Faculty Research Brief: August 2010
Faculty Research Brief is a periodic report designed to inform the Stern community about new faculty research, new publications, awards and grants. Please send your research news to be considered for inclusion to paffairs@stern.nyu.edu.
Featured Research
The Michelle Markup: The First Lady’s Impact on Stock Prices of Fashion Companies
David Yermack, Albert Fingerhut Professor of Finance and Business Transformation, analyzes designer and retailer firms’ stock prices over a 14 month period after First Lady Michelle Obama wears their clothing at major events. He finds that her public appearances led to gains exceeding $2.6 billion in shareholder value for various clothiers and could create value exceeding $100 million for companies that design and market her outfits. For clothes that she does not select, firms experience losses in their stock values by about 0.4 percent. Professor Yermack notes that Michelle Obama’s impact upon the fashion industry appears to represent a pattern of value redistribution rather than value creation.
“Predicting Purchase Behavior from Stated Intentions: A Unified Model”
Research Professor of Marketing Vicki Morwitz and Professor Baohong Sun of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University develop a predictive model of the relationship between intentions and purchasing decisions. Simultaneously, their model accounts for biases in consumers' reported intentions, changes in their true intentions over time, and the imperfect correlation between true intentions and actual purchasing. Underlining the utility of this model for managers who seek to target the right consumers with the right marketing efforts, the authors demonstrate how their unified model is more accurate in predicting individual-level purchase decisions than existing models. The paper was accepted for publication at the International Journal of Research in Marketing.
“The Evolving Social Network of Marketing Scholars”
Professor of Marketing Eitan Muller, along with Jacob Goldenberg of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Barak Libai of Tel Aviv University and Stefan Stremersch of Erasmus University Rotterdam, examines the growing social network of marketing academics. The researchers provide a comprehensive and dynamic database on the social collaboration among marketing scholars over the last 40 years. Accepted for publication in Marketing Science, their paper provides insight into the evolution of social networks over time as well as the specific evolution of the marketing discipline.
The Ethical Dimension of Organizational Identity
Clinical Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations Matt Statler, David Oliver and Johan Roos begin to explore the ethical implications of organizational identity in their research, “A Meta-Ethical Perspective on Organizational Identity.” Forthcoming in the Journal of Business Ethics, the paper builds on recent literature that frames organizational identity as a dynamic process involving cognitive, social and emotional elements, and develops a new theory to describe the ethical dimension of this process. The researchers use the balance theory of practical wisdom as a framework to describe the ethical considerations that arise whenever organizational identity is constructed in practice, and illustrate the relevance of this theory through a case study of a strategy development workshop in an international paint company. They point to several implications of their study for future research in the areas of organizational identity and business ethics. Additionally, they advise practitioners who seek to develop more ethically sensitive organizations to look beyond lawyers and auditors and to focus on the ways in which organizational members construct identity by talking about the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘others’ in the business environment.