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Faculty News and Research
NEW HEIGHTS IN RESEARCH
UCR Business Makes an Impressive Leap to No. 77 in UT Dallas Business School Research Ranking
The UCR School of Business is ranked 77th in the University of Texas at Dallas Top 100 Business School Research Rankings for the period of 2015 through 2019, a nine-point jump from UCR’s previous spot. The rise in the ranking—which assesses business schools of all sizes—is a testament to faculty productivity at the UCR School of Business, with comparatively fewer faculty than other institutions on the list.
The UT Dallas Naveen Jindal School of Management’s ranking tracks research publication in 24 leading business journals. The UCR School of Business has steadily climbed up the list within the North American Business Schools category, which ranked UCR 98th during the 2012-2016 time period. The UT Dallas evaluation includes most of the journals generally considered the very best in the fields of finance, accounting, operations, marketing, and management.
Accomplished Professor of Accounting Retires
Professor of Accounting Woody M. Liao retired in June 2021 after 30 years of service to the UCR School of Business. Woody M. Liao Within the school, Liao served as graduate advisor, senior associate dean for the A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management (AGSM), and was the chair and area coordinator for accounting. In addition, he was advisor to the AGSM Accounting Society and the student Financial Management Association Chapter. A widely published author in top research journals, he was also the recipient of many awards and honors from both industry and academia.
FACULTY PUBLICATIONS AND HONORS: 2020-2021
Hai Che, associate professor of marketing
“Consumer Search and Purchase: An Empirical Investigation of Retargeting Based on Consumer Online Behaviors” With Zhenling Jiang, Tat Chan, and Youwei Wang Marketing Science, 2021
“Business Analytics for Intermodal Capacity Management” With Michael F. Gorman, Ting Luo, and Jim (Junmin) Shi Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 2020 “Dual Channel Distribution: The Case for Cost Information Asymmetry” With Adem Orsdemir and Liang Guo Production and Operations Management, 2021 “Optimal Incentives for Salespeople with Learning Potential” Management Science, forthcoming Elodie Adida Goodman, associate professor of operations and supply chain management
“Outcome-based pricing for new pharmaceuticals via rebates” Management Science, 2021 “Reference Pricing for Healthcare Services” With Hamed Mamani and Shima Nassiri Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, forthcoming 2021
Jerayr “John” Haleblian, Anderson Presidential Chair in Business Administration, associate dean of faculty, department chair, and professor of management
“Impression offsetting as an early warning signal of CEO self-interest in acquisitions” With Cindy Devers, Daniel Gamache, Scott Graffin, Jason Kiley, and Gerry McNamara Academy of Management Journal, 2020 Hyun “Shana” Hong, associate professor of accounting
“Lender Monitoring and the Efficacy of Managerial Risk-Taking Incentives” With Ian Ryou and Anup Srivastava The Accounting Review, 2020
Mingyu (Max) Joo, assistant professor of marketing
“Temporal Distance and Price Responsiveness: Empirical Investigation of the Cruise Industry” With Dinesh K. Gauri and Kenneth C. Wilbur Management Science, 2020
Thomas Kramer, associate dean for the undergraduate program and professor of marketing
“Ritualistic Consumption Decreases Loneliness by Increasing Meaning” With Yixia Sun and Xuehua Wang Journal of Marketing Research, 2021
Ye Li, assistant professor of management
Poets & Quants 2020 Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors honoree
“Too much trust in group decisions: Uncovering Hidden Profiles by Groups and Markets” With David V. Budescu Organization Science, 2020
Birendra (Barry) K. Mishra, professor of accounting information systems
American Accounting Association Journal of Information Systems (JIS) best paper award in the accounting information systems section for “Budget Adjustments and Spending Patterns: A Transaction-Cycle View” co-authored and published in JIS
“Dual Channel Distribution: The Case for Cost Information Asymmetry” With Long Gao and Liang Guo Production and Operations Management, 2021 Marlo Raveendran, assistant professor of management
Poets & Quants 2020 Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors honoree “The Role of Interdependence in the Micro-Foundations of Organization Design: Task, goal, and knowledge interdependence” With Ranjay Gulati and Luciana Silvestri Academy of Management Annals, 2020 “Seeds of Change: How current structure shapes the type and timing of reorganizations” Strategic Management Journal, 2020 “Division of Labor Through Self-Selection” With Phanish Puranam and Massimo Warglien Organization Science, forthcoming 2021 Danko Turcic, associate professor of operations and supply chain management
