Thursday, February 8
Mary Godwyn History and Society Women’s Business Centers: Strategies to Educate Low-Income Women Entrepreneurs
Kent Jones Economics The Political Economy of WTO Accession: The Unfinished Business of Universal Membership

Tuesday, February 27
I. Elaine Allen Mathematics and Science A Comprehensive Look at Online Education in the US
Lisa Colletta Arts and Humanities Political Satire and Postmodern Irony in the Age of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart

Wednesday, March 14
Ajaz Hussain Economics Disequilibrium in Airline Networks: Is there an Argument for Re-Regulation?

Additional Chat Dates
Wednesday, April 4
Tuesday, April 24

Back to Top

Lisa Colletta, Arts and Humanities
Forest Lawn and Perpetual Youth – Chapter Four of Voluntary Exiles: British Novelists in Hollywood, 1935-65. 
This chapter focuses on the British fascination with the theme park-like cemetery, Forest Lawn. 

Ryan Davies, Finance
Funds of Hedge Funds Portfolio Selection. 
This project develops a new technique for a fund of hedge funds manager to decide how to optimally allocate capital across various hedge fund strategies. 

Steven Gordon, Technology, Operations and Information Management
The Role of Information Technology in Supporting Business Innovation. 
This research aims to learn how organizations can best develop and use their information technology resources and competences to create and sustain innovation. 

Katherine Harris, Marketing
Growing Sprouts into Greenback Greens. 
Using in-depth interviews, this exploratory study examines the beliefs and attitudes that less enthusiastically green customers have about hybrid vehicles to determine what might motivate them to buy a hybrid vehicle.

Gang Hu, Finance
Is there Skill and Is it Rewarded? Agency Costs and Relationship between Institutional Brokers, Buy-side Traders, and Portfolio Managers. 
This study focuses on the feasibility of monitoring brokers and holding them accountable for the quality of the execution they provide to large size institutional orders. 

Gang Hu, Finance
Costly Arbitrage and Idiosyncratic Risk: Evidence from Short-Sellers. 
Hu’s research explores the conjecture that the relation between short interest and subsequent returns is greatest in stocks with high transaction costs and high idiosyncratic risk. 

Donna Kelley, Entrepreneurship
Survival of Technology-Based Ventures as a Function of Technology Resources. 
This research examines shorter-term and longer-term survival in Korean technology-based ventures as a function of internal technology resource accumulation and external resource-based expansion. 

Joan Lindsey-Mullikin, Marketing
Price Evaluation: Appreciation of Store Pricing Format Due to Gender Differences. 
This study tests gender differences in two commonly seen pricing formats: every day low pricing versus special (Hi Lo) price promotions.

Mary O'Donoghue, Arts and Humanities
Not Their Muse: Irish-Language Poets, Their Translators and Cross-Gender Linguistic Ventriloquism. 
This research considers ownership and misappropriation of voice, and the subjugation of linguistic and literary identity, in the translation of recent Irish-language poetry.

Ross Petty, Accounting and Law
Initial Interest Confusion: A Consumer Protection Perspective. 
This research analyzes the trademark concept of initial interest confusion from a consumer protection/advertising law perspective.

Zhen Zhu, Marketing
Marketing, Patient’s Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Responses to Self-Scheduling Technology Failures. 
Using two computer-based experiments on ambulatory care patients using SST to schedule appointments, this research analyzes customer psychology in using SSTs and the alignment in managing SSTs and customer-contact employees.

On August 31, 2006, Charles H. Jones, Ph.D., a civilian research coordinator at Edward’s Air Force base, visited Babson. Dr. Jones initiates and oversees long term research on aircraft instrumentation. The goals of his research program are to reduce instrumentation costs and modification schedules to meeting the technological challenges of future flight test. He is involved in research areas involving leading-edge technologies such as smart sensors, power line communications, radio spectrum efficiency, and hypersonic flight. Dr. Jones is also involved in the development of international standards, and he oversees university and small businesses (SBIR) grant projects originating from his office.

