Proposal Deadlines
Upcoming Research Programs
Faculty News
Library Notes
BFRF Final Products
Fall 2009 Course Releases
External Funding

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Upcoming Research Programs

Save the Dates!
All programs are held in the Needham Room, Olin Hall from noon to 1:15 PM.

Wednesday, October 7
Danna Greenberg and Elaine Landry, Management
"Who Can Alter the Ideal Worker Norm: Women's Experiences Negotiating Flexible Work Arrangements"
Mary O'Donoghue, Arts and Humanities
"Hysterical Clarity and the Child's-Eye View in Two Short Fictions"

Thursday, October 22
Bala Iyer and Salvatore Parise, TOIM
"The Role of Technology-Mediated Networks in Knowledge Management"
Joel Shulman, Entrepreneurship
"A typology of Social Entrepreneurs: Motives, Search Processes and Ethical Challenges"

Save the dates for Wednesday, November 4 and Thursday, November 12.

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Faculty News

Goldstein Awarded NSF Grant
Finance Professor Michael Goldstein has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to conduct a research project entitled, "Collaborative Research: Diamonds and Oil from the Tundra: A System Study on the Impact of Changing Seasons on Mining and Oil Exploration." The research will focus on how changes in seasonality affect economic activity in and near the Arctic Circle through alterations in transportation.

The project will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Matthew Sturm and Thomas Douglas, both of Department of Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Ft. Wainwright, Alaska, and Dr. Henry Huntington of Huntington Consulting in Eagle River, Alaska. The Grant will also fund an opportunity for Babson students to travel to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada near the Arctic Circle to participate in the collection and analysis of the research data. A particular area of interest and research will be the ice roads that help supply mines and other areas north of Yellowknife.

Additionally, a course on "Arctic Economics: Environment and Seasonality" will be developed and offered to Babson, Olin College of Engineering, and Wellesley College students as part of the recently announced three-college agreement to explore an expanded partnership among the three institutions.

Fixon Paper in Top 10
TOIM Professor Sebastian Fixson's paper entitled, "Teaching Innovation Through Interdisciplinary Courses and Programs in Product Design and Development: An Analysis at Sixteen U.S. Schools" was recently listed on SSRN's Top Ten download list for Entrepreneurship Educator: Courses, Cases & Teaching. To view the top ten list for the journal click on its name Entrepreneurship Educator: Courses, Cases & Teaching Top Ten.

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Library Notes

Copyright and Fair Use
Cutting and pasting, downloading PDFs, sharing documents, posting cases???
Are these common questions you struggle with?  Horn Research Librarians can help you understand what is legal and what is not. Contact research@babson.edu for copyright support.

"Fair Use" is a policy rather than a law, designed to facilitate the use of protected work by educators and researchers. The librarians can assist you to determine what is "fair use" and what is not. Babson is committed to copyright compliance and we are here to help facilitate the process for the community.
   

Check out Digital Knowledge at Babson "DKB"
DKB is an evolving digital collection or institutional repository that captures, preserves, and disseminates the intellectual property created within the Babson College community. It is designed to promote Babson based research and enable discovery via the Web. Administered by the Horn Library, Digital Knowledge at Babson provides a single location to store, organize and preserve these materials.  Authors and/or publishers hold copyright over their content and all rights are reserved. more ».

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BFRF Final Products Accepted

Dessislava Pachamanova, Mathematics and Science, Two Chapters of Simulation and Optimization Modeling in Finance

Since about the mid-1990s, considerable thought and innovation in the financial industry have been directed towards creating a better understanding of risk and its measurement, and towards improving the management of risk in financial portfolios. There is an even greater sense of urgency to establish better risk management practices after the financial market collapse in the fall of 2008. The first submitted chapter provides a critical review of several types of advanced risk measures. It discusses in detail the history of, estimation of, and portfolio allocation under value-at-risk and conditional value-at-risk – two important risk measures that are widely used in practice. The second submitted chapter reviews recent developments in quantitative portfolio allocation formulations.

Ross Petty, Accounting and Law, "Brandwidth" Gone Wild: Restoring a More Competitive Balance to Trademark Law for the Benefit of Consumers"

Originally, trademark law only protected against close copying of trademarks on competing products.  However, the scope of trademark protection has inexorably expanded to include confusion about source or sponsorship for related products (infringement) and dilution by blurring of famous trademarks even when used on completely unrelated products.  In addition to this expansion of trademark law largely at the behest of trademark registrants, businesses have developed operational strategies for expanding the product scope of their trademark protection.  Two such strategies include developing a family of brands as done by McDonalds or a conglomerate brand as exemplified by Virgin Enterprises.  This expansion of product coverage for trademark law is referred to here as "brandwidth."

