Marketing Faculty Research

Burnout and the future of B2B sales

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 13:38:21 +0000

Burnout and the future of B2B sales Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 09/20/2022 - 09:38

In This Story

Jessica Hoppner

Selling is inseparable from relationship management. In the past, the one-to-one "human touch" of a salesperson compensated for the standardized nature of their wares. However, today's sales environment tends towards customized solutions and co-creation with the client, especially in the B2B space. In many cases, these trends have greatly increased the network of stakeholders whom salespeople are obliged to keep happy.

Jessica Hoppner

Research shows that B2B customers benefit from being more involved in the process, but what about the sales force? Does their increased interpersonal burden translate to higher risk of burnout? ��AV School of Business Marketing Area Chair Jessica Hoppner's recently published paper in Industrial Marketing Management, co-authored by Paul Mills of Cleveland State University and David A. Griffith of Texas A&M University, finds some surprising answers.

Academic explanations of burnout often rely on the job's demands-resources model, which compares workplace challenges against the tools on hand to help employees meet them. When professional demands rise sharply without a corresponding change in available resources, exhaustion followed by burnout becomes more likely.

Hoppner and her co-authors developed a set of hypotheses about the resources B2B salespeople would need to prevent burnout, given the increased responsibilities of customer participation. Their study took the form of a survey (designed with input from actual B2B sales professionals) completed by 210 salespeople. Three-fourths of the respondents reported that customer participation in their company's development process had grown significantly over the past year. The survey went on to ask how burned out they felt by their job, how much autonomy they had in their work, whether they felt sales ability was fixed or changeable and how much they felt it was worth investing time in developing skills, knowledge, and relationships. The final question was about the competitive intensity of their industry in the previous year.

Holistic analysis of the survey responses revealed that the stress of customer participation was not directly heightening the risk of burnout. Instead, B2B salespeople were rising to the occasion by reinvesting in critical resources - the aforementioned skills, knowledge, and relationships. In doing so, they became even more skilled, and better prepared to work with their customers. You could say that they turned stress into their superpower.

The intensity of their resource investment, however, was influenced by (a) their level of job autonomy and (b) their belief that sales ability can improve. The positive relationship between autonomy and salespeople's resource investment was even stronger in less competitive industries.

As Hoppner explains, "The salesperson wants to respond to these new challenges by investing in resources and getting new skills. The autonomy provided by your company influences how much you invest. The competitive environment influences whether you can invest as much. And you only have so much bandwidth as a salesperson to invest in new skills."

But investment always requires both authority and a certain amount of faith. Respondents who believed good salespeople are born not made - i.e. those with what psychologist Carol Dweck called a "fixed mind-set" about sales ability - would presumably consider upskilling a waste of time, whether or not their organization gave them the autonomy to do so. Their fatalistic thinking would prevent them from tapping the resources that might buffer them against burnout. Indeed, the "fixed mind-set" salespeople in Hoppner's sample reported not only less investment in core skills but also higher burnout than peers with a "growth mind-set" grounded in self-improvement.

In today's B2B sector, burnout prevention is a critical issue since value co-creation demands fully engaged and committed salespeople. Widespread burnout defeats the purpose of customer participation.

Hoppner recommends that sales managers remember the winning combination of autonomy and growth mind-set, particularly when customer participation is a top priority. Good B2B sales managers, she implies, will be comfortable transferring some control, especially in high-competition industries that may be more challenging on salespeople to begin with. In addition to receiving a reasonable degree of independence, salespeople should be fully trained in problem solving, project management, and other skills needed for full self-sufficiency.

It is also a good idea to promote a growth mind-set throughout the sales force, so that they will equip themselves with the resources necessary to meet their new challenges. Hoppner emphasizes that mind-sets are malleable. "A lot of times you talk about selection when hiring salespeople. But with one's belief in innate selling ability, companies have the ability to have interventions where you can train, mentor or coach people to have this growth mind-set," she says.

While burnout is a near-universal threat for workplace teams these days, Hoppner is cautious about generalizing her findings, preferring instead that their possible applicability outside of sales remain a matter for future research. She emphasizes that while every individual is different, the typical sales persona and portfolio of responsibilities may foster a preference for autonomy. This preference becomes even greater when their role undergoes a structural shift such as additional customer participation, and they need freedom to navigate those changes more effectively.

"The job autonomy is really the freedom for them to choose what makes sense for the context and what to do for the customer," Hoppner says. "How you're developing close interactions with your client, and creating custom sales solutions. It's definitely a creative endeavor because you are not sure what exactly is going to come up in the processes you're developing, and what the ultimate sale is going to be."

At the same time, she observes that in general "having employees be able to feel in control - over how they do their job and if they have the ability to learn - can help mitigate burnout when job roles change."

