Faculty News

Business School Adds Seven Faculty

PHOTOGRAPH BY SAL BROMBERGER/SANDRA HOOVER

Professors Lawrence Wein (left) and Dale Miller (right) join the Business School’s tenured faculty this year.

SEVEN NEW FACULTY MEMBERS join the Business School this fall, leading to a net increase of 11 over the past three years. Among the arrivals in 2002 are Dale Miller, professor of organizational behavior, who will be codirector of the School’s new Center for Social Innovation, and Lawrence Wein, professor of operations, information, and technology, whose recent work has studied the implications of U.S. government policy for responding to a potential germ warfare attack.

Miller, a social psychologist, is the Morgridge Professor of Organizational Behavior. He studies intergroup and interpersonal relations. This includes the origins and consequences of people’s false beliefs about the opinions, feelings, and practices of their peers; the effects of the belief that self-interest influences individual and group behavior; how interpretations of disagreements differ when people belong to different cultural groups; and when individuals feel they have license to take actions or express opinions with negative consequences for others.

The Center for Social Innovation (CSI), which is codirected by organizational behavior faculty member Jim Phills, was created to promote solutions for social problems through teaching, research, and outreach. It will support an annual research fellows program to encourage leading researchers to focus on a specific topic. There are also plans to launch early next year a journal including both academic research and the ideas of practitioners working in the field of social innovation.

Wein, whose work in operations management ranges from semiconductors to studies involving HIV infection and cancer, designs mathematical models for focusing on a variety of issues such as factory schedules, multidrug therapies, and methods for creating organ transplant waiting lists.

In addition, the School welcomes five other tenure-line faculty plus nearly two dozen visiting faculty and lecturers. The new assistant professors are: Phillip Leslie (strategic management), an empirical economist working mostly in industrial organization; Brian Lowery (organizational behavior), whose research involves the role that automatic processes play in determining the contents of thoughts and behavior in areas such as stereotyping and prejudice; Ulrike Malmendier (finance), whose research is in behavioral economics and finance; Martin Ruef (strategic management), who studies the rise of new organizational forms, how legitimacy affects organizational survival, and the creation of new organizations by entrepreneurs; and Alan Sorenson (strategic management), an empirical economist who concentrates on problems of industrial organization and focuses on pricing issues.

BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR Joanne Martin is one of four recipients of this year’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Centennial Medal at Harvard University. The award recognizes contributions to society that have emerged from the recipients’ graduate education at Harvard. The Fred H. Merrill Professor of Organizational Behavior was recognized for her research and leadership in the academic field of organizational behavior. The medal was created in 1989 on the 100th anniversary of the founding of Harvard’s graduate school and is presented each year to two to four alumni/ae selected from nominations solicited from within the Harvard community.

PETER DeMARZO has been promoted to professor of finance, and three associate professors have been awarded tenure. In addition, seven junior faculty were promoted from assistant to associate professor.

On the faculty since 2000, DeMarzo’s academic research interests include security design, contract theory, corporate financial policy, asymmetric information and trade, and general equilibrium theory.

Timothy Groseclose, associate professor of political economy and the McNamara Faculty Fellow for the current academic year; Harrison Hong, associate professor of finance; and Ron Kasznik, associate professor of accounting, were awarded tenure. Lanier Benkard, Yossi Feinberg, Peter Henry, Paul Oyer, and Romain Wacziarg were promoted to associate professor of economics; Ming Huang to associate professor of finance; and Larissa Tiedens to associate professor of organizational behavior. Benkard and Sonya Grier, assistant professor of marketing, are the Fletcher Jones Faculty Scholars for 2002–03.

The Business School has established a series of faculty scholar and faculty fellow awards to recognize exceptional faculty.

Among the faculty given recognition this academic year are Darrell Duffie, the Miller Professor of Finance, named the Spence Faculty Fellow for the third year; Sunil Kumar, associate professor of operations, information, and technology, named the Rosenberg Faculty Scholar for the second successive year; Andrzej Skrzypacz, assistant professor of economics, named the MBA of 1969 Faculty Scholar; and Robert Wilson, the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, named the Jaedicke Faculty Fellow.

Andrew Grove was named the Class of 1973 Lecturer in entrepreneurship, and Jeffrey Moore is the Class of 1978 Lecturer.

Five professors are GSB Trust Faculty Fellows for the current year: Jonathan Bendor, George Foster, Michael Harrison, Roderick Kramer, and Maureen McNichols.

WHETHER DECLARING THAT “a little paranoia may help” a company’s performance or arguing about marketing organizational structures (“If it’s everybody’s job, it’s nobody’s responsibility”), David Montgomery has been a pioneer in marketing research since the 1960s.

“Dave has always demonstrated an abiding interest in real problems of real marketing managers. His research has shown both relevance and rigor,” Professor Marian Moore of the University of Virginia said in August during the American Marketing Association Educator’s Conference, where Montgomery was presented with the prestigious Mahajan Award.

Montgomery, the Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing Strategy, Emeritus, is the third researcher to be honored for lifetime contributions. Each recipient has had a Business School connection—including David Aaker, PHD ’70, of the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School, who is the father of current Business School marketing faculty member Jennifer Aaker; and George Day of the Wharton School, who taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for more than five years.

Montgomery’s prize-winning 1988 paper “First Mover Advantages” concluded that firms don’t choose to be pioneers; rather, “pioneering opportunities arise endogenously … [gaining] first mover opportunities through a combination of proficiency and luck.” A 1996 paper, “Perceiving Competitive Reactions: The Value of Accuracy (and Paranoia),” found that performance is enhanced for teams that are paranoid—those that perceive their competitors as reacting to them when, in fact, they are not. But missing reactions was found to badly hurt a firm.

DAVID BRADY has been named to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, to serve through 2004. The federal commission supports activities to preserve, publish, and encourage the use of documentary sources relating to the history of the United States.

The 15-member body is chaired by the Archivist of the United States and composed of representatives of the three branches of the federal government and of professional associations of archivists, historians, documentary editors, and records administrators. Brady is one of the two presidential appointees to the body. The commission is authorized to receive up to $10 million annually to be disbursed through grants.

Brady is the Business School’s Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Professor of Political Science and Leadership Values.