also of projecting a sense of confidence and warmth. They need to lead others to think they are trustworthy, hardworking and take their jobs seriously, he says.

Watson assigns public-facing work. In the Advanced Business Communication class, students create a Professional Online Portfolio (POP) that helps them stand out in their job searches and give companies a fuller picture of their skills and personality.

Each portfolio is a student-designed and student-controlled website that features a video introduction, a résumé, professional yet friendly photos of the student, examples of school or work projects others may see, descriptions of the student’s community and leadership experience, and information about personal interests and life goals.

The POP project was one of 30 innovations recognized in February 2016 by AACSB International, the global accrediting body and membership association for business schools. The Innovations That Inspire initiative showcased ways that business schools are modernizing and diversifying the business education environment.

Prof’s Award-Winning Paper Studies Effects of Madoff Ponzi Scheme on Investor Trust

Research that Accounting Professor Umit Gurun undertook using the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme to study the effects of trust on investing earned him and his co-authors the 2016 Best Paper Award from the Wharton School and Wharton Research Data Services at the Western Finance Association Conference last June.

For “Trust Busting: The Effect of Fraud on Investor Behavior,” Gurun and fellow researchers Dr. Noah Stoffman of Indiana University and Dr. Scott E. Yonker of Cornell University obtained court documents that listed home addresses of more than 11,000 victims of Madoff’s fraud. They then created a map to identify which areas in the U.S. had highest exposure to the biggest Ponzi schemes on record. They also made a request via the Freedom of Information Act to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to obtain detailed information on the assets managed by registered investment advisers and banks.

They looked for connections between these three data sets and discovered that consumers who lived in close proximity to Madoff’s victims lost trust in the financial system and consequently withdrew their investments, opting instead to make safer bank deposits.

“This trust shock created a ripple effect in the victims’ social circles,” Gurun says.

The study shows that the ripple effect is pervasive and has an adverse effect on the economy. The investment advisers whose clients lived close to Madoff victims become tainted with this trust shock and were more likely to go out of business than their counterparts whose clients were not affected. The trust shock exhibited by the victims and their social networks continues to this day and shows no sign of dissipating any time soon.

Profitability and Takeover Possibility Study Nets Two JSOM Profs a Best Paper Award

The Multinational Finance Society presented Dr. Ashiq Ali, Charles and Nancy Davidson Chair in Accounting, Dr. Bin Li, assistant accounting professor, and Dr. Todd Kravet, a colleague at the University of Connecticut, the Best Paper Award at the society’s annual conference last June.

Their study, “Accounting Profitability and Takeover Likelihood,” examines the association between profitability and the likelihood a firm will become an acquisition target.

“While past research argues that poorer performing firms are more likely to be acquired, because acquirers can unlock value through efficient management,” the trio wrote, their research reveals that acquiring firm managers motivated by opportunism are, on average, more likely to go after safe, high-performing firms. This results in a lower return on investment for acquiring firm’s shareholders than if the firm were to acquire a poor-performing target, with the goal of improving its operational efficiency.

“Managers may have incentive to be empire builders, that is, expand the business that they are managing,” Ali said. “The bigger the firm becomes, the more compensation and power the managers end up getting. When acquiring other firms, these managers are more likely to go for firms that are doing really well rather than the ones that are doing poorly, because in the latter case, managers will actually have to work to make the target firms more efficient and prevent it from failing.”

Ultimately, investors need to consider what acquirers are doing on a case-by-case basis, Ali said, but tendencies toward opportunism, according to the team’s research findings, can be a good indicator that the returns from the acquisition of a well-performing firm will not be favorable for acquiring firm’s shareholders.

The Multinational Finance Society is a nonprofit that advances and disseminates financial knowledge, philosophies, techniques and research findings among members of the academic and business communities.