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Faculty News & Publications

GSB, Haas Center Honor Patell

James PatellJames Patell, who joined the Business School faculty 32 years ago as an accounting professor with a degree in marine architecture, is the 2007 recipient of the Robert T. Davis Award presented by the School’s faculty to recognize an individual for a lifetime of service and achievement. He is also the 2007 winner of the Miriam Aaron Roland Volunteer Service Prize presented by Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service. That prize honors a faculty member who “over and above the normal academic duties engages and involves students in integrating academic scholarship with significant volunteer service to society.”

Patell, the Herbert Hoover Professor of Public and Private Management, is codirector of the Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing at Stanford. He is also a founding faculty member of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, otherwise known as Stanford’s d-School, and he was a creator of and co-teaches the course Design for Extreme Affordability. That course brings together students from such fields as business, engineering, computer science, medicine and product design to seek practical, market-based solutions to challenges faced by the world’s poor.

At the Business School dinner honoring Patell, Dean Emeritus Robert Jaedicke, who taught accounting with Patell during his first year, recalled that he learned quickly that “Jim’s talents were enormous. He’s very smart, he knows manufacturing processes, math, and computing processing and operations ... and he was one of the best project managers. The more complex the project, the more people involved, the more interdisciplinary it was, the better. Oh, and he did know some accounting.”

Patell served as an associate dean of the School under Jaedicke from 1985 to 1991. He is credited with being the driving force to revitalize the School’s Public Management Program. Since the program’s founding, nearly 3,000 students have taken the specific set of courses to earn a PMP certificate in addition to MBA or Sloan management degrees, including 92 from last year’s graduating class. Patell has devoted countless hours to helping individual students with projects as well as implementing his own new ideas, thereby modeling the integration of academic scholarship with service for social impact, the Haas Center noted.

Mark Wolfson, who joined the accounting faculty two years after Patell, said besides writing papers together, the two remodeled a house and took a sabbatical together. “The University of Chicago still doesn’t know what to make of the two Stanford professors from California,” Wolfson said, “who dressed up as the Blues Brothers—Jake and Elwood—in 1981, with briefcases handcuffed to our wrists, and handed out final exams.”

Academy Honors Two Faculty

Two Graduate School of Business faculty members, J. Darrell Duffie, the Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, lecturer in strategic management, have been named fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

They were among 227 new fellows, including former Vice President Al Gore, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Nine Stanford faculty members were elected in May to the distinguished body founded in 1780 by John Adams and other scholar-patriots. The election of this year’s class brings the number of Stanford scholars in the academy to 243.

Duffie, who is also the codirector of the School’s Credit Risk Executive Program, has done extensive research on such issues as over-the-counter market financial modeling and financial risk management. His research and teaching have been recognized with other honors such as the New York Stock Exchange Prize for Equity Research and the PhD Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award at the Business School.

Schmidt co-teaches a course titled Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital at the Business School. In 2006, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, which recognized his work on “the development of strategies for the world’s most successful Internet search engine company.”

The new fellows will be honored at the academy’s annual induction ceremony in Cambridge, Mass., on Oct. 6.

Faculty Publications

Accounting
Performance-Based Compensation in Professional Service Firms
C.D. Ittner, David Larcker, and M. Pizzini
Journal of Accounting and Economics
(Vol. 43), 2007

Electronic Business
Strategic Spot Trading in Supply Chains
Haim Mendelson and Tunay Tunca
Management Science
(Vol. 53, No. 5), May 2007

Finance
Dynamic Signaling and Market Breakdown
Ilan Kremer and Andrzej Skrzypacz
Journal of Economic Theory
(Vol. 133, No. 1), March 2007

Investment Under Uncertainty and Time-Inconsistent Preferences
Steven Grenadier and Neng Wang
Journal of Financial Economics
(Vol. 84, No. 1), April 2007

Multi-Period Corporate Default Prediction with Stochastic Covariates
Darrell Duffie, L. Saita, and K. Wang
Journal of Financial Economics
(Vol. 83, No. 3), March 2007

Health Economics
A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Adjuvant Trastuzumab Regimens
in Early HER2/neu-Positive Breast Cancer
A. Kurian, R. Thompson, A. Gaw, S. Arai, R. Ortiz, and Alan Garber
Journal of Clinical Oncology
(Vol. 25, No. 6), February 2007

High-Tech Strategy
Defining the Minimum Winning Game in High-Technology Ventures
Robert Burgelman and Robert Siegel
California Management Review
(Vol. 49, No. 3), Spring 2007

Information Goods Upgrades: Theory and Evidence
Brian Viard
B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics
(Vol. 7, No. 1), January 2007

Marketing
Do You Look to the Future or Focus on Today? The Impact of Life Experience on Intertemporal Decisions
W. Liu and Jennifer Aaker
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
(Vol. 102, No. 2), March 2007

Getting Emotional About Health
N. Agrawal, G. Menon, and Jennifer Aaker
Journal of Marketing Research
(Vol. 44, No. 1), February 2007

The Role of Self-Selection, Usage Uncertainty, and Learning in the Demand for Local Telephone Service
Sridhar Narayanan, Pradeep Chintagunta, and Eugenio Miravete
Quantitative Marketing and Economics
(Vol. 5, No. 1), March 2007

Retail Environment and Manufacturer Competitive Intensity
Michaela Draganska and Daniel Klapper
Journal of Retailing
(Vol. 83, No. 2), April 2007

Operations
Optimal Control of a High-Volume Assemble-to-Order System
Erica Plambeck and Amy Ward
Mathematics of Operations Research
(Vol. 31, No. 3), August 2006

Organizational Behavior
Adaptive Learning and Risk Taking
Jerker Denrell
Psychological Review
(Vol. 114, No. 1), January 2007

Inferring the Popularity of an Opinion from Its Familiarity: A Repetitive Voice Can Sound Like a Chorus
Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen Garcia, Norbert Schwarz, and Dale Miller
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
(Vol. 92, No. 5), May 2007

Interdependent Sampling and Social Influence
Jerker Denrell and Gaël Le Mens
Psychological Review
(Vol. 114, No. 2), April 2007

What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management
Jeffrey Pfeffer
Harvard Business School Press, 2007

Suppose We Took Evidence-Based Management Seriously: Implications for Reading and
Writing Management
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton
Academy of Management Learning and Education
(Vol. 6, No. 1), March 2007

The Frontiers of Intellectual Property: Expanded Protection vs. New Models of Open Science
Diana Rhoten and Walter Powell
Annual Review of Law and Social Science
(Vol. 3), 2007

What Breaks a Leader: The Curvilinear Relation Between Assertiveness and Leadership
Daniel Ames and Francis Flynn
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
(Vol. 92, No. 2), February 2007

Politics
Primary Elections and Candidate Ideology: Out of Step with the Primary Electorate?
David Brady, H. Han, and J.C. Pope
Legislative Studies Quarterly
(Vol. 32, No. 1), February 2007

Partisan Roll Rates in a Nonpartisan Legislature
Keith Krehbiel
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 
(Vol. 23, No. 1), April 2007