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Identity and the digital world

According to research from Jagdish Sheth, Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing, and Michael Solomon (UNC), the idea of identity is evolving, impacted by the growing influence of the digital world. The authors’ groundbreaking study builds on a seminal paper from Russell Belk, written in 1988, which identified the role that possessions play in an individual’s life and how external elements are critical to how people self-identify. The duo uses Belk’s findings on consumer behavior, taking it a step further by applying his concepts to current day, with the online world in mind. Sheth and Solomon found that traditional boundaries between an individual’s offline and online life are increasingly blurred, resulting in what they term the “digital extended self.” People are creating a new sense of identity, courtesy of the information posted, the persona created, and the relationships developed online. They write, “A social footprint is the mark a consumer leaves after she occupies a specific digital space (e.g., today’s Facebook posts), while her lifestream is the ongoing record of her digital life across platforms (e.g., registrations in virtual worlds, tweets, blog posts).” Not surprisingly, the notion of just what defines a consumer is changing. User-generated content and online consumer reviews have altered the nature of relationships between the producer and consumer. The authors’ findings have critical implications for marketers looking to get a better understanding of consumer behavior. Source:

Integrating knowledge in outsourced software development

Despite the prevalence of using outside vendors to handle a company’s software development, little is known about the best way to effectively share the knowledge critical to a project’s success among the client and vendor software team members. In research from Anandhi Bharadwaj, professor of information systems & operations management (ISOM) and Goizueta Term Chair in ISOM, and coauthor Nikhil Mehta (U of Northern Iowa), the duo determined that knowledge integration on outsourced projects is further complicated by the uncertainty often inherent in software development. Bharadwaj and Mehta analyzed 139 vendor development teams taken from sixteen Indian software companies for their research. The authors found that the manner in which software teams share and protect the information resources they have impacts the knowledge integration ability of the team. Since software teams operate under conditions of resource scarcity and dependence, team leaders need to ensure that their software development teams have not only the requisite technical skills but also the ability to import needed skills and knowledge from external sources and share it effectively within the team. An important implication of Bharadwaj and Mehta’s research is that organizations should develop holistic performance appraisal policies that assess software developers for both intergroup and within-group activities. Source:

Supply network structure and systemic risk

Demand uncertainty can present a serious challenge for any business, especially when it comes to managerial decisions on inventory. But when an economic downturn happens, the challenge becomes systemic. According to research by Nikolay Osadchiy, assistant professor of information systems & operations management, and coauthors Vishal Gaur (Cornell U) and Sridhar Seshadri (Indian School of Business), systemic risk is more greatly felt depending on where a company sits in the supply chain. The trio discovered that while an economic downturn presented a serious hurdle for retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers alike, manufacturers were more prone to systemic risk given their placement upstream in the supply chain. Manufacturers had “a more dispersed customer base,” which the authors noted was more closely “associated with higher systematic risk.” Manufacturers also experienced greater systemic risk due to the effect of aggregation of orders over time. They wrote, “A market shock in one period may affect sales over several periods due to lead times and time lags in managerial decision making.” Source:

Are alternative investments right for the average person?

Given the risk, alternative investments were once considered only appropriate for the affluent and institutional investors. However, investment firms increasingly are offering alternative investment products, including mutual funds, ETFs, and private equity funds with strategies similar to hedge funds, to less affluent people. While average investors are responding eagerly to the move and forking over billions for alternative offerings, there are critics who argue that nontraditional assets are simply too risky for them. In a news article, Klaas Baks, associate professor in the practice of finance and executive director of the Center for Alternative Investment at Goizueta, offered his support of the investment strategy, while George Papadopoulos, a fee-only wealth manager, cautioned against it. Baks noted that alternative vehicles allow less affluent individuals to diversify their portfolios. Alternative investments also require minimal initial investment. Papadopoulos wrote that the risk and fees, as well as a lack of transparency and liquidity, were reasons to avoid nontraditional assets. In the article, Baks contended that all investments offer some risk but that alternative investments, when used correctly, also provide critical access to leverage. Source:

Understanding self-serving behavior in leaders

In a new research paper, Melissa Williams, assistant professor of organization & management, developed a framework to better understand when and why leaders use their power for personal gain. She discovered that a variety of traits, characteristics, and values, such as feeling less of a sense of guilt, made leaders more likely to exhibit self-interested behaviors. Individuals who were more narcissistic, less humble and honest, and generally less agreeable also had an increased chance of abusing their power. Leaders with an individualistic and competitive streak as well as those with a lower sense of morality were also more likely to act on self-interest. Threats to power especially increased self-serving behavior for those with a propensity for it. Williams added that “because positions of leadership are desirable and hedonically pleasurable, leaders facing threats to their power will prioritize self-interested actions that secure their own power over behaviors that serve shared goals.” Interestingly, for the individuals who did not have self-interested traits and values, power actually decreased the likelihood that they would become self-interested. Source:

The brain, human behavior, and accounting

Accounting is essential to market economies, setting up what is basically a moral code for financial transactions. Drawing from new and related research, Gregory B. Waymire, Asa Griggs Candler professor of accounting, argues that accounting does have a moral basis because it is designed to encourage and promote ethical behavior. To support the point, he used existing functional MRI research showing how the brain responds to accounting information. Studies show a clear link between earnings news and increased brain activity, as well as accounting information and changes in human behavior. Waymire notes that accounting has the ability to create trust in economic exchange and establishes a way to benefit from it. Additional neuroscience research will play a critical role in furthering our understanding of the relationship between accounting and human behavior. The research is particularly salient for auditors as they work to improve investor trust. Source:

Speculation and its impact on trading volume

Financial researchers have long wondered exactly which economic forces cause variation in asset prices and returns. For instance, traders will often target financial instruments due to their volatile and highly liquid nature, such as US treasury bonds. This speculative behavior takes advantage of the frequent price movements of the product. But the influence of that behavior remains the subject of debate. Francisco Barillas, assistant professor of finance, and Kristoffer Nimark (Cornell U) take a deep dive into the issue by investigating the impact of speculative trading activity on the variation of long maturity US bond yields. For their analysis, Barillas and Nimark use public information to develop a rational model to track “informed traders that take on speculative positions to exploit what they perceive to be inaccurate market expectations about future bond prices.” They argue that their research takes a more “suitable approach for empirical work” by factoring in how traders exploit private information that other traders may not have. The authors note that bond prices alone are not enough information for predicting bond returns. The two write, “If traders have access to different information, this price may differ from what an individual trader would be willing to pay for the bond if he had to hold it until maturity.” Ultimately, they find that this speculation remains a key driver of trading volume, accounting for a “substantial fraction of the variation in historical US bond yields along with the usual analysis of estimating returns based on bond prices.” Source:

Securitized loan modification and loan performance

After the collapse of the housing market, the wave of foreclosures in the US changed the economic landscape of many neighborhoods across the country. Some academics and policymakers have argued that the renegotiation of those loans was a much better alternative than foreclosure and that incentives should have been offered to financial institutions to encourage it. However, little research exists to understand the performance of loans that were modified. Gonzalo Maturana, assistant professor of finance, takes a close look at loan modifications made early in the recent housing crisis to better understand the value of offering incentives to modify securitized non-agency loans. According to Maturana, researchers contend that the small number of loan modifications added to the number of foreclosures during the subprime crisis. His analysis consisted of slightly more than 835,000 non-agency securitized loans that became delinquent between August 2007 and February 2009. Maturana found that loan “modification reduces loan losses by 35.8% relative to the average loss, which suggests that the marginal benefit of modification likely exceeded the marginal cost.” Additionally, modifications resulted in fewer liquidations. He also found that modifications were particularly useful “in preventing future loan losses in times of large increases in delinquencies when servicers are more likely to be working at full capacity.” Source:

Relational signaling and gift giving

Prior research indicates that gift givers are motivated by competing goals. Often, they will simply select an item of the recipient’s choosing. However, gift givers are also likely to select an item on their own to help show knowledge of the recipient and further define and maintain a personal connection. Morgan Ward, assistant professor of marketing, and coauthor Susan Broniarczyk (U Texas) take the research a step further by analyzing how the closeness of a relationship further impacts the gift-giving decision when a gift registry is readily available. The duo employed five separate studies with human subjects presented with various gift-giving scenarios. The paper notes, “We find that despite their stated primary intention to please recipients, close (vs. distant) givers ultimately are more likely to ignore recipients’ explicit registry preferences in favor of freely chosen gifts.” Ward and Broniarczyk conclude that divergence from the registry was not necessarily about finding a better gift. Instead, it occurred only when givers specifically received attribution for their selection. The closeness of the personal connection resulted in a “perceptual distortion of the gift options in favor of relational-signaling gifts.” Distant givers were much more likely to pick an item from the registry, selecting gifts closely aligned with recipients’ preferences. Source:

Unconventional Tech Conference Brings International Audience to UMW

Join us July 30 – August 3! Educators from Canada to Cairo, the UK and across the U.S. will attend the University of Mary Washington’s Digital Pedagogy Lab. Dynamic keynote speakers like NPR’s lead education blogger, Anya Kamenetz, and Columbia University’s Jade E. Davis will ask participants to re-imagine technology’s role in higher education, finding the best ways to teach with and about it. Hosted by UMW’s trend-setting Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (think ground-breaking initiatives like Domain of One's Own), DPL delves deep into digital pedagogy, covering everything from cultural humility to “mad genius” storytelling. We’re also on Twitter – so follow along and join in on the conversation - @DigPedLab and #digped.​​ Source: