Ford Library

This final Director’s Blog of 2021 highlights the research of some of our Fuqua faculty to illustrate the academic strength that a diverse community can create and share to the benefit of management education and the world. Our only regret is that we can’t feature our entire faculty here due to space limitations!

Note that the links below will prompt you for your Duke Net ID and password in some cases. Fuqua faculty author names will appear in bold. Thanks for your attention this year, and best wishes for successful exams and a restful holiday season!

• The Natural Hair Bias in Job Recruitment, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 12:5, 2021
  Christy Zhou Koval, Ashleigh Shelby Rosette.
• Loved As-Is: How God Salience Lowers Interest in Self-Improvement Products, Journal of Consumer Research, 2021
  Lauren Grewal, Eugenia C Wu, Keisha M Cutright.
• Marketing Thinking and Doing, Journal of Marketing, 85:1, 2021
  John A Deighton, Carl F Mela, Christine Moorman
• The Impact of Medical Marijuana Legalization on Opioid Prescriptions, SSRN, 10/12/2021.
  Hayoung Cheon, Tong Guo, Puneet Manchanda, S Sriram
• The Rise of Scientific Research in Corporate America, NBER Working Papers, September 2021
  Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, Konstantin Kosenko, Jungkyu Suh (Fuqua PhD candidate) & Yishay Yafeh
• A Job for Everyone, Duke Corporate Education Insights on Culture, Diversity, Inclusion, & Leadership, June 2021
  Daisy Lovelace
• Testing, Voluntary Social Distancing and the Spread of an Infection, NBER Working Papers, July 2020
  Daron Acemoglu, Ali Makhdoumi, Azarakhsh Malekian & Asuman Ozdaglar
• What Explains Differences in Finance Research Productivity during the Pandemic?, Journal of Finance, 76:4, August 2021
  BM Barber, W Jiang, A Morse, Manju Puri, H Tookes, IM Werner

This month’s Director’s blog features a miscellany of notable WSJ articles along with recent scholarship published by Fuqua faculty authors in online & print scholarly journals. Ford Library helps fund access for these journals for Duke and Fuqua. Fuqua authors’ names are in italics.

From the WSJ – All of the linked articles below require a WSJ.com account which you can create here. Ford Library and Goodson Law Library have co-funded your access to personal accounts on WSJ.com.

• West Virginia Creates Jobs Farming Lavender at Former Coal Mines – Jocelyn Sheppard, 61, who has degrees in English and library science, is president of Appalachian Botanical, a company banking on the hope that repurposing former mines as lavender farms can help diversify the state’s economy, create jobs and clean up the environment.
• Goldman Sachs, Other Financial Firms Back Program to Diversify Wall Street – Bloomberg LP, Centerbridge Partners LP and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are funding a new program to train, mentor and hire students for careers in the financial sector in a push to bring more women and minorities to the industry.
• Facebook Disables Access for NYU Research Into Political-Ad Targeting – The Library Director comments: If you’re doing data-driven research and need to build a research or article corpus, don’t do it this way. The NYU Ad Observatory, launched last September by the university’s engineering school, recruited more than 6,500 volunteers to use a special browser extension to collect data about the political ads Facebook shows them. Soon after, Facebook, which hadn’t given permission for the project, demanded the researchers cease collecting the data.

Featured Fuqua Faculty Research

• US Tropical Disease Priority Review Vouchers: Lessons In Promoting Drug Development And Access, David Ridley, Pranav Ganapathy et al., Health Affairs, 40(8), Aug 2021.
• Categorical Competition in the Wake of Crisis: Banks vs. Credit Unions, Aaron Chatterji et al., Organization Science, 32(3), May-Jun 2021.
• The Blossoming of Economic Epidemiology, David McAdams, Annual Review of Economics, Vol. 13. (2021).

This month’s Director’s blog features recent scholarship published by Fuqua faculty authors in online & print scholarly journals. Ford Library helps fund access for these journals for Duke and Fuqua. Fuqua authors’ names are in italics.

• Does Medicare Reimbursement Drive Up Drug Launch Prices? – David Ridley & Chung-Ying Lee. The Review of Economics & Statistics, (20)5.
  – Fuqua Insights Synopsis.
• Transforming COVID-19 vaccines into vaccination: challenges and opportunities for management scientists – Dai, Tinglong & Jing Sheng “Jeanette” Song. Health Care Management Science (2021).
• Knowledge creation through collaboration: The role of shared institutional affiliations and physical proximity – Bryan Stephens, Jonathon N. Cummings. Journal Of The Association For Information Science And Technology, May 2021.
• Media Platforms’ Content Provision Strategies and Sources of Profits – Wilfred Amaldoss et al. Marketing Science, May-June 2021.

