The BFRF has accepted the Final Products from the following faculty members who have completed their BFRF sponsored research projects.

 Craig Ehrlich, Accounting and Law
“May CPAs Use Exculpatory Clauses?”
We lack a clear answer to a basic and important question.  May a CPA performing attest services use an exculpatory clause or a limitation of remedy in his or her letter of engagement?  Fearing catastrophic jury verdicts for malpractice, practitioners seem to be using such language with greater frequency - particularly waivers of punitive damages and, to avoid a jury, alternative dispute resolution clauses - and the current trend of the law seems increasingly to favor freedom of contract and to allow professionals to limit their liability contractually. A recent bar journal article suggests that accountants should be able to limit malpractice liability, and that the “only concern here would be a finding that the accountant’s work involved an ‘important public interest’ because it is being performed by a certified public accountant”. This is a significant concern, however, and it might strip an auditor of the shelter of an agreement to limit liability.

Elizabeth Goldberg, Arts and Humanities, “Cross-Currents and Convergencies: Emerging Cultural Paradigms,”
Chapter 16 of The Cambridge History of African American Literature will present both a chronological description of African American literature in the United States (1600-2006), and an explanation of the convergence of oral and printed literary traditions in its development. This chapter examines African American literary history from the period 1970-2005, contextualizing its explosion of feminist and postmodern literary texts in terms of related historical and literary movements. The chapter specifically addresses experimental literature that revises existing historical and literary tropes; that brings together various genres in one literary textl and that extends the borders of African American literature to emphasize connections among literatures of the African diaspora.

Ivor Morgan and Jay Rao, TOIM
“Experience Innovators”
Morgan and Rao have created a new typology for classifying service industries – Positive, Routine and Negative services. Having completed the work on negative and routine service industries, they now focus on 10-12 positive service companies. These case vignettes of several of the companies will complete their book project.

Mary O'Donoghue, Arts and Humanities
"Part 3 of Aquitania Poetry Collection"
The Ship Beautiful is a long poem, comprised of a sequence of poems, narrating the disintegration of a relationship abroad the Cunard liner Aquitania. It reflects incidents prior to and during a transatlantic crossing.

Dessislava Pachamanova, Mathematics and Science
“Skewness-Aware Portfolio Allocation: Relation to Utility Theory and Empirical Evidence”
This paper presents a new measure of skewness, skewness-aware deviation, which can be linked to tail risk measures such as Value-at-Risk.  We show that this measure of skewness arises naturally also when one thinks of maximizing the certainty equivalent for an investor with a negative exponential utility function, thus bringing together the mean-risk and the expected utility framework for an important class of investor preferences. We present a skewness-aware asset pricing and allocation framework, and show via computational experiments that the proposed approach results in improved and intuitively appealing asset allocation when returns follow real-world or simulated skewed distributions.

Ross Petty, Accounting and Law
“Initial Interest Confusion vs. Consumer Sovereignty: A Consumer Protection Perspective on Trademark Infringement”
The concept of Initial Interest Confusion (IIC) as a form of trademark infringement involves situations where consumers are initially confused about the source of a product but that confusion is corrected before possible purchase. Currently, trademark law condemns some practices, but allows others that are likely to cause IIC.  This paper suggests that FTC consumer policy and the concept of consumer sovereignty both argue that IIC should be allowed under trademark law except when it coerces consumers into a purchase they otherwise would not have made or makes it costly for consumers to escape the IIC shopping situation. 

More Faculty News

FSF-NUTEK Award 2007 goes to the DIANA Project!

External Funding
Corporate, Foundations and Government Relations Office (CFGR)