Research Seminars

The College of Business hosts regular face-to-face seminars in which scholars from around the country present and discuss their current scholarly research in the business-related disciplines.  Each discipline group within the College usually hosts one speaker each semester. 

Yue Zhang, Ph.D., Associate Professor in Operations Management, John B. and Lillian E. Neff College of Business and Innovation, University of Toledo.

Title: “Sustainable Logistics System Design for Hybrid Commercial Drones”

Abstract: Hybrid drones have been developed and used for commercial purposes due to their long flying range and large payload. This research aims to design a sustainable logistics system for hybrid commercial drones in B2B commerce with deterministic demand locations. An integrated hybrid drone location and routing problem is modeled as a mixed-integer linear program with the objective of maximizing the sustainability of the system, which includes operational costs as well as social concerns and environmental impacts being neglected in previous literature. Due to the difficulty of solving large instances of this integrated location and routing problem, it is decomposed into a location master problem and routing subproblems. The two models are compared through computational experiments. Managerial insights and theoretical contributions are discussed.

Time and location: 10:00-11:15 am, 19000 Hubbard Drive, Room 120/121, Fairlane Center North, Dearborn, MI 48126

Ayalla Ruvio, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Marketing, Broad College of Business, Michigan State University.

Title: “How Rewarding is Your Rewards Program? The Differential Effects of Experiential and Material Rewards”

Abstract: We contribute to and extend a recent theoretical framework about loyalty programs by presenting a comprehensive examination of how experiential rewards impact customers’ attitudinal and behavioral loyalty. Five lab studies and a longitudinal field study establish that experiential versus material rewards lead to greater attitudinal loyalty, more redemptions, and more spending when pursuing a reward and after redeeming them. These effects are driven by a greater perceived value of experiential versus material rewards, even when they have the same monetary value. Additionally, we demonstrate that a small experiential reward is as effective as a large material reward.  A large experiential reward does not provide additional benefits, suggesting a boundary condition of our findings. However, the promise of a large experiential reward can prompt customers to forgo immediate rewards to pursue it. These results provide robust evidence as to how firms can improve the impact of their rewards programs by integrating experiential rewards.

Time and location: 10:00-11:15 am, 19000 Hubbard Drive, Room 120/121, Fairlane Center North, Dearborn, MI 48126

Manish Srivastava, Ph.D., Professor of Strategic Management and Innovation, College of Business, Michigan Tech.

Title: “Acquiring architectural knowledge and the alliance vs acquisition choice”

Abstract: Alliances and acquisitions provide valuable sources of external knowledge and help firms adapt to changing conditions. When searching for external knowledge, firms often face this choice: should they ally with or acquire a target firm. Prior research has addressed this alliance vs acquisition choice from the resource similarity, geographic similarity, relational proximity, product market similarity and technological similarity perspectives. From the technology perspective, firms consider the similarity (or conversely the distance) between their knowledge and that of target firms. While prior work has considered the role of similarity in domain knowledge, the role of architectural knowledge—recombining existing knowledge in new ways—has not been examined. Recombination of existing knowledge is one of the important ways in which firms create new knowledge. Thus, knowing how to combine different domains of knowledge has become increasingly critical. Given the importance of alliances and acquisitions as a potential source of technological knowledge, firms may search for architectural knowledge using alliances and acquisitions. However, we have little understanding of whether alliances or acquisitions will be a more effective governance mechanism to acquire such knowledge. Also, there is a clear dearth of studies that simultaneously examine the drivers of the alliance vs. acquisition choice and the performance implications of that choice in terms of the relative effectiveness of alliances and acquisitions. Accordingly, in this study, we first examine how the choice between alliances and acquisitions is influenced by dissimilarity in architectural knowledge with a target firm. We then examine which mode provides a more effective mechanism for acquiring architectural knowledge and how the effectiveness of these two modes changes as a function of dissimilarity in architectural knowledge with the target firm.

