Research Seminars

Finance

Speaker: Marianne Bertrand
Chicago Booth

13 June 2013


The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model: A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers’ Narrative Transportation

Marketing

Speaker: Tom Van Laer, and Luca M. Visconti
Assistant Professor, and Associate Professor , ESCP Europe

13 June 2013 - TBC - From 10:30 am to 12:10 pm

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Finance

Speaker: Haoxiang Zhu
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

6 June 2013


Finance

Speaker: Atif Mian
Princeton University

30 May 2013


Something to Lose and Nothing to Gain : The Role of Stress in the Interactive effect of Power and Stability on Risk Taking

Management & Human Resources

Speaker: Jennifer Jordan
Assistant Professor , Faculty of Economics & Business - University of Groningen, Netherlands

24 May 2013 - T036 - From 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm


This investigation explores how power and stability within a social hierarchy interact to affect risk-taking. Building on a diverse, interdisciplinary body of research, including work on non-human primates, intergroup status, and childhood social hierarchies, we predicted that the unstable powerful and the stable powerless will be more risk taking than the stable powerful and unstable powerless. Across four studies, the unstable powerful and the stable powerless preferred probabilistic over certain outcomes and engaged in more risky behaviors in an organizational decision-making scenario, a blackjack game, and a balloon-pumping task than did the the stable powerful and the unstable powerless. These effects appeared to be the result of the increased stress that accompanied states of unstable power and stable powerlessness: these states produced more physiological arousal, a direct manipulation of stress led to greater risk taking, and stress tolerance moderated the interaction between power and stability on risk taking. These results have important implications for the way social scientists conceptualize the psychology of power and offer a theoretical framework for understanding factors that lead to risk taking in organizations. Current and future directions on power, stress, and risk-taking will also be discussed.

Finance

Speaker: Rudi Fahlenbrach
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

23 May 2013


Finance

Speaker: José-Luis Peydro
Universitat Pompeu Fabra

16 May 2013


Why Neighborhood Social Capital Enhances Social Learning for Experience Attributes of Products : Evidence from Internet Fashion Retailing

Marketing

Speaker: David Bell
Professor of Marketing , Wharton, University of Pennsylvania

16 May 2013 - T036 - From 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm

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Does Chatter Really Matter? The Importance and Strategic Use of Online User Generated data?

Marketing

Speaker: Gerard Tellis
Professor of Marketing , USC Marshall School of Business

13 May 2013 - T037 - From 11:30 am to 1:00 pm


This presentation will cover two papers. The first paper will establish the importance of online chatter in predicting stock market prices. The second paper will reveal the meaningfulness and strategic usefulness of UGC in diagnosing dynamic brand positioning over time.

Retail Assortment Optimization

Operations Management & Information Technology

Speaker: Professor Marshall L. Fisher
Professor of Operations and Information Management , Wharton School - University of Pennsylvania

26 April 2013 - HEC - Jouy en Josas Campus - Building S - Room S120 - From 10:30 am to 12:00 pm


A retailer’s assortment is the set of products they carry in each store at each point in time. Obviously the assortment a retailer chooses to carry has an enormous impact on their revenue, profitability and customer satisfaction. I describe joint work with Ramnath Vaidyanathan, a PhD student in Operations and Information Management at Wharton, now in the business school at McGill. We consider the problem of choosing, from a set of N potential SKUs in a retail category, K SKUs to be carried at each store of a retail chain so as to maximize revenue or profit. Assortments can vary by store, subject to a maximum number of different assortments. We describe an approach in which we view a SKU as a set of attribute values, use sales history of the SKUs currently carried by the retailer to estimate the demand for attribute values and from this, the demand for any potential SKU, including those not currently carried by the retailer. We also introduce a model of substitution behavior, estimate the parameters of this model and consider the impact of substitution in choosing assortments. We use maximum likelihood estimation to fit the parameters of our model and describe several alternative heuristics for choosing SKUs. We describe application of this approach to optimize assortments for three real examples, snack foods, tires, and appearance chemicals. The tire and appearance chemicals recommendations were implemented and produced revenue increases of 5.8% and 3.5% respectively, increases which are significant relative to typical comparable store increases in these segments.