Stanford GSB: Stanford Business November 2000

Stanford Business

November 2000, Volume 69, Number 1

Professor Glenn Carroll joins the Business School's organizational behavior team.
Photograph by Saul Bromberger/Sandra Hoover

School Welcomes Nine New Faculty
PROFESSOR OF organizational behavior Glenn Carroll, who earned his PhD in sociology at Stanford, is among nine tenured and tenure-track faculty to join the Business School in 2000.

Carroll's work includes international and interdisciplinary research involving the study of population dynamics among organizations, resource-partitioning theory, and the ecology of organizations. Carroll, who formerly taught at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, will teach the MBA core course Dynamics in Organizations.

Other new faculty members are:

Peter DeMarzo, associate professor of finance, PhD Stanford, 1989. His research includes traditional financial economics, such as corporate finance and asset pricing, and microeconomic theory.

Deborah Gruenfeld, associate professor of organizational behavior, PhD University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1993. Gruenfeld's research centers on how the structure of complex social groups affects persuasion, information sharing, learning, and depth of processing.

Chip Heath, associate professor of organizational behavior, PhD Stanford, 1991. His research examines how basic psychological processes are altered by behavior occurring in a group or organizational setting.

The appointments also include five assistant professors in five different fields. They are Ilan Kremer, assistant professor of finance (auction theory and competition in financial dealer markets); Paul Oyer, assistant professor of economics (employment relationships grounded in game theory, contract theory, and transaction cost economics); Erica Plambeck, assistant professor of operations, information, and technology (incentives and coordination in technological systems, and stochastic models for processing networks with throughput constraints); Andrzej Skrzypacz, assistant professor of economics (repeated auctions and price adjustment processes); and V. Brian Viard, assistant professor of strategic management (competitive pricing).

IT DID NOT TAKE LONG for Korean graduates of a new Business School executive education program to put their education to work. Upon returning home, the 43 members of the 1999 program in Strategy and Entrepreneurship in the IT Industry started a venture capital group that raised $1 million, which they invested in two Korean startups. The alumni also sponsored nine "venture clinics" to help others learn and are currently constructing a 12-story incubator building for high-tech startups in a joint venture with local and central governments, according to OK K. Kim, president of a new group known as the Stanford Executive Information Technology Association.

The group's high energy came to the attention of Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who honored their mentor, professor emeritus William Miller, this summer with the Dongbaeg Medal, The Order of Civil Merit. Miller was cited for his "endless commitment and dedication toward the successful implementation" of the executive program for Koreans in information technology fields and support of Korean venture companies. A second class this year drew three times as many applicants as the first. Miller also advises the Korean government and universities there on information technology policy and on curriculum.

"Korea is about a third the size of Japan in population and their economy is perhaps 10 percent of Japan's, yet they have started more companies in the last two years than has Japan," Miller notes. "We are seeing dramatic changes all over Asia, with young people willing to work for small companies, something they were unwilling to do before."

In late November, Miller will be presented with the Okawa Prize 2000 from the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications in Tokyo. The citation is "for outstanding and pioneering contributions to the progress of applied mathematics and information technologies and for prominent leadership in university and corporate management."

RECENTLY NAMED AS A SENIOR associate dean, John Roberts represents the Business School to a wide array of external constituencies including alumni, corporations, and other universities. He assumed his new duties in September.

Roberts, the Jonathan B. Lovelace Professor of Economics, has a major role in communicating the School's teaching and research and representing the views of the faculty. He will work closely with Dean Robert Joss and the two senior associate deans for academic affairs, David Kreps and Joel Podolny, as well as with the director of executive education and the School's development and alumni offices.

Roberts, who joined the faculty in 1980, is director of the Global Management Program and codirector of the Executive Program in Strategy and Organization.

THREE BUSINESS SCHOOL faculty members—Jennifer Aaker, Keith Krehbiel, and Edward Lazear—were honored earlier this year by students for their outstanding teaching. Aaker, an assistant professor who taught the required MBA marketing course in her first year on the faculty, "demonstrated passion, boundless energy and enthusiasm, and pushed the boundaries of accessibility and feedback to students," wrote one student in nominating her for the 2000 Distinguished Teaching Award presented by the MBA Student Academic Committee. Aaker earned her PhD at the Business School and taught at UCLA's Anderson School.

The Teaching Excellence Award of the 2000 Sloan Fellows was presented to Krehbiel for "demonstrating a passion for his subject matter and thereby motivating the Sloan Fellows." The Edward B. Rust Professor of Political Science taught the course Management and Nonmarket Environments.

The Stanford Business School PhD Association awarded its Faculty Distinguished Service Award to Lazear, whom one nominator described as "a master teacher with a relentless but unaggressive style." Lazear, the Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and Economics, was also praised for his openness to new research projects "far away from the research mainstream and far from his areas of research."

A PAPER ON POLITICAL PARTIES IN THE 19th century has won David Brady and Stanford coauthors Douglas Rivers and Kara Buckley the Congressional Quarterly prize for the best paper on legislative policies. The paper, "Elections and Insurance Incentives: Parties at the Turn of the Century," was presented at the legislative studies section of the 1999 American Political Science Association (APSA) meetings, held in Atlanta. Brady, the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Professor of Political Science and Leadership Values, and his coauthors received the prize at the 2000 APSA meetings in Washington, D.C., in September.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS Peter Henry has been elected to the board of directors of the National Economic Association. An expert on countries with emerging markets, he has recently written several articles on how market liberalizations in a number of those countries in the 1980s and 1990s created investment booms. Henry is a national fellow at the Hoover Institution for the academic year 2000-01.