CBE names 12 faculty recipients of research awards

Western Washington University’s College of Business and Economics has honored 12 of its faculty members for their excellence in research. This year’s recipients of the Dennis R. Murphy Faculty Research Awards are Earl Benson, Sophie Kong, Brandon Dupont, Yvonne Durham, Matthew Roelofs, Steven Globerman, Jongwook Kim, John Krieg, Ed Love, and Jason Kanov. This year’s recipients of the David Merrifield award are Z. George Zhang, Paul Storer, and Globerman. These awards recognize exemplary faculty papers that were accepted for publication by refereed journals between Aug. 16, 2010 and Aug. 15, 2011. Benson and Kong collaborated on the paper “Stock Return Expectations and P/E 10,” forthcoming in the Journal of Portfolio Management. This paper uses an innovative and relatively simple approach to estimate the return on equities. The approach provides reasonable estimates of subsequent 10-year returns for the S&P 500 Index for the past 8 decades and suggests that the return for the coming decade will be in the range of 6 to 8 percent. Dupont co-authored “The Long Term Rise in Overseas Travel by Americans, 1820-2000,” forthcoming in the Economic History Review. This paper provides new quantitative evidence on the long-term rise in American travel to Europe between 1820 and 2000. Using newly constructed data on the number of Americans making that trip and a new time series on passenger fares, Dupont and his co-authors provide an explanation for the long-term rise in overseas travel. Durham and Roelofs collaborated on the paper “A Laboratory Study of Auction with a Buy Price,” accepted by Economic Inquiry. The study uses an economic experiment to explore the incentives for auction houses such as eBay to allow sellers to specify a “buy price” in online markets and whether the nature of the buy price (permanent or temporary) is significant. The experimental results indicate that specifying a buy price can increase auction revenue, early bidding, and efficiency. Roelofs’ article, “Heterogeneous Preferences for Altruism: Gender and Personality, Social Status, Giving, and Taking,” was published in Volume 14 of the journal Experimental Economics. Early work on social preferences found that men and women exhibit significant differences in their altruistic behaviors. “We show that these differences are more subtle than previously understood and are explained collectively by various personality factors,” said Roelofs. Globerman wrote the article “The Social Responsibility of Managers- Reassessing and Integrating Diverse Perspectives,” forthcoming in the Business and Society Journal. The paper discusses socially responsible business management and advocates for an alternative view of socially responsible behavior by managers. Kim’s paper, “Alliance Governance and Technological Performance: Some Evidence from Biotechnology Alliances,” was published in Volume 20, Issue 4 of Oxford Journals: Industrial and Corporate Change. This paper examines how the nature of biopharmaceutical research and development alliances changes over the course of the drug development process. Krieg authored the article “Which Students are Left Behind? The Racial Impacts of the No Child Left Behind Act,” published August 2011 in Volume 30, Issue 4 of Economics of Education Review. “The No Child Left Behind Act imposes sanctions on schools if the fraction of any of five racial groups of students demonstrating proficiency on a high stakes exam falls below a statewide pass rate,” said Krieg. “This system places pressure on school administrators to redirect educational resources from groups of students likely to demonstrate proficiency towards those who are marginally below proficient. Using statewide observations of 3rd- and 4th-grade math tests, this paper demonstrates that students of successful racial groups at schools likely to be sanctioned gain less academically over their subsequent test year than comparable peers at passing schools.” Love authored the article “New Product Pricing Strategy Under Customer Asymmetric Anchoring,” forthcoming in the International Journal of Research and Marketing. This paper argues that customers adjust their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for a new product based on the observed price of that product. This adjustment is asymmetric; customers adjust upwards when the observed price is higher than their WTP, but they do not adjust downwards. Kanov co-authored the paper “Understanding Compassion Capability,” published in Volume 64, No. 7 of Human Relations. "This paper investigates the building blocks of compassion in the workplace,” Kanov says. “The inevitable pain and suffering people experience can be quite detrimental individually and organizationally, and our previous research finds evidence that compassion in the workplace can lessen these consequences and promote other positive outcomes.” Zhang’s article “Modeling Security-Check Queues,” is forthcoming in Management Science. “This study is motivated by the waiting lines between the US-Canadian border-crossings,” said Zhang. “In such a system, every customer has to be inspected by the first stage inspector but only a proportion of customers need to go through the second stage for further inspection. The study aims to help managers of such a system optimize its efficiency and effectiveness.” Storer and Globerman collaborated on the article “Regional and Temporal Variations in Transportation costs for U.S. Imports from Canada,” accepted by the Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy. This paper evaluates whether transportation costs for U.S. imports from Canada have increased due to “border thickening” in the post-9/11 period. Evidence shows that a pre-9/11 trend of declining transportation costs noticeably slowed in the post-2001 period, and that costs declined at varying rates at different crossing points along the Canada-U.S. border. “The College of Business and Economics is fortunate to have many faculty members who are both excellent teachers as well as excellent scholars. These awards recognize exemplary work in a wide range of areas which is many times a result of faculty’s collaborative efforts with fellow scholars. The papers and recipients exemplify what we are about as a College. I am proud to work with the recognized authors and everyone in the College,” said Brian Burton, dean of Western’s College of Business and Economics. The awards are $1,000 and are funded entirely by supporters of Western’s College of Business and Economics through the Western Foundation. “We are very pleased that donors have recognized Dennis Murphy’s and David Merrifield’s legacies to the College and University to fund these very important awards,” said Burton.