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management journal’s 2020 Meritorious Service Award
Jorge M. Silva-Risso, professor of marketing
“The End of the Express Road for Hybrid Vehicles: Can Governments’ Green Product Incentives Backfire?” With Chang He, Chris Gu, and O. Cem Ozturk Marketing Science, 2021
Yunzeng Wang, dean of the UCR School of Business
“The Effect of List Prices on Channel Performance with Consignment” With Xiang Fang and Jun Ru Production and Operations Management, 2021
“Discussion of ‘The effect of fair value accounting on the performance evaluation of role of earnings’ ” With Yong Zhang Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2020
Understanding Decisions and Incentives in Supply Chain Systems and Health Care
Associate Professor Elodie Adida Goodman has earned high marks from her peers for research within a pervasive aspect of business
Elodie Adida Goodman
The COVID-19 pandemic is a clear example of how crucial supply chain management is and how disruptions can affect society, according to Elodie Adida Goodman, associate professor of operations and supply chain management. “Early on, the shortage of medical supplies revealed how vulnerable ‘long’ supply chains are,” she says. “They can span many countries due to outsourcing practices.
“The issues we have faced are evidence that building resilient supply chains will be critical for the next crisis the country will face.”
Goodman’s current research explores health-care payment systems, and her most recent co-authored articles include the forthcoming “Reference Pricing for Healthcare Services” in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management and “Outcome-Based Pricing for New Pharmaceuticals via Rebates” published in Management Science in 2021.
“I find it fascinating that changing the way payment incentives are designed can have a real effect on people’s lives, such as improving access to drugs, and physicians or patients making better treatment decisions,” she says. “Since the health-care reform of 2010, there has been more attention devoted to removing inefficiencies and reducing costs without sacrificing the quality of care. Some of this can be achieved by changing the way we pay for treatments and services.”
Goodman was recently appointed to the editorial boards of two top journals in the field: She is an associate editor for both Management Science and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. She also serves as senior editor for Production and Operations Management.
While her research and leadership within the field are widely respected by her peers, Goodman finds satisfaction helping students understand the complexities of analytical techniques. “I teach quantitative courses, which business students sometimes find among the most challenging in their program,” she says.
“With the increasing importance of data analysis in the workplace, I focus on how to think about a problem and the intuition and reasoning behind a formula rather than the numbers. In my opinion, quantitative courses are not really about calculations, they’re more about reasoning.”
— By Laurie McLaughlin
Should Companies Let Employees Choose Their Tasks?
The tactic can be useful with very skilled employees and independent projects
Letting employees select their own tasks is a popular means of increasing work satisfaction. However, managers should also consider the nature of the task and employees’ specializations before letting them select their own, suggests a study led by UC Riverside.
Traditionally, managers allocate tasks to employees who are expected to produce a defined output. As organizations must increasingly respond to markets and opportunities quickly and decisively, they have begun to experiment with letting employees choose their own tasks. There is to date little hard data, however, to help managers determine the best task-allocation strategy to optimize worker productivity and satisfaction, and the organization’s success.
Marlo Raveendran, an assistant professor of management in UCR’s School of Business, led an international team of researchers who studied when and why self-selection may outperform allocation of work by a manager within an organization. They found that manager-led allocation tends to perform better than self-selection when employees have a broad skill range, tasks are highly interdependent, and
coordination requirements are high. Self-selection tends to perform better than managerial allocation when employees are highly specialized, tasks are fairly independent, and when new workers join a firm or project over time.
“We tend to think of the upside of self-selection as providing greater motivation for employees and better information on their own skills,” Raveendran says. “However, we found that even in the absence of motivational and informational considerations, self-selection can outperform managerial allocation depending on the employees’ degree of specialization and the nature of work.”
The researchers developed an agent-based model to see whether self-selection may have performance benefits over managerial allocation even in the absence of heightened job satisfaction. The model showed the skill-to-task fit tends to be higher under self-selection than under managerial allocation, but at the cost of over- and understaffing of tasks. In self-selection, employees often pick their tasks without considering other employees’ skills, while managers may give away a task to an employee today for which a better-skilled employee may come along later.
The trade-off between self-selection and managerial allocation rests on a trade-off between interpersonal coordination failure under self-selection and intertemporal coordination failure under managerial allocation. This trade-off exists in addition to motivational and skill or information advantages that usually benefit self-selection. “We provide a deeper understanding of the mechanism underlying the relative performance differences between self-selection and managerial allocation of employees to tasks that goes well beyond the expected motivational and informational advantages that intuitively characterize self-selection,” Raveendran says. “The results of our analysis offer a window into the conditions under which each form of intraorganizational division of labor may have relative advantages.”
The research adds rigor to the question of when to use selfselection as a form of task allocation within organizations. Managerial allocation has many coordination advantages, but self-selection likely outperforms it under a confluence of specific conditions: When employees are very skilled but at only a narrow range of tasks, tasks are independent, and employee availability is unforeseeable.
The researchers hope these results can be used to inform, if not guide, managerial thinking on when and how to use self-selection as an allocation process within the firm.
Raveendran was joined in this research, “Division of labor through self-selection,” published in Organization Science by Phanish Puranam of INSEAD in Singapore and Massimo Warglien at Ca’Foscari University of Venice in Italy.
Marlo Raveendran
— By Holly Ober
Lonely? These Odd Rituals Can Help
Personal rituals around everyday tasks ease loneliness
If you dunk a tea bag repeatedly into your mug or open a cream-filled cookie to lick the filling, you might find coping with isolation a bit easier than others.
A UC Riverside-led study has found people who adopt unique rituals to make everyday tasks more meaningful might feel less lonely.
“We found that something as simple as preparing tea in a certain way, as long as it’s interpreted as a ritual, can make the experience more meaningful,” says Thomas Kramer, professor of marketing at UCR’s School of Business. “This makes people feel less lonely.” The paper, published in the Journal of Marketing Research, addressed the fact that people who experience chronic loneliness often feel their lives lack meaning. Rituals create meaning. Most rituals occur in celebratory, social, or religious group settings and draw upon and reinforce shared cultural values. But rituals are also an important part of consumer culture. These rituals do not draw from shared cultural values and might be created by marketers
or individual consumers. Marketers have long known that rituals facilitate relationships with consumers and brands and between consumers themselves.
Kramer and co-authors Xuehua Wang, an associate professor of marketing at East China Normal University, and Yixia Sun, an assistant professor of marketing at Zhejiang University, sought to find out if rituals around everyday consumer products could also help people feel less lonely by imbuing use of the products with meaning. Their paper is titled “Ritualistic Consumption Decreases Loneliness by Increasing Meaning.”
“Nobody in marketing has ever looked at rituals with private meaning,” Kramer says. “A lot has been done on what they do, for example, promoting self-control. But no one has looked at whether or not idiosyncratic, private rituals provide meaning in the context of consumer products.”
After asking participants questions designed to assess their degree of chronic loneliness, the researchers told participants that consumers often adopt rituals around the consumption of everyday products. They asked about rituals the participants practice and asked them either to imagine or actually use the product in either the ritualistic way, such as the familiar “twist-lick-dunk” technique for eating cream-filled cookies, or engaging with the product the way they usually did.
