Last month, five distinguished professors in University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics presented their recent findings and research methods during Lerner’s Faculty Research Showcase held in the Lerner Atrium.
“Research is at the very top of priorities for Lerner,” said Lerner Dean Oliver Yao. “We are going to focus on publishing our high impact research in top journals and generating impact that will put Lerner on the map. I’m excited to be here today to listen to some research presentations, and I want to congratulate our speakers. Today is a chance for you to really demonstrate the great research you’ve been doing.”
Below are summaries of the presentations:
Manaswini Rao, Assistant Professor of Economics
“Got (clean) milk? Organization, incentives, and management in Indian daily cooperatives”
Rao’s research focused on the effects of offering economic incentives to dairy cooperatives in India. She carried out her research through empirical and quantitative research with causal inference, and used randomized controlled trials as well as big data using natural variation. The question she focused on was whether group-level incentives could generate higher productivity, as well as how incentives interact with information disclosure.
Rao also described that there was an issue of misaligned incentives, which led to worse production quality. She concluded her research studies by explaining to those in the audience how incentives have major effects in this particular issue.
Jiaheng Xie , Assistant Professor of MIS
“Unbox the black box: Predict and interpret YouTube viewership using deep learning”
Xie’s research focused on understanding video engagement, and he highlighted how video-sharing sites attract the most attention online, asking the question “what videos will go viral?”
Xie then proposed his and his collaborators’ objective, which was to propose an interpretable machine learning in order to predict viewer engagement. They also wanted to interpret the factors that go into video engagement.
Xie concluded that interpretability is a main factor in increasing human trust of ML models, and presented the quantitative data on his research gathered from 6,528 different types of YouTube videos.
Joanne Yoo, Associate Professor of Hospitality Business Management
“Incorporating senses into destination image”
Yoo’s research focused on the incorporation of senses into destination image.
She began by asking the audience what they remembered most about their past vacation and went on to explain the importance of multi-sensory images, and how tourists build representations of destinations through their five senses. According to Yoo, these influence their judgments of the destinations and resulting behaviors.
Her research methods included semi-structured interviews with international travelers to Vietnam and a survey through social media centered on tourism in Vietnam. She approached the findings with a content analysis of the interview data and a statistical analysis of the survey data.
Yoo’s research concluded that the multi-sensory image is a significant dimension of destination image, with smell and taste emerging as the most prominent factors in influencing tourist’s perceptions.
In terms of marketing, Yoo explained how destination marketers should incorporate all three image dimensions — cognitive, affective, and multi-sensory — into their strategies for attracting tourists. The study also showed that the multi-sensory images can have a greater effect than the cognitive image when it comes to gaining tourist satisfaction.
Matthias Fleckenstein, Associate Professor of Finance
“Private equity returns: Empirical evidence from the business credit card securitization market”
Fleckenstein’s research was centered around finding a methodology for estimating private equity returns by utilizing business credit card securitization data. He explained how the lack of publicly available market data on privately held firms makes it harder to understand the risks of and returns on privately held firms.
To explore this issue, Fleckenstein used secondary market prices of securitized business credit card loans, covering a wide range of small private firms (coffee shops, contractors, etc.).
According to Fleckenstein, looking at this data can provide insights into the risks and rewards of ownership stakes in small private companies.
The main results of the study showed that credit spread on business credit card securitizations act similarly to high-yield corporate bond spreads, and entrepreneurial credit risk is very systematic in nature.
He also focused on small business credit cards, depicting a main source of debt capital for small entrepreneurial firms is credit card borrowing, making “the credit risk inherent in these receivables…a direct reflection of the credit risk of entrepreneurship.”
Saleem Mistry , Associate Professor of Management
“Too many teams: Examining the impact of multiple team membership and permanent team identification on employees’ identity strain, cognitive depletion, and turnover
Mistry’s research examined the impact of multiple team memberships (MTMs) and permanent team identification on identity strain, cognitive depletion, and turnover decisions.
Mistry hypothesized that increased MTM identity strain would lead to increased cognitive depletion, resulting in higher turnover decisions.
In the first study, results showed that more temporary teams were linked to less MTM identity strain, and permanent team identification inhibited this positive effect.
The second study showed the opposite: it was confirmed that more temporary teams lead to increased MTM identity strain. Cognitive depletion was also identified as a mediator between identity strain and turnover decisions.