During his visit, Dr. Jones met with several Babson and Olin faculty members. He also gave a presentation sponsored by the BFRF, Blank Center, and Olin College. He discussed the sources of ideas for research projects at Edward’s, and the steps and roles involved in their initiation and development. He also identified specific issues and challenges associated with managing research in government.

From this visit, Julian Lange and I have begun to map out a first-phase study of innovation management practices in government. While there is ongoing research in the field around the challenges and practices associated with corporate innovation, there is less known about how government, and more specifically military, organizations conduct research leading to future technologies. There are a number of specific issues that make this a particularly interesting area to study, such as the involvement of other organizations, such as small businesses and universities, in this process, and the interface between the stable employment of civilian personnel and the frequently changing military leadership.

Back to Top

Elaine Allen, Mathematics and Science
A Comprehensive Look at Online Education in United States.
Online education has been touted as the wave of the future for students and as a way of opening new markets to institutions of higher education.  It has grown at rates exceeding 20% over the last five years and its growth shows no signs of abating.  From this year’s Sloan Survey of Online Education, the number of students taking at least one course online in the Fall of 2005 is estimated to be more than three million students, an increase of over two million from the number estimated for the 2003 Sloan Survey of Online Education.  With the longitudinal data gathered by the Sloan Survey of Online Education from 2003 - 2006, we can examine whether there are differences between schools that have adopted online and those that have not within the schools that have adopted online education and also identify differences among the programs and courses being offered online.  This paper describes, analyzes, and profiles the degree-granting institutions of higher education in the United States that offer online education and compare the characteristics of these schools with those that do not offer online courses. 

Kate McKone-Sweet, TOIM
A Taxonomy of Supply Chain Management.
The practitioner-oriented research has proposed frameworks that suggest there are “strategic” groups of manufacturers that develop similar sets of supply chain capabilities.  However, these proposed strategic groups are based on case studies and have not been identified or tested using analytical methods. This research will identify strategic groups of manufacturers with similar supply chain capabilities using a data-based analytical approach.   In addition, this research will identify the characteristics, the priorities and the performance levels of each strategic group. Our taxonomy of strategic groups will provide a strong framework for discussion, research and pedagogy.

Mary O’Donoghue, Arts and Humanities
Small Home Truths: Stories and a Novella is a collection of fictions themed round care-taking and companionship amid circumstances ranging from filial and parental responsibility to infirmity to bereavement. These fictions investigate poet Anna Akhmatova’s idea that “in human closeness there is a secret edge.”

Ross Petty, Accounting and Law
The Use of Dead Celebrities in Marketing: A Legal and Public Policy Analysis.
An interesting practice in the field of marketing is the use of dead celebrities in advertising and on merchandise. Some estimate that this licensing industry produces revenues of $300 million annually. We trace the origins and historical development of this practice, look at the various laws that assign property rights for deceased celebrities’ names and likenesses to their estates, thereby establishing a licensing market, and examine the public policy implications of this practice.

Mark Potter, Finance
The Mutual Fund Scandal and Investor Response.
The mutual fund scandal was one of the biggest financial news stories of 2003 and the largest in the 65-year history of mutual funds.  Many fund companies – totaling over one thousand funds and $1 trillion in assets - were investigated due to late trading and market timing allegations.  This study is an empirical examination of the effects of the scandal in terms of consumer reaction, fund performance and industry reaction. 

Janice Yellin, Arts and Humanities
Ancient Nubian Religion.
The entry on Nubian Religion for the Atlas of Ancient Nubia focuses on the Napatan (c. 850-350 BC) and Meroitic (c. 350 BC-AD 350) periods. It combines established information pertaining to elite Nubian religion with new research about the religion of the vast majority of ordinary ancient Nubians: what gods they worshipped and how they worshipped them. Typically this type of overview gives a cursory nod to folk religion and then discusses the official state religion as practiced by elites who, because of their wealth and access to literate priests, left behind religious texts and monuments. However, archaeological work in the Sudan provides data for ancient Nubian folk religion that has not been fully explored. New insights into the underlying basis of elite religion reveal elements of folk worship embedded in elite religion and lessens the perceived gap between upper and under class ancient Nubian society.