They found that the participants who experienced the most chronic loneliness also habitually engaged in the most rituals around consumer products. Moreover, participants who completed activities the researchers designed to induce loneliness felt less lonely after completing a real or imagined act of ritualized consumption. They also indicated that they felt their life had more meaning after the action.
The findings show that consumers might engage more strongly with brands that create rituals around purchasing or using products because they find meaning and a sense of community. The authors also suggest that governments can do more to reduce widespread loneliness by promoting rituals that do not include particular product options and add meaning to lives devoid of meaning. “Many people are trying to find structure right now because everything is so chaotic,” Kramer says. “The implications of our study are that if you feel lonely, find a ritual. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. It can help you feel less lonely by providing a sense of meaning and purpose.”
The authors note that though participants felt less lonely immediately after using the product, they did not follow up to determine how long this feeling lasted. They also note idiosyncratic consumption rituals might not be advisable for individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorders. — By Holly Ober
Thomas Kramer
NEW FACULTY Two New Accounting Professors See Behavior by the Numbers
Eric Allen One study compared the extra effort [marathon] runners exhibit at the finish line to the tendency of companies to report earnings just above zero rather than just below—even when the difference is negligible.
Studying Marathon Runners Illuminates Earnings Reporting
Assistant Professor of Accounting Eric Allen’s research interests include the effect of statutory requirements on firm income tax planning and disclosures; efficiency of firms’ tax planning decisions; and financial statement analysis.
“On a very fundamental level,” he says, “I’m curious about why people and organizations do things that don’t seem consistent with what you would expect from theory, or the popular perception of how things work.”
Allen also studies marathon running through an economics lens. One study he co-authored compared the extra effort runners exhibit at the finish line to the tendency of companies to report earnings just above zero rather than just below—even when the difference between a very small loss and a very small profit is negligible. “I am a runner and an accounting researcher, so writing about marathon running lets me justify spending way too much money on race fees and shoes,” he says. “But really, the beauty of investigating marathon runners is that it allows us to study individual decisions at a level of detail that you can’t really get when just looking at more traditional data sets.”
Allen was most recently an assistant professor of accounting at University of Southern California. He earned his doctoral and master’s degrees in business administration from University of California at Berkeley after working professionally as a tax accountant, business manager, and senior auditor. His undergraduate degree in economics and business administration is from the University of Redlands.
UCR welcomes two new faculty members who bring a wide range of expertise in accounting, from the behavioral economics of marathon runners to how psychological traits influence fraud
Naman Kiran Desai
Accounting Reveals So Much
Assistant Professor of Teaching in Accounting Naman Kiran Desai has published widely on his research interests, including auditing and corporate governance. Topics have included how internal audit design influences the perceptions of external auditors; the determinants of external audit fees; and the impact of auditor expertise and shareholder dissent on financial reporting processes. He also recently published examinations of how psychological traits influence the propensity to act opportunistically or commit fraud.
Desai says he is drawn to the field because accounting reveals so much about a company—far beyond profits and losses.
“My training and experience in the field of accounting allow me to see things which an untrained individual might not see,” he says. “As an accounting professor, I constantly strive to make my students see beyond the numbers.” Having earned the international designation of chartered accountant (equivalent in the United States to a CPA), Desai brings professional experience to the classroom. Previously, his courses explored cost accounting for business decisions; fraud risk and corporate governance; behavioral research in accounting and finance; and advanced auditing and forensic accounting.
Desai, already a familiar presence as a School of Business lecturer, earned his doctorate in accounting at Florida State University, where he served as a lecturer before taking faculty roles at University of Central Florida; the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad; and St. Mary’s College, California. He has a master’s degree in accountancy from the University of Alabama and a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Gujarat University, Ahmedabad. — By Darin Estep