This paper suggests that contrary to the proclaimed ownership of "their" trademarks by brand owners, consumers decide which brands to accept, to like, and even to love. Consumer interest therefore suggests that brand owners should not have complete control over "their" trademarks. Furthermore, there has long been concern about trademark monopolies. Concepts such as trademark fair use and genericide recognize this public interest in some uses of trademarks by third parties. 

Contrary to assumptions behind trademark law, marketing studies suggest that unsuccessful brand extensions of well known trademarks are unlikely to substantially harm to the original brand.  This paper proposes that trademark law be modified to encourage competition by providing greater choice opportunities for consumers and to eliminate dilution by blurring. 

Ross Petty, Accounting and Law, "Is Marketing Ever Too "Pushy?"  A Comparison of US and EU Approaches to Consumer Unfairness"

In its attempt to sell products and services, marketing is inherently pushy. Consumers both tolerate and generally learn to resist typical informational and emotional marketing appeals. While consumers may happily accept the costs of resistance in exchange for robust market purchasing opportunities, sometimes they may reluctantly give in to marketing pressure to buy. The factual informational content of marketing solicitations are regulated in many jurisdictions under schemes to address deception. The non-factual selling aspect, if regulated at all, would presumably be addressed under the heading of consumer unfairness. This paper compares the US FTC's consumer injury based approach to consumer unfairness with the EU's new Unfair Commercial Practices Directive.  It concludes that the Directive’s three dimensions of unfairness: Coercion, Harassment, and (undue) Influence are useful constructs for analyzing the non-factual selling aspect of marketing practices but that both approaches are vague and could benefit from additional marketing research.  

Anne Roggeveen, Marketing, "Advertising a Firm's Emotions:  Appraisal Theory and Messages of Corporate Social Responsibility"

Set against the backdrop of advertising corporate social responsibility, the results of these three experiments demonstrate how the emotion a firm conveys in their advertising is differentially effective as a function of other message elements contained in the advertisement.  More specifically, we find that when there is a strong match between the underlying appraisal dimension elicited by the emotion conveyed in the advertisement, and the other message elements in terms of their relation to that dimension, evaluations are enhanced.  We focus our research around two emotions commonly linked with CSR activities – pride and hope.

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Fall 2009 Course Releases

Jennifer Bethel, Finance, "Runs on Money Market Funds, Market Fragility, and Private and Public Sector Guarantees"
During fall 2008, numerous money market funds experienced financial distress as the value of fund assets plummeted, and investors pulled their money. Bethel investigates investor response to private and public sector guarantees.

Ryan Davies, Finance, "Intraday Portfolio Return Autocorrelation Dynamics"
This project studies portfolio return autocorrelation and cross-autocorrelations over the trading day. Results provide evidence of the amount of incorporation of information into stock prices.

Jon Dietrick, Arts and Humanities, "New Money" and the Circulating Black Body in August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone"
This project investigates the role of money and economic relations in social constructions of race and gender in African American playwright August Wilson's 1986 play Joe Turner's Come and Gone.

Jeffrey Melnick, History and Society, "Musical Responses to Katrina"
Melnick explores key moments and cases that reveal the emergence of music as social practice after the storm, and suggest what scholars can learn from considering musical activity in the light of this national tragedy.

Erik Noyes, Entrepreneurship, "Music to Our Ears: New Industry Emergence and the Spawning of New Market Categories in the Popular Music Industry"
Noyes applies network analysis to the social structure of the pop-ular music industry to see if artists that spawn new market cate-gories have identifiable and reoccurring patterns of influences. 

Salvatore Parise, TOIM, "The Role of External Networks in the Innovation Process"
The purpose of this project is to understand how organizations create, develop, and manage these external networks to drive innovation and performance. 

Katherine Platt, History and Society, "Diaspora Culture, Identity and Discourse: What Happens When Home Place Enters Cyber Space? A North African Case"
This study focuses on the proliferation of diaspora organizations devoted to the Kerkennah Islands of Tunisia. 

The following fall course releases are part of Major awards.

Kandice Hauf, History and Society, "Disciples: Followers of Charismatic Leaders"
Using materials from Chinese history, cross-cultural examples and theoretical materials from disciplines such as sociology and psychology to analyze such areas as hierarchy, patron-client relationships, and friendship, Hauf will establish the comparative and theoretical framework her book on the disciples of the major Confucian thinker of the Ming dynasty, Wang Yangming (1472-1529).

Mary O'Donoghue, Arts and Humanities, Upper Rooms: Two Fictions. 
O'Donoghue's short story examines how performers and practitioners in arts and sports experience the demands of their fields and how those same demands influence, and often contort, their personal relationships and engagements with the world.

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External Funding

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