If you are a Fuqua faculty member, and are reading this and would like to see your research linked here, please email us!

Yina Lu, Andrés Musalem, Marcelo Olivares, Ariel Schilkrut, (2013) Measuring the Effect of Queues on Customer Purchases. Management Science 59(8):1743-1763.

Professor Andres Musalem of The Fuqua School’s Marketing faculty and his co-authors conducted an empirical study to analyze how waiting in lines (queues) at a retail store affects customers’ purchasing behavior.

Their study methodology combines a novel data set with periodic information about how lines are structured (collected via video recognition technology) with point-of-sales data. The authors found that waiting in line to make a purchase has a nonlinear impact on purchase incidence; and that customers appear to focus mostly on the length of the line, without adjusting enough for the speed at which the line moves.

Unlike prior research, which relied on surveys to measure both actual and perceived waiting times, this study uses actual field data to analyze the effect of lines on customer purchases. During a 7-month pilot study in 2008, Musalem and his co-authors used digital photos analyzed by image recognition software to track the number of people waiting, and the sales staff serving the customers at the deli of a large “supercenter” grocery chain store in a major metropolitan area in Latin America.  They also collected point-of-sale data for all transactions involving relevant  purchases from the beginning of 2008 until the end of the study period.

The research was further focused on grocery purchases of loyalty card customers who visited the store an average of one or more times per month. This accounted for a total of 284,709 transactions from 13,103 customers. Based on their analysis and findings from these data, the authors present and discuss three managerial insights. Pooling (combining) identical lines into a single queue served by multiple staff may result in lost sales. The benefits of adding servers when staffing queues is considered. Finally, the implications of external circumstances generated by congestion for pricing and promotion management in a product category are considered.

One of this paper’s significant contributions to queuing theory research is the development of this research methodology utilizing objective data rather than surveys after the fact. Because of their objective and empirically based methodology, the authors are confident in their conclusions regarding customer behaviors and the impacts of queue design on purchasing behavior.   They also acknowledge that while their research focuses on the short term implications of lines during store visits, there are good opportunities for future applications of their method to study longer term effects of queues and customer service experience on future customer purchases.

The authors’ integration of advanced methods from both operations management and marketing have provided managers with an important and useful tool for decision-making regarding current operations, potential future operations, and the pricing and promotion of products.

Post content only © Carlton Brown & Ford Library, The Fuqua School of Business.

Today, we’re beginning a new series of posts on our blog. Fuqua Faculty Scholarship will briefly highlight currently published research by members of the faculty here at the Fuqua School of Business.

In addition to a citation and an adapted abstract, we’ll provide a link to the featured article’s full text online within one of the e-journal platforms provided to Duke users by Ford Library or Duke Libraries. If you’re reading these posts from off-campus, you’ll need to enter your Duke Net ID and password in order to view the article full text.

Ben-David, Itzhak; Graham, John R.; Harvey, Campbell R. (2013) “Managerial Miscalibration“, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 128, Issue 4, November 2013, Pp. 1547-1584.

A person is said to be “miscalibrated” when they overestimate their ability to predict the future, or because they underestimate the volatility of random events. Miscalibration is the systematic underestimation of the range of potential outcomes by individuals, or in the language of psychology, excessive confidence about having accurate information.

Ben-David, Graham, and Harvey ask, does miscalibration apply to senior financial executives and managers, who when designing corporate policies, must routinely estimate future unknowns (e.g., demand, cash flows, and competition)?

Using a unique 10-year panel that includes more than 13,300 expected stock market return probability distributions, the authors find that executives are severely miscalibrated with regard to estimating future unknowns — to the extent that realized market returns are within the executives’ 80% confidence intervals only 36% of the time.

The authors conclude that “knowing that executives are miscalibrated has important implications for investors, regulators, and other corporate stakeholders who rely on corporate data and forecasts.” The authors anticipate future research that will examine “how such data should be best used and also that determines how miscalibrated employees should be compensated and motivated.”

Post content only © Carlton Brown & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.