New Schulich Faculty

ISIK BICER

Assistant Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems

Research Interests

• Supply Chain Analytics • Uncertainty Modelling • Optimization Under

Uncertainty

Isik Bicer

Isik is Assistant Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems. Prior to joining the Schulich School of Business, he was a faculty member at the Rotterdam School of Management of Erasmus University in the Netherlands. He holds a PhD degree in Operations Management from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Isik’s research focuses on supply chain analytics and supply chain finance. He uses methods from quantitative finance, optimization theory, statistics, and stochastic modelling to develop supply chain models that aim to reduce the mismatches between supply and demand. He also carries out research to improve the financial sustainability of companies by focusing on the effective deployment of supply chain finance tools. His research appeared in the top operations management journals, such as Production and Operations Management and Journal of Operations Management, and some practitioner outlets such as Harvard Business Review and Forbes. The analytical tools developed as the outcome of his research have been implemented in companies in the pharmaceutical, automotive, consumer packaged goods, and agriculture industries.

Isik brings a new approach to the supply chain analytics field by modelling the uncertainty. Digital transformation of operations includes two main analytical components: (1) Predictive analytics and (2) Prescriptive analytics. The predictive analytics component aims to forecast demand values in future. This information is later used in the prescriptive analytics component to improve the operational decisions of supply chain executives. The way the data is collected for demand forecasting is subject to some inefficiencies, such that important information is lost due to data aggregation. Isik uses some advanced analytical methods, such as the Fast Fourier Transform, to avoid the loss of information. He strongly believes that if the loss of information is avoided in the predictive analytics models, the value of analytical applications in supply chains would be magnified.

Please see his recent publication at HBR for more information about this approach and its successful application in a company: https://hbr.org/2022/01/using-uncertainty-modeling-tobetter-predict-demand.

ALEXANDER COUTTS

Assistant Professor of Economics

Research Interests

• Behavioural Economics • Development

Economics • Experimental

Economics

Alexander Coutts

Alexander Coutts is Assistant Professor of Economics. His primary area of research is behavioural economics, using field and lab experiments to understand broad interactions between information, beliefs, and behaviour. His research has been published in journals such as American Economic Review, Experimental Economics, Games and Economic Behavior, and the Journal of Development Economics.

During his PhD at New York University, he specialized in experimental economics (studying the role of optimism and overconfidence in belief-updating) and development economics (studying patterns of cooperation in rural villages). In addition to his PhD, Alexander holds an MA from Queen’s University and a BA from the University of British Columbia.

Prior to joining Schulich, he was a faculty member at the Nova School of Business and Economics (Portugal). There, he worked with the NOVAFRICA knowledge center, utilizing randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to investigate how information affects beliefs and behaviour in the context of the political resource curse in Mozambique and health in Guinea-Bissau.

In ongoing research, Alexander studies motivated beliefs, and how belief formation and updating may lead to overconfidence, optimism, and discrimination. In a current project recently funded by SSHRC, he focuses on applying principles from behavioural economics and psychology to study awareness about racial bias. In other ongoing work, he focuses on attribution biases in how individuals update their beliefs about performance when there are other factors to potentially blame. A final related strand of research involves studying gender bias in feedback and attribution. All of this research is made possible through the work of outstanding co-authors working at several different universities.

Alexander has taught a wide range of courses including microeconomics, game theory, behavioural economics, and development economics. He enjoys teaching at different levels, from undergraduate to doctoral, and has experience teaching to audiences in different fields: economics, finance, management, law, and general business.

VIBHUTI DHINGRA

Assistant Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems

Research Interests

• Public Sector

Operations • Supply Chain

Management

Vibhuti Dhingra

Vibhuti Dhingra is Assistant Professor in the Operations Management and Information Systems area at the Schulich School of Business. She received her PhD in Management Science from the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests are in data-driven analytics and incentive problems, with applications to supply chains and public sector operations. Her work has been published in premier academic journals, including Management Science and the European Journal of Operations Research. She also excels in the classroom and has won a university-wide award for teaching excellence during her PhD.

One area of Vibhuti’s research studies how multinational firms can manage their “reputational risk” when engaging with potentially unethical suppliers. Multinationals typically have a complex and widely dispersed supply chain network and cannot always observe the actions of their suppliers. Most of these suppliers are in extremely competitive environments and face immense pressure to cut costs and meet tight production deadlines. This can cause them to adopt questionable business practices that benefit them but may impose a reputational cost on the downstream multinational. Vibhuti’s research proposes a contract design that firms can use to incentivize their suppliers to act responsibly and shows that it can outperform conventional strategies such as dual-sourcing or non-compliance penalties.