Time and location: 10:00-11:15 am, 19000 Hubbard Drive, Room 120/121, Fairlane Center North, Dearborn, MI 48126

Xiaoquan Jiang, Ph.D., Professor of Finance, College of Business, Florida International University.

Time and location: 10:00-11:15 am, 19000 Hubbard Drive, Room 120/121, Fairlane Center North, Dearborn, MI 48126

Helet Botha, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Business Policy and Strategy, College of Business, University of Michigan-Dearborn.

Title: "The Managerial Psychology of Stakeholder Conflict: Tradeoff vs. Integration"

Synopsis: Managers must know how to address conflicts among the interests of diverse stakeholders. In practice, managers often experience having to make decisions wherein existing alternatives cannot simultaneously satisfy the diverse stakeholders involved (Fiske & Tetlock, 1997; Kaler, 2006; Mitchell, Weaver, Agle, Bailey & Carlson, 2016; Hadani, Goranova & Khan, 2011; York, 2020).  Normative and descriptive research within stakeholder management discusses several approaches by which managers prioritize conflicting stakeholder interests and make tradeoffs, including stakeholder salience (Mitchell, Agle & Wood, 1997; Agle, Mitchell & Sonnenfeld, 1999; Bundy, Shropshire, & Buchholtz, 2013), multi-criteria modeling (Brenner & Cochran, 1991; Hosseini & Brenner, 1992), and balancing stakeholder interests across time (Reynolds, Schultz & Hekman, 2006; Smith, 2014; Smith, Gonin & Besharov, 2013).  In contrast, other scholars have argued that the interests of diverse stakeholders can 'go together', and therefore can be served simultaneously without resorting to tradeoffs (Freeman, 2010; Tantalo & Priem, 2014). Such integration is enabled by managerial mindsets (Phillips, 1997; Harrison, Bosse & Phillips, 2010; Freeman, 2010), the fact that managers and stakeholders have multiple values (Mitchell et al., 2016; Harrison & Wicks, 2013), and relationships characterized by trust (Harrison et al., 2010; Jones, Harrison & Felps, 2018; Gibbons & Henderson, 2012).

Time and location:10:00-11:15 am, 19000 Hubbard Drive, Room 120/121, Fairlane Center North, Dearborn, MI 48126

Kenneth Snead, Ph.D., Professor of Accounting, Allen W. and Carol M. Schmidthorst College of Business, Bowling Green University.

Title: "The Berkshire Toy Company- a Longitudinal Extension" Co-authored with Sally A. Baskharoun.

Synopsis: This paper is a longitudinal extension of a previously published case "Budgeting and Performance Evaluation at the Berkshire Toy Company" (BTC) (Crawford and Henry 2000)."  BTC effectively illustrates timeless concepts that exist in the manufacturing sector, by providing a scenario where a large annual operating loss is incurred even though sales units were higher than budgeted.  The major requirement of the BTC case is for students to compute sales and cost variances and offer likely explanations for their cause. 

This longitudinal extension provides an enhanced active learning approach by adding the requirement for students to develop budget assumptions for the upcoming year based upon what is revealed from their extensive variance analysis for the previous year.  In addition to the variance analysis findings, the assumptions are also based on lengthy student classroom discussions and debates regarding what realistic and  conservative key cost assumptions should be used for the forthcoming year.  Once collective agreement is reached, these assumptions are incorporated into an Excel master budget, prepared on a quarterly basis, which often reveals an annual pro forma operating loss worse than the previous year's.  Project groups are then assigned the task of developing a proposal to mitigate the impending loss and then participate in a mock presentation of the proposal to the CFO.  This extension illustrates for students the need to be prepared to offer succinct and well thought out explanations of the variance causes, and more importantly, their implications for the future.  Further, it acquaints students with the challenges of developing an implementable proposal to avert projected large operating losses.

