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Vanderbilt Welcomes Largest MBA Class in Recent History
Vanderbilt MBA Students Announce Keynote Speakers for 2007 Net Impact Conference
Owen Students Launch Human Capital Case Competition
Bill Christie Appointed to Associate Dean for Faculty Development
Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management Awards Five Endowed Chairs
Six New Professors Join the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management Team
Oasis Center VP Awarded Full Tuition to Vanderbilt's Executive MBA Program
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Investors in stock options have lost nearly half a billion dollars in ten years because of carelessness or lack of knowledge coupled with manipulation of the system by expert traders. Investors’ failure to exercise call options when stock dividend payments make it optimal to do so—and their resulting losses—are the subject of a recent study by Robert E. Whaley, Valere Blair Professor of Management, and two colleagues. The resulting paper, “Failure To Exercise Call Options: An Anomaly And A Trading Game,” is the first to take a comprehensive look at the phenomenon, which involves the last-minute buying and selling of huge numbers of contracts in call options.
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With social networking continuing to rise in prominence, the opportunities to use data from social networks for competitive advantage are immense, even for service-oriented brands. As CRM becomes even more challenging in this new environment, companies looking to get ahead can build on the wealth of knowledge about network interaction among researchers. OWENIntelligence talks with Dawn Iacobucci, E. Bronson Ingram Professor in Marketing, an expert on social networks, customer satisfaction and service marketing.
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Every year, preventable medical errors claim the lives of nearly 100,000 Americans and inflict billions of dollars in costs to the U.S. health care system billions of dollars. With the recent announcement that Medicare will no longer reimburse hospitals for costs resulting from preventable errors, this problem takes on even greater urgency for health care providers. Applying earlier research into “high reliability organizations” (such as nuclear power plants), Tim Vogus, Assistant Professor of Management, and Kathleen Sutcliffe developed and validated the Safety Organizing Scale (SOS) — the first comprehensive measurement tool for gauging the safety-promoting behavior of caregivers.
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Bruce Barry, author of Speechless: The Erosion of Free Expression in the American Workplace, says an increased concern with corporate and brand image, the changing nature of information technology, and diminishing job stability have led to “a kind of perfect storm for limiting free expression on or off the job.” Employee concern that community or political speech or activities may affect their jobs “has a chilling effect on their role as citizens,” according to Barry, professor of sociology and professor of management. Analyzing expression-related firings, historical trends, and legislative and judicial developments, Speechless examines the state of free speech in private and public employment, discusses its effect on workers and the wider society, and offers suggestions for reforming both law and management practice.
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While many researchers and investment managers believe that profitable yields from momentum-based strategies are largely the result of market inefficiencies or irrational investor behavior, a new analysis by Jacob Sagi, associate professor of management, provides new insight into the mysteries of momentum and will likely prompt investors to think differently about how to design and employ such strategies for greater returns.
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Consumers often make buying decisions because they think of themselves in relationship to certain brands. In many cases, they make connections to these brands based not on strong advertising arguments or an intense analysis of product attributes, but rather on narrative processing. They tell stories about themselves having used a product, or they envision themselves as future consumers of that product. Jennifer Escalas, associate professor of management, examined the persuasive properties of ads that use a self-referencing approach to marketing (where individuals are told to imagine themselves as users of a product) versus ads requiring consumers to objectively analyze and evaluate product features. Escalas found that when ad viewers were transported by narrative thoughts, they tended to like the product equally well, even if the ad presented a weak rationale for buying the item.
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Almost every business in every industry wrestles with this question: How do we improve quality and reduce costs? Should we focus on improving quality, even if it initially increases business costs, and then seek to reduce those expenses later? Is it possible to improve quality and lower costs at the same time? The answer provided by professors Michael Lapré and Gary Scudder at Vanderbilt: Focus first on quality. And the more slack with which a company has—or, put another way, the farther it operates from its asset frontier—the more it will be able to improve quality and cost positions at the same time.
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Company executives wanting to establish a positive corporate culture should recognize the strong effect of behavioral integrity—or, consistency between actions and words—on employee satisfaction and loyalty. Ray Friedman, Brownlee O. Currey Professor of Management, and colleagues measured the response of employees who perceived their managers to have low behavioral integrity. They found that when there were gaps between the values managers espoused and how they actually behaved, it resulted in a broad range of negative effects, including high turnover, low commitment to the organization and a pervasive milieu of distrust. In addition, black employees were more aware of and sensitive to low behavioral integrity among their bosses than were non-black employees. Interestingly, black employees were most critical of management’s low behavioral integrity if their bosses were also black.
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