Zhen Zhu, Marketing
Fix It or Leave It: Customer Expectation, Intentions, and Reactions in Technology-Based Self-Service Failure and Recovery.
This study explored customer’s reactions to self-service technology (SST) failures. Drawing from the attribution and expectancy theory, we probed a psychological process customers undergo during SST failures, and in particular, the formation of customers’ expectation for fixing the problem by themselves. We also examined the behavioral intention and actual reactions customers take to recovery SST failures. In addition, we investigated the impacts of perceived interface interactivity and customer’s innovativeness on this process. The research model and hypotheses were tested via a computer-based experiment in car rental kiosk and intelligent ATM settings, with 296 subjects participated in four shopping malls in the U.S. Results provided support to most of the hypotheses. Theoretical and managerial implications of the findings are also discussed.

Michael Goldstein, Finance
Brokerage Commissions and Information Allocation. 
This paper suggests that commissions constitute a convenient way of charging institutions a prearranged fixed fee for long-term access to a brokers' premium services.  We examine commissions and order flow for a large sample of institutional orders in 1997 and in 2003 and find that most per-share commissions are concentrated at only a few price points. Further, the prior-period commission, rather than trade-specific characteristics, is the strongest determinant of next period's commission. Institutions concentrate their order flow with a small set of brokers, and small institutions concentrate more than large institutions.  We construct an alternative cost-minimization model and show that our ideas are consistent with empirical results that cannot be explained by cost-minimization alone. Collectively, these results support our long-term contract conjecture.  Finally we show the evolution of institutional trading commissions from 1997 to 2003, and use our conjecture to predict the future developments in the institutional equity industry.

Kent Jones, Economics
The Political Economy of WTO Accession: The Unfinished Business of Universal Membership.
While the WTO now represents most of the world’s population, GDP and trade, the accession process since its founding in 1995 has been lengthy, and it is getting longer. Compared to its predecessor, the GATT, the WTO applies a much more detailed and legalistic approach to accession, due to the broader commitments of WTO members under the single undertaking and the enforcement powers of the Dispute Settlement Understanding.  In WTO accession cases, WTO incumbent members have a superior bargaining position.  This study indicates that the elapsed time from WTO application to accession has increased systematically with the number of completed accessions, suggesting a process of learning by incumbent WTO members to bargain for more demanding concessions from applicants. Regarding the terms of accession in the sample of completed accession cases, the number of rules commitments has increased, and the level of bound tariffs has fallen, as the number of completed accessions has increased. In view of the difficult cases remaining to complete universal WTO membership, the study proposes more flexibility in accession requirements, along the lines of the GATT tradition.

Miguel Rivera, Management
An Integrative Model of Learning in Alliances.
In this paper, we explore the different types of organizational learning that are likely to occur in alliances and we identify their specific determinants. To accomplish this goal, we present a framework organizing the accumulated empirical findings in the alliance literature to date that disentangles two major dimensions of learning, knowledge acquisition and knowledge access, and that separates organizational learning from its performance consequences. Building on and extending prior discussions on the difference between acquiring knowledge and accessing knowledge in alliances, we argue that the sets of determinants likely to impact these two dimensions overlap but are not identical. We identify what determinants are more closely related to knowledge acquisition or knowledge accessing in alliances, and we discuss several factors that can moderate the relationship between these determinants and the two dimensions of learning. Proposing that organizational learning and learning-induced performance are different outcomes of alliances that are often confused in empirical studies, we further identify several factors that can moderate the relationship between learning and its performance consequences in alliances.

Download EndNote X

EndNote is software that allows you to import citations while you search, “cite while you write” and create bibliographies in your preferred format.

Corporate, Foundation, and Government Relations Office (CFGR)
Community of Science (CoS) Funding Opportunities