Her current research studies project management through a data-driven lens. By collecting and analyzing large datasets on public infrastructure projects, her work sheds new light on why projects perform poorly. Using econometric methods and theoretical analysis, she estimates the causal effect of contractor payment terms and network disruptions on project delays. Her work offers guidelines to improve project performance by considering the contractors’ financial conditions and network linkages.

POUYAN FOROUGHI

Assistant Professor of Finance

Research Interests

• Corporate Finance • Corporate Governance • Financial Institutions

Pouyan Foroughi

Pouyan Foroughi is Assistant Professor of Finance. Pouyan received his PhD in Finance from Carroll School of Management at Boston College. Before Pouyan joined Schulich, he spent two years as an Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Pouyan’s primary research interests are in the areas of empirical corporate finance, corporate governance, and the role of financial institutions in capital markets. In his previous works, he has shown how the organizational characteristics of hedge fund activists and their connections to other financial institutions could impact the governance practices of target companies and the outcome of their activist campaigns. In another study, he finds that firms in the same networks tend to have similar corporate governance practices. In this study, Pouyan finds support for the existence of peer effect in the adoption of antitakeover provisions. His ongoing research focuses on the opportunistic trading by insiders and the role of institutional shareholders in adopting pro-environmental policies by corporate managers. In his most recent work, he studies the impact of exposure to air pollution on the engagement of mutual funds with portfolio companies on environmental issues. He finds that higher air pollution in a mutual fund’s location increases the propensity of the fund to vote in support of environmental proposals and to liquidate its holdings of portfolio firms with higher emissions. These results suggest that a mutual fund’s direct exposure to pollution can play a crucial role in motivating the fund’s environmental engagements.

Pouyan’s research has won best paper awards at the WFA-CFAR conference, Western Finance Association (WFA), and Midwest Finance Association (MFA). His research has been published in the Review of Financial Studies and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. Pouyan’s teaching interests include Corporate Finance and Corporate Governance. He has taught several courses at Schulich, including Introduction to Finance (FINE 2000) (graduate and undergraduate levels), Managerial Finance (FINE 5200), and is scheduled to teach PhD Seminar in Corporate Finance (FINE 7200).

IVONA HIDEG

Associate Professor and Ann Brown Chair in Organization Studies

Research Interests

• Gender equity and diversity in the workplace • Reactions to and support for diversity policies promoting women and racialized workers • Underrepresentation of women in leadership positions • Men and their experiences and roles in the context of gender equity • Accent/language and socio-economic status-based diversity in organizations

Ivona Hideg

Ivona Hideg is Associate Professor and Ann Brown Chair in Organization Studies. Prior to joining Schulich, she was a Research Fellow with the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) at the Harvard Kennedy School and Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Organizational Leadership at the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is currently serving as an Associate Editor at the Academy of Management Journal. Ivona’s main program of research includes workplace equity, diversity, and inclusion. In her work, she focuses on gender but also examines issues surrounding race, language, and socio-economic background diversity. Her research has been published in leading journals, such as, Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (OBHDP), and Psychological Science; and it has been featured in major media outlets including Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, and Globe and Mail.

Her work has been recognized by external awards, including the 2019 Distinguished Winner of the Responsible Research in Management Award sponsored by the Academy of Management Fellows and co-sponsored by the Responsible Research in Business and Management for her work on the impacts of maternity leaves on women’s careers. She received the Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation, and Science, and her work is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She consulted for the federal government of Canada on parental leave policies and the recruitment of women into the Canadian Armed Forces and served on the Board of Directors of Focus for Ethnic Women, a non-profit organization that helps immigrant women navigate the Canadian workplace. She holds a PhD from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. She loves working with collaborators across the globe, and she was honoured with visiting professorships at Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, Amsterdam Business School, the RMIT in Melbourne, and the University of Western Australia. Ivona is also a proud mom of two young children!

RAHA IMANIRAD

Assistant Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems

Research Interests

• Healthcare Operations

Management • Performance Measures • Data Envelopment

Analysis

Raha Imanirad

Raha Imanirad is Assistant Professor of Operations Management in the Operations Management and Information Systems area. Her research interests are broadly centred on understanding how operational improvements can be made in service systems, with a particular emphasis on healthcare delivery systems. In her research, she utilizes data-driven methods to derive insights into how organizations can make operational improvements in order to achieve better outcomes. Her current research investigates how operational choices in healthcare settings affect physician performance. Specifically, this stream of research provides insights into Emergency Department (ED) physician performance and sheds light on potential ways to improve physician performance through efficient and effective physician scheduling.

The methodological foundation upon which her other stream of research rests is a benchmarking tool called Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The essential idea behind DEA is how to conduct a relative comparison of a set of independent decision-making units such as a set of hospitals or emergency wards in hospitals. In such settings, a number of important questions arise: how to identify the best performing units; how to create the efficient frontier containing those best performers; and how to measure the improvements that non-best performers would have to make in order to reach the efficient frontier. In her research, she identifies a number of interesting problems that go beyond the original DEA model. In particular, her work has extended the original DEA methodology to cases where the use of the conventional approach is not applicable. Her work has appeared in Operations Research, European Journal of Operational Research, Annals of Operations Research, and Naval Research Logistics.