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When It Comes to Innovation, More Is More

Jennifer Anzaldi — Mon, 02 May 2022 14:40:33 +0000

When It Comes to Innovation, More Is More Jennifer Anzaldi Mon, 05/02/2022 - 10:40

In This Story

Sharaya Jones

We tend to believe great innovations speak for themselves. Once they’ve connected with the marketplace, successful innovations acquire an aura of inevitability. It’s easy to forget that they were once only an idea on paper, competing with others for buy-in and resources.

In this earliest stage of innovation, creative proposals are judged according to their perceived novelty and usefulness. Sharaya Jones, assistant professor of marketing at Mason, has a simple yet counterintuitive rule for would-be innovators hawking their ideas: More is more.

Her recent paper in Marketing Science, co-authored by Laura J. Kornish of University of Colorado Boulder, pits verbose and detailed idea descriptions against terse ones. Over several studies, participants were shown random selections from a pool of descriptions—including short, very short, long-winded and highly specific versions of the same basic idea (all of which came from an actual crowdsourcing platform). They then scored each proposal for creativity, market uniqueness, and intent to purchase the hypothetical product. The longer and more specific they were relative to the others viewed by the participant, the higher their creativity score.

Subsequent studies revealed how this maximalist bias works. When participants were surveyed on their experience of reading the descriptions, a chain of associations surfaced between how easy it was to keep track of a description’s central concepts (which the researchers termed “fluency”), perceived complexity and the creativity score. Longer text that ventured into the weeds was harder for the reader to follow, which made it appear more complicated and thus more creative.

“When you have all these different pieces and you’re trying to fit them together, that’s basically the definition of complexity. And there’s a body of research linking complexity and novelty,” said Jones.

Remember, though, that novelty is only one of the two chief creativity criteria—the other being usefulness. When developing products and services for sale to consumers, it’s crucial to keep usefulness in mind, lest you end up with a cool innovation that has no clear practical purpose. The researchers used participants’ purchase intent as a rough indicator of perceived usefulness, as the two qualities are closely related. The correlation between length/granularity and purchase intent was slight to non-existent. Elaborate, highly specific descriptions may have been deemed more creative, but they did not induce readers to open their wallets.

“The more fluent an idea is, i.e., the easier it is to interpret, the more purchase intent increases,” explained Jones. “So that’s why there’s this balance, where novelty and usefulness are kind of at odds with each other.”

Ideally, there would be an equilibrium of novelty and usefulness criteria. But prior research finds that usefulness is often undervalued. Or, as the paper states, “Novelty is a much bigger driver of perceived creativity than usefulness is.” In Jones’s research, extreme length differences between the descriptions magnified this effect.

Therefore, one of Jones’s main takeaways is that in early-stage innovation contests, length requirements for entries should be kept within a fairly narrow range—long enough for evaluators to get the picture but not so long that innovators can start piling on the distracting detail. Indeed, in one study the length/creativity correlation disappeared when the researchers grouped the descriptions by length.

Absent a reasonable maximum length, innovators would obviously want to write more rather than less, throwing in specifics where possible. Jones suggests that the same recommendation may apply to everything from job descriptions (especially if you’re trying to attract millennials or Gen Z candidates looking for a creative workplace) to certain types of product marketing. (i.e., brand extensions where the usefulness of the item is already well-established).

The research also suggests that innovations that are mainly about usefulness—the proverbial better mousetrap—may be very marketable but still have a tough time competing with very novel concepts.” Innate pro-novelty bias can be compounded by dazzling descriptions of bright shiny objects. A good way to cut through the noise may be to augment text with visuals or even physical prototypes to render the proposal’s unique value more tangible.

“Putting a little bit more emphasis on usefulness is definitely something that organizations should be doing,” Jones said. “Figuring out other ways to convey usefulness, outside of the written description, could be very helpful, especially for marketers."

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Better Strategies for Protecting Against Uncertainty

Jennifer Anzaldi — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 16:36:58 +0000

Better Strategies for Protecting Against Uncertainty Jennifer Anzaldi Thu, 04/07/2022 - 12:36

In This Story

Saurabh Mishra

Turbulent times are challenging for decision-makers in business. This pervasive condition scholars call economic policy uncertainty (EPU) can turn a wise move into a costly one virtually overnight and is known to weigh on firm innovation, investments and value.

When confronting EPU, what’s a firm to do? Saurabh Mishra, professor and area chair of marketing at Mason, and co-authors Sachin Modi of Wayne State University and Michael Wiles of Arizona State University have penned a paper (forthcoming in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science) that explores that question.

Prior research suggests three capabilities that possibly buffer against the adverse effects of EPU. R&D capability refers to a firm’s capacity to convert knowledge into innovative discoveries or ideas, in the form of patents or processes. Operations capability is a catch-all term for principles of supply chain management enabling firms to balance innate tensions between flexibility and efficiency in the production processes. Marketing capability includes familiarity with the consumer base, sophisticated messaging and sales techniques, etc.