Time and location:10:00-11:15 am, 19000 Hubbard Drive, Room 120/121, Fairlane Center North, Dearborn, MI 48126

Kyungwon (Kyung) Lee, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Marketing, College of Business, University of Michigan-Dearborn.

Title: "When do business buyers offer suppliers a "second chance" after being betrayed? Role of emotions of betrayed business buyers"

Synopsis: Any business relationship which adopts the relational governance of trust involves dependence and, in turn, the inherent risk of betrayal (Hirschorn and Gilmore 1994). In the context of buyer-seller relationships, a buyer perceives betrayal when s/he perceives that “a [seller] has intentionally violated what is normative in the context of their relationship.” (Grégoire and Fisher 2008, p. 250). Generally, betrayal is difficult to be forgiven. However, prior research has reported that in some instances, betrayed victims in business relationships forgive their perpetrators’ conduct of betrayal and offer a “second chance” (e.g., Finkel et al. 2002; Joireman et al. 2013; Leonidou et al. 2018a), not holding grudges over time (Gregoire et al., 2009). For example, using a survey of business buyers in various industries in the United States, Leonidou et al. (2018a) found that 23% of betrayed buyers had forgiven their perpetrators. In return, natural questions arise: After experiencing betrayal in the business relationship, when do aggrieved buyers offer a “second chance” to offended suppliers? And why? 

Draw on emotion theory in psychology, we investigate the effect of business buyers' perception of betrayal on their emotions, trust, and in turn, their intention to manage the relationship, including the intention to expand the relationship despite the occurrence of betrayal. Specifically, we focus on two negative discrete emotions, namely, anger (high-arousal emotion) and sadness (low-arousal emotion). Taking a mixed-method approach, we conducted in-depth interviews to investigate when and how anger and sadness emotions are manifested in buyer-seller relationships involving betrayal and test our process model of perceived betrayal using survey data of 201 business buyers. Our in-depth interviews suggest that business buyers experience anger and sadness when their trust is eroded, and they consider terminating the focal relationship, while they also decide to continue the relationship despite the perception of betrayal. Our estimation of the structural equation model suggests that anger and sadness have differential effects on how business buyers respond to perceived betrayal. Specifically, anger magnifies the detrimental effect of perceived betrayal on their relational outcomes and relationship management decision, while sadness mitigates such detrimental effects of perceived betrayal.

Time and location:10:00-11:15 am, 19000 Hubbard Drive, Room 120/121, Fairlane Center North, Dearborn, MI 48126

Madhu Kalimipalli, Ph.D., Professor of Finance, School of Business and Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University.

Title: "Do Firms Benefit from Carbon Risk Management? Evidence from the Credit Default Swaps Market"

Synopsis: We examine how firms’ carbon risk management practices influence market assessment of their credit risk. Using two quasi-exogenous events involving the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and the staggered implementation of US state climate adaptation plans, we find that stronger carbon risk management is associated with significantly lower CDS spreads. Our results are not driven by firm-level climate exposures, leverage, and social-, governance- or distress- risks. Firms with better carbon risk management also exhibit enhanced future growth opportunities and cash holdings, and lower subsequent carbon emissions. Overall, our paper highlights the importance of carbon risk management in mitigating credit risk.

Time and location: 10:00-11:15 am, 19000 Hubbard Drive, Room 120/121, Fairlane Center North, Dearborn, MI 48126

Jonathan Helm, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Operations and Decision Technologies, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University.

Title: "Delta Coverage: The Analytics Journey to Implement a Novel Nurse Deployment Solution" Co-authored with Pengyi Shi.

Synopsis: The COVID-19 pandemic has created new opportunities to develop and deploy high-impact analytics to combat severe resource shortages and a rapidly evolving healthcare ecosystem. Nursing organizations suffered both during and in the aftermath of the pandemic from excess demand for and diminishing supply of nurses. The nurse shortage was caused in part by nurses leaving the profession as well as nurses leaving their permanent jobs to take lucrative travel nursing contracts. With limited ability to replace nurses, hospitals struggle to maintain adequate staffing amidst the massive spike in workforce variability.

In January 2021, we embarked on a journey in partnership with Indiana University (IU) Health System, the largest health system in Indiana with 16 hospitals, to jointly develop a suite of advanced data and decision analytics to support a new internal travel nursing program at IU Health. In January 2021, we launched an academia-industry venture to develop and deploy a data-driven solution to support this systemwide program, which was branded the Delta Coverage program. Delta Coverage expands the floating capacity to their entire network.   Effective implementation of this program requires an analytics tool integrating forecasting and optimization to improve quality of care while respecting the working conditions of the nursing staff. To provide 1-2 weeks advanced notice of travel, we developed a novel machine-learning-based occupancy forecasting model that accounts for different levels of patient acuity. Using distributional information from the forecast, we generate workload scenarios for the network along with a probability measure over the scenarios. These scenarios are fed into a two-stage stochastic program where the decision variables mimic the timing and type of decisions being made in practice.

The decision support tool was implemented in October 2020 as a Microsoft Power BI application that recommends how many nurses to put on-call 1-2 weeks in advance and how many on-call nurses to deploy to a remote hospital, with the option to cancel some of the planned travel if it is found not to be needed closer to the time of deployment. We logged the performance of the recommendations from October 2021 to March of 2022 as a proof of value, with the tool running each day in real time. Analysis indicates system-wide improvements in all metrics: with reductions of 5% understaffing, 3% misallocation of resource nurses, and 1% overstaffing. Further benefits include a narrowing of the staff to demand fluctuation, with a reduction in the third quartile of understaffing of 32% and in overall understaffing variance of 4%.  The estimated savings is $100K in overstaffing, $55K in misallocated resources, and $150K in overtime. The annualized savings of over $900K.

Time and location: 10:00-11:15 am, 19000 Hubbard Drive, Room 120/121, Fairlane Center North, Dearborn, MI 48126

George Jiang, Ph.D., Professor of Finance, Carson College of Business, Washington State University.

Title: "The Termination Effect of US Single Stock Futures"

Time and location: 10:00-11:15 am, 19000 Hubbard Drive, Room 120/121, Fairlane Center North, Dearborn, MI 48126

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Xinghao (Shaun) Yan, Ph.D., Associate Professor in Supply Chain Management, College of Business and Innovation, University of Toledo.

Title: "Uncertainty: How to Understand and Deal With It"

Synopsis: In supply chain management, uncertainty (existing in both demand and supply), and the associated cost caused have been paid more and more attention by industrial practitioners. Particularly, in Covid19 pandemic, the shortages of goods and the major fluctuations in demand have caused significant losses in the global supply chains. In this seminar, I will mainly introduce the following research topics on uncertainty I have recently conducted:

1. Understand uncertainty. Uncertainty in demand or supply may be due to their uncertainty nature. For example, the consumers’ uncertain preference or other uncontrollable factors such as pandemic, and the uncertain yield rate of supply due to the unstable quality of the raw materials etc. The other source of uncertainty is information asymmetry among supply chain members, as firms need to make strategy based on its limited information about the other members in the supply chain.
   1. In the case of uncertainty nature, how does the uncertainty influence the operational decisions in a supply chain?
   2. How much loss in profit is caused by the information asymmetry?
       
2. Deal with uncertainty.
   1. In the case of uncertain nature, firms can make efforts to reduce the uncertainty in either demand or supply. How efficient are the uncertainty reduction efforts?
   2. In the case of information asymmetry, is it more beneficial for the less-informed firm to trust the information revealed by the more-informed firm, or achieve the true information from the more-informed firm through information screening?

Time and location: 10:00-11:15 am, 19000 Hubbard Drive, Room 120/121, Fairlane Center North, Dearborn, MI 48126

Jaideep Shenoy, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Finance, School of Business, University of Connecticut.

