| In Brief
New Faculty Talent Joins Haas
The Haas School hired five new faculty for 2004-2005.
Here we touch on their current research interests and
activities.
Eduardo Andrade, Waverly Ding, Shai
Levi (front row)
Xuanming Su, Alexandre Mas (back row)
What Loosens Your Wallet
The role emotions play in consumers' buying decisions
may be complex, but Assistant Professor Eduardo
Andrade is using the Haas School's new XLab (Experimental
Social Sciences Laboratory) to conduct experiments to
discover the precise combinations of mood and motivation
that will get people to spend money. He explains that
people may turn to consumption to alleviate negative
feelings, a phenomenon known as mood regulation. But
bad feelings can make people feel negative about going
shopping, too, an effect known as mood coloring. "My
question is can we predict consumer choices when we
evaluate these two mechanisms together?" says Andrade.
A member of the Haas Marketing Group, Andrade holds
a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Florida,
an M.Sc. in marketing from the École des HEC
– University of Montreal, and a BS in business
from the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil.
Biotech and Academia
In her research on the evolving relationship between
academia and the biotechnology industry, Assistant Professor
Waverly
Ding has found that the relationship is reciprocal,
with industry influencing academia and academia, in
turn, influencing industry. In her research she has
studied conditions under which university-employed scientists
have been willing to enter the biotech industry over
the past 30 years, thereby breaking long-standing taboos
against academics participating in commercial activities.
Analyzing data on some 6,000 scientists, Ding discovered
that the presence of colleagues and collaborators who
already had some entrepreneurial experience significantly
boosted the likelihood that Ph.D. researchers would
become involved in business ventures.
Ding, who joined the Haas Organizational Behavior and
Industrial Relations Group, holds an MBA and Ph.D. in
business from the University of Chicago. She also holds
an MA in sociology from New York University and a BA
in English from Beijing Foreign Studies University.
The Truth About Earnings
Assistant Professor Shai
Levi, who joined the Haas Accounting Group this
fall, has found that investors who rely on firms' press
releases when making investments, but fail to take that
firm's official SEC filings into consideration, are
not doing themselves any favors. According to Levi,
investors often fixate on the limited financial information
firms voluntarily disclose in their end-of-quarter press
releases and then don't adequately revise their view
of a firm's performance when the full set of financial
reports is filed with the SEC a few weeks later.
Levi holds a Ph.D. in business administration from
New York University, and a law degree (LLB) and BA in
economics from Tel Aviv University.
A Happy Workforce Pays Off
Disgruntled employees can harm firms financially if
their irritation translates into poor workmanship and
defective products, according to Assistant Professor
Alexandre
Mas, who bases his work on several years of research
into labor unrest and worker performance. When he studied
Bridgestone/ Firestone, which refused to negotiate flexibly
with its workers' union in several plants between 1994
and 1996, Mas determined that the quality of the tires
produced in one of the plants involved in the labor
dispute was significantly lower than that of tires produced
in plants unaffected by the strife. Defective tires
from the affected plant resulted in 70 automobile deaths,
the recall of 14 million tires, and a loss in company
stock value of $9 billion in four months.
Mas, who joined the Haas Economic Analysis and Policy
Group, earned his Ph.D. and MA in economics from Princeton
University, and his BA in economics and mathematics
from Macalester College.
Who Gets Served, When
Patients awaiting donor kidneys could significantly
increase their chances for a successful transplant if
a mathematical model recently developed by Assistant
Professor Xuanming
Su was adopted to prioritize the waiting list more
effectively. Su, a new assistant professor in the Operations
and Information Technology Management group, used queuing
theory – the study of who gets served, when –
to develop a model to manage the list of patients waiting
for kidney transplants. He plans to submit a proposal
to modify the current system [according to his study]
to the national committee in charge of transplant policy
decisions.
Su holds a Ph.D. in business, MS degrees in statistics
and in computer science, a BA in economics, and a BS
in mathematics, all from Stanford University.
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