This research study was designed to gauge whether, and how much, each of the three capabilities counteracted EPU’s value-destroying impact. The researchers analyzed fluctuations in EPU over the years 1992-2015 alongside financial performance data and capabilities information for 4,316 U.S.-based firms for the same period of time. The results were quite nuanced. Marketing capability countered EPU’s drag on abnormal returns and Tobin’s Q (a measure of firm value outside of its physical assets), but had no perceptible effect on reducing firm-specific risks. Operations capability displayed an opposite effect in interacting with EPU: resulting in value destruction under high EPU but also reducing risk at the same time. Finally, R&D capability was neither here nor there when it came to protecting value, but marginally reduced EPU-derived risks.

Why was marketing capability the only real value-protector of the three? “If you are in a position where you are able to better understand your consumers through a better marketing function, and better meet them where they need to be met in terms of their needs and aspirations, then you might actually end up moving ahead of your competitors,” says Mishra.

To be sure, marketing was the only one of the three without a risk-lessening effect. However, this may not be as much of a drawback as it seems, since the paper finds that EPU reduces risk in general. In other words, managers facing uncertainty already tend to play it safe. Mishra suggests that for firms under EPU, pursuing tighter connections with customers should often be a higher priority than battening down the hatches.

A big, surprising takeaway from Mishra’s research, then, is that EPU’s implications for consumer demand are a key under-explored element of the wider uncertainty story. And because beefing up marketing capability attacks the demand side directly, it should be seriously considered as part of an organizational response to uncertainty.

By contrast, operations isn’t as much of a value-add under EPU because it reflects an efficiency focus, which can make the firm too lean to have a buffer or safeguards against EPU. R&D is more vulnerable to uncertainty, because EPU changes consumer needs as well as market conditions in ways that can’t easily be predicted and preemptively addressed through innovation.

But that doesn’t mean R&D and operations should be taken for granted. Mishra says that the best way for firms to weather uncertainty isn’t only to make smarter decisions about which capability or capabilities to invest in. Perhaps even more importantly, firms should work proactively—in today’s business climate, that means immediately—to build and shore up internal synergies, so that strengthening one capability enhances all three to some degree.

“A very strong message is this complementarity between functions,” Mishra says. “Within an organization, it should not be a zero-sum game, which it tends to be at times. It’s not about getting a bigger piece of the same pie, it’s about working together to make the pie bigger for your organization.”

Marketing and operations were an especially productive combination for combating EPU, for example. The professors found that a one-percent increase in both capabilities was associated with 0.438 percent higher Tobin’s Q and a statistically significant jump in abnormal returns. Together, this one-percent effect completely cancelled out EPU’s damage to financial performance.

However, not all capability combinations were winners. A joint focus on marketing and R&D actually lowered firm value under EPU. Dividing resources between the extreme ends of the product pipeline proved too unfocused a strategy, the professors concluded.

Obviously, deeply siloed firms and those engaged in intense intramural competition for resources will be limited in the types of synergies they can unlock, which puts them at a disadvantage. In times like ours when uncertainty reigns with no sign of stopping, an organization divided against itself will have an even harder time staying upright.

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Marketing Prof Named Finalist for Prestigious Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award

Jennifer Anzaldi — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 18:11:45 +0000

Marketing Prof Named Finalist for Prestigious Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award Jennifer Anzaldi Thu, 03/24/2022 - 14:11

In This Story

Jessica Hoppner

A paper co-authored by Jessica Hoppner, associate marketing professor at Mason, has been named a finalist for the American Marketing Association’s prestigious Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award.

The annual award recognizes “an article in the Journal of Marketing Research that has made the most significant long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology and/or practice” and eligibility begins five years post-publication.

Hoppner says, “I am grateful to have our article selected as a finalist for the Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award. With each article you hope to make an impact. To have the JMR community consider our article on inequity and interdependence as one that makes a long-term contribution to the field is an absolute honor.”

The paper being recognized, “The Influence of the Structure of Interdependence on the Response to Inequity in Buyer-Supplier Relationships,” appeared in JMR in February 2017. To date, “The Influence of the Structure of Interdependence on the Response to Inequity in Buyer-Supplier Relationships” has been cited within marketing, operations and B2B journals—attesting to its interdisciplinary impact.

Saurabh Mishra, chair of the marketing research area at the business school, says, “At Mason we have some of the brightest minds in marketing working on topics of high relevance to scholars and managers. Selection of Professor Hoppner’s work as a finalist for this award is a testament of the quality of her work and an honor for the marketing area and the School of Business.”