Title: "Corporate M&As and labor market concentration: Efficiency gains or power grabs?" Co-authored with David Cicero (Auburn University) and Mo Shen (Auburn University).

Synopsis: There have been growing concerns among economists and policymakers that labor markets in the United States are getting increasingly concentrated. Motivated by this finding, we investigate if the increase in labor market concentration due to a merger between two firms leads to value creation for the merging firms. We also evaluate whether deals are motivated either by firms’ efforts to increase their labor market power vis-à-vis the employees, or to realize labor efficiencies by merging entities with overlapping labor markets. Using establishment-level employment data, we create a novel measure of the change in labor market concentration due to a merger. We find that an increase in this measure predicts merger firm pair formation. Furthermore, the merger-related increase in labor market concentration is positively related to the combined wealth effect to the merging firms, negatively related to the wealth effect of rival firms, and positively related to the wealth effects of supplier and customer firms. We also document a decrease in total employment and an increase in IT spending in establishments of the merging firms that experience a greater increase in labor market concentration. Overall, our evidence suggests that increased labor market concentration in mergers enables efficiency enhancing post-merger restructuring rather than enhancement of employer market power.

Darcy Fudge Kamal, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Strategy, Sacramento State.

Title: "Seeking a Friend and an Ally." Co-authored with Steven Hyde, Eric Bachura, and Megan Thornton-Lugo.

Synopsis: It is widely known in other micro fields such as organizational behavior and psychology that motivation is an important predictor of behavior. Yet the alliance and Upper Echelons literature have largely overlooked this important antecedent. A deeper understanding of a CEO’s motivations can illuminate why a firm may engage in higher levels of alliance activity while another firm may not. In this study, we explore how CEO needs—a manifestation of internal motivation—may impact alliance behavior. The results of our study demonstrate that the motivations of CEOs – namely their need for affiliation– have a non-linear relationship with alliance activity. More specifically, the results suggest an initial positive relationship between the need for affiliation and alliance activity. However, at high levels of affiliation, the CEO’s concern for harmony with their board becomes more important, resulting in lower alliance activity.

Richard Schneible, Ph.D., Professor of Accounting, Seidman School of Business, Grand Valley State University.

Title: "Management Forecast Precision and the Commonality of Analyst Information." Co-authored with Orie Barron, Lyndon Orton, and David Yu, all from Penn State University.

Synopsis: In this study, we examine the relationship between managers’ earnings forecast precision and changes in the characteristics of analysts’ information as reflected in their forecast errors. We argue that more precise / specific management forecasts provide analysts with information of lower cost than their own private efforts. Thus, as management forecast specificity increases, analysts are incentivized to substitute managements’ forecast for their own, increasing the commonality among analysts’ forecasts. Consistent with this, we find the change in consensus, a measure of commonality, is increasing in the specificity of managements’ forecast. This finding is of interest because it identifies a mechanism through which management may influence the degree to which analysts rely on similar information. In addition, we find evidence that analyst forecast accuracy is declining in the specificity of managements’ forecast. By increasing the specificity of the forecast, management can level the playing field among market participants but at a cost of decreased accuracy of the mean forecast.

Chanchai Tangpong, Ph.D., Professor of Management and Chair of the Management and Marketing Department, College of Business, North Dakota State University. 

Title: "Dynamics in Buyer-Supplier Relationships and Sourcing Choice Sequence"

Synopsis: In this seminar, Dr. Chanchai Tangpong will discuss how he developed a research program to address strategic, operational, and behavioral issues in buyer-supplier relationships. He will also present his co-authored paper, titled “Performance and Survival Implications of Sourcing Choice Sequence across an Architectural Innovation Life Cycle,” which appears in the recent issue of the Journal of Operations Management. He will then briefly highlight his ongoing research projects and discuss what he has learned from his intellectual and research journey.

View his presentation.