GUANGRUI (KAYLA) LI

Assistant Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems

Research Interests

• Social Media and

Online Platforms • Policy Making in

Social Media

Guangrui (Kayla) Li

Guangrui (Kayla) Li is Assistant Professor of the Operations Management and Information Systems area. She received her PhD degree from the School of Business and Management at the University of Hong Kong Science and Technology.

Her research is motivated by the prevalence of social media platforms and online communities. Given the wide reach of these platforms, even minor changes in the platform design/policy would lead to significant impacts. Meanwhile, an enormous number of platform users generate a huge amount of data, which brings statistical challenges when using such “big data”. Her research tries to answer these questions: (1) the impacts of platform design/policy and (2) the statistical challenge brought by big data.

The overarching goal of the first stream is to understand the impact of platform design/ policy on various issues. She has two broad research objectives in this research stream. The first objective is to understand the impacts of the behaviour of artificial intelligence systems on social media platforms. Machines powered by artificial intelligence increasingly mediate our social, cultural, economic, and political interactions. Understanding the behaviour of artificial intelligence systems is essential to our ability to control their actions, reap their benefits and minimize their harms. She focuses on one specific artificial intelligence system — the ranking algorithm and its impacts in a specific context — social media platforms. Her research examines how the implementation of the ranking algorithm on social media platform influence users’ content generation and patience. The second objective is to understand the impact of platform policy on the generation of WOM and rating bias. She investigates whether a restriction policy could solve review bombing and lead to less biased rating scores.

The second research stream is to address the statistical challenges caused by the prevalence of an extremely large sample in academic research. This project tries to deal with the ‘deflated p value’ problem, and the role of prediction versus explanation, in big data research. This paper has been accepted by Transactions on Management Information Systems.

MAJID MAJZOUBI Assistant Professor of Organization Studies

Research Interests

• Strategic Positioning • Audience Evaluations • Optimal Distinctiveness • Artificial Intelligence • Organization Theory • Organizational Identity • Organizational Change

Majid Majzoubi

Majid Majzoubi’s research is on the interface between audiences and organizations. Majid draws on strategic management, organizational theory, and socio-cognitive foundations of social judgments to study how firms’ positioning claims influence their audience evaluations. His focus is on how firms can use machine learning algorithms to improve their audience ratings and evaluations through strategic positioning. In our connected world of today, firms are increasingly being rated, ranked, and evaluated. Audience ratings command a significant influence on firms’ success prospects. The advance of artificial intelligence and the availability of big data allows for a nuanced investigation of audiences’ individualized categorization schema and evaluation criteria. Through a series of studies, he uses machine learning algorithms to examine the subtleties of a dynamic strategic positioning strategy in light of a heterogeneous audience and in categories with multiple comparison benchmarks. He explores (1) how identity change affects audience evaluations, (2) how market positioning affects audiences’ benchmark selection, and (3) how firms could use machine learning to strategically position themselves. His papers are under various stages of review at the Academy of Management Journal and Strategic Management Journal.

In addition to research, Majid is highly passionate about teaching and interacting with the ambitious students at Schulich. His background in Computer Science and Technology allows him to integrate a business mindset with the latest technological trends and deliver a class that bridges theory and practice.

Majid has received his PhD in Strategic Management from the University of Washington in Seattle and his MBA from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Having recently moved to Toronto, he has been amazed by the cultural diversity and the great food scene. When not working, Majid enjoys swimming and cycling.

ALEKSANDRA RZE ´ ZNIK

Assistant Professor of Finance

Research Interests

• Institutional Investors • Financial Fragility • Liquidity • Asset Pricing • Sustainability

Aleksandra Rzeźnik

Aleksandra Rze´znik is Assistant Professor of Finance. She was an assistant professor of finance at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. She received her PhD in Finance from the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark and her BA and MA in International Business Administration from the Viadrina University in Germany. During her PhD studies and assistant professorship in Vienna, she frequently visited the University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management.

Aleksandra is an applied financial economist with broad research interests in asset pricing. She is especially interested in the threats to financial stability coming from nonbank financial institutions like mutual funds. She is currently working on several projects analyzing the effect of specialized demand, peer fragility, and mutual fund monitoring activities on asset prices and their liquidity. In addition, Aleksandra is also interested in issues of sustainability in the financial markets. Specifically, together with her co-authors (Loriana Pelizzon and Kathleen Weiss Hanley), she explores an exogenous shock to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings and assesses investor and price responses to the sudden shifts in the ESG ratings. The results show that investors’ blind reliance on ratings, particularly retail investors, may result in suboptimal investment decisions that exert transitory price pressure on affected stocks. Aleksandra’s work has been published in Review of Finance and presented at major finance conferences including AFA, EFA, NFA, and FMA. Aleksandra is also a principal investigator on a project funded by SSHRC Insight Development Grant in 2020.

Aleksandra’s teaching interest includes asset pricing, investments, and active portfolio management. She is currently teaching FINE3200 to BA students and asset pricing part of FINE7300 to PhD students of Schulich. In her free time, she loves jogging, playing tennis, and watching independent foreign films.

DIVINUS OPPONG-TAWIAH

Assistant Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems

Research Interests

• Digital Platforms • IT Adoption and

Innovation • Design Science • Network Science • Gamification Systems • Green IT

Divinus Oppong-Tawiah

Divinus holds a PhD in Information Systems from McGill University and researches how new technologies evolve organizational forms and practices and shape digitally enabled organizational work. He studies these concepts in contexts such as IT innovation in digital platforms; collective intelligence and open innovation in online communities; and sustainable organizational IT practices, using a variety of empirical methods: network science, data science, design science, econometric analysis, randomized controlled trials, and quasiexperimental causal inference methods. Overall, his research aims to deepen understanding of how organizations leverage information systems and information technologies to innovate, compete and survive in the digital economy. At Schulich, he teaches graduate courses in Business Application of AI, Information Systems and Data Analytics.

WINNY SHEN

Associate Professor of Organization Studies

Research Interests

• Diversity • Inclusion • Leadership • Meta-Analysis • Understaffing • Work-Life Balance • Worker Well-Being

Winny Shen

Winny Shen is Associate Professor of Organization Studies. An organizational psychologist by training, she received her PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2011 and was named by the Association for Psychological Science (APS) as a Rising Star in 2016. Prior to joining Schulich, she was a faculty at the University of South Florida and the University of Waterloo. One of the most rewarding aspects of her career has been working with students; to date, she has had the pleasure of supervising or co-supervising five PhD dissertations, seven master theses, and nine undergraduate honours theses.

What drove Winny to become a management professor was her desire for more organizations to be inclusive, productive, and healthy. In an effort to realize this goal, her current research interests center on three domains and their intersections: diversity and inclusion, leadership, and worker health and well-being. For example, she has explored barriers to leadership among women and racial minorities, how abusive leadership behaviours harm the well-being of both the leader and their followers, and workplace stressors that tend to disproportionately affect minority workers (e.g., discrimination; imposter syndrome). This work has been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and appeared in top journals in psychology and management, such as the Journal of Applied Psychology, Psychological Science, Academy of Management Journal, and the Journal of Management. Her research has also received the Saroj Parasuraman Award for outstanding publication on gender and diversity in organizations and the Andre Bussing Memorial Prize for early-career research in occupational health psychology. Finally, Winny actively strives to bridge the science-practice gap in business by speaking to policymakers, appearing in the media, and teaching evidence-based practices to her students.

LUKE ZHU

Associate Professor of Organization Studies

Research Interests

• Business Ethics • Diversity • Moral Identity • Organizational Justice • Perception of

Artificial Intelligence

Luke Zhu

Luke Zhu is Associate Professor of Organization Studies. He received his PhD degree from the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia and a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Before joining Schulich, Luke was Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba.

Luke’s research addresses some of our society’s most pressing challenges, such as discrimination and moral decision making. For example, his research that moral judgments of persons and acts can be dissociated from one another suggests that sometimes it takes a bad person to do the right thing, which found that when a leader chooses a consequentialist course of action by sacrificing one individual to save a greater number of lives, they are praised for their action but nonetheless seen as deficient in moral character. His research on discrimination focuses on revealing the various factors that give rise to, perpetuate, and exacerbate discrimination. For example, one of his research projects found that people’s desire to justify the socio-political system leads them to support whatever ideologies accessible in their social environment, even if those ideologies run counter to the maintenance of group hierarchy. This research makes a major contribution to our understanding of the motivational underpinnings of ideologies by distinguishing the motive to justify the system from wanting to maintain the social hierarchy, two motives often treated as interchangeable but which Luke’s research demonstrates are not. These findings also shed light on why people’s ideological commitments can seem so inconsistent and fleeting. On the topic of discrimination, Luke’s research has also contributed several novel interventions to reduce biased judgments of women and racial minorities, such as the activation of a calculative mindset.

Luke has published 20 publications in some of the most prestigious outlets, such as the Journal of Applied Psychology, which is regarded as the flagship outlet in Industrial/ Organizational psychology as rated by 217 academics (Zickar and Highhouse, 2000), Cognition, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a multidisciplinary scientific journal that acknowledges only the most important scientific endeavours. Beyond academia, Luke’s research has been featured in many world-class media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.