Hoppner and her collaborators, David A. Griffith of Texas A&M, Hanna S. Lee of Miami University, and Tobias Schoenherr of Michigan State University, looked into how power differences between buyers and suppliers, in addition to their relative level of dependence upon one another, affected the suppliers’ willingness to share valuable resources. Hoppner and her co-authors sent questionnaires to 1,000 Japan-based suppliers about their relationships with U.S. buyers. Their analysis identified a complicated three-way interaction between inequity, interdependence, and relative dependence that, in some cases, sharply deviated from received wisdom on resource-sharing. For example, suppliers who had the upper hand in a highly interdependent relationship did not take steps to equalize the dynamic by increasing resource-sharing, even though they could easily afford to do so. The researchers suggest a working culture that stresses competitive achievement over cooperation may have had something to do with this.

Therefore, Hoppner and her co-authors recommend that managers “consider both the limitations of magnitude of interdependence and the cultural orientation of the manager in determining managerial action.” For other academics, the paper offers novel frameworks for understanding business relationships, which, unlike standard frameworks based on equity theory, do not presume fairness as a primary motivation in workplace interactions.

Finalists for the Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award are selected by the editorial review board, associate editors, and advisory board members of JMR. A smaller group of selectors drawn from the same pool will meet in the coming weeks to choose the winner, which will be announced at the upcoming Summer AMA Academic Conference.

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Why “Woke” Advertising Matters

Marianne Klinker — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 20:18:34 +0000

Why “Woke” Advertising Matters Marianne Klinker Tue, 02/15/2022 - 15:18

Imagine you were an alien from another planet, trying to form coherent opinions about human women and their place in this world based on advertising alone. It would be difficult, to say the least. On an average day, consumers may see sexually objectifying portrayals of women in beer and car commercials, as well as ads for cleaning products featuring housebound mothers (never fathers)—a more wholesome but similarly regressive stereotype.

In recent years, the “femvertising” trend has emerged to balance the scales of social progress with more empowering messages aimed at women. Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, which began in 2004 and is ongoing, was a pioneer that inspired many brands to follow suit. Some have targeted markets where women are said to be lagging behind in their development—e.g. Ariel’s “Share the Load” campaign encouraging men in India to help out more with housework. But so-called “wokeness” has an uphill journey ahead if it is to make inroads against entrenched sexism in advertising. Also, detractors have labeled the trend “faux-feminism” with no impact on the real world.

Gautham Vadakkepatt

However, research by Gautham Vadakkepatt, associate professor of marketing at Mason, finds strong indications that gender equality in advertising and actual outcomes for women are on parallel rising trajectories, in the markets that need it most. His forthcoming article in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (co-authored by Andrew Bryant, Ronald P. Hill and Joshua Nunziato) runs the numbers to provocative effect, while making some plausible proposals about how, in the internet age, advertising could be a force for good.

The researchers used the United Nations Development Programme’s Gender Development Index (GDI) as a measure of women’s development during the years 2013-2017, the first golden era of “femvertising.” GDI captures gender disparities in the Human Development Index (HDI), which covers life expectancy, education and income. While the study was not designed to establish causation, they found associations between changes in the GDI and overall advertising spend—especially for countries with high internet penetration and large biases against women (as shown by the Gender Social Norms Index, another U.N. metric).

Among other robustness checks, the researchers swapped out the GDI for the Gender Inequality Index as well as a basket of other developmental variables, such as maternal mortality, adolescent birth rate, and infant mortality rate. They also ran comparisons using the women-only portion of the HDI, thus confirming that the observed changes were due to improvements for women, as opposed to a decline in men’s outcomes. Foreign direct investment and population size—two factors that influence societal development—were also included as control variables. Regardless of the specific measurements used, the basic interaction between ad spend, women’s development, and internet usage held firm.

The researchers had some guesses about what might be behind this. They launched two follow-up studies to test their hypotheses. In the first, 140 people (fewer than one-third of whom were women) were shown an ad for a Fiat convertible featuring a suggestively “topless” model, and a Chevrolet commercial featuring a confident, gifted young woman athlete. Both were ostensibly car commercials, but the similarities ended there. It would be harder to find a more striking contrast between retrograde and progressive ideas of womanhood. The divergence was also reflected in surveys that participants completed after watching the ads. The Fiat ad provoked more of an angry, disapproving response (the technical term is “psychological reactance”) than the Chevrolet ad. The latter ad’s message of women’s empowerment was praised by both women and men. One person wrote: “I love this ad and wish more kids AND adults could watch it and really, really SEE it and understand why it was made.”

The second study was a multi-country analysis of the top 100 YouTube comments for the seven videos in the 2018 “Dove Films/Real Beauty Sketches” series (a textbook example of “femvertising”). Comments in more than 10 different languages—among them English, Indonesian, Italian, Arabic and Japanese—were included in the data-set. They were then grouped together according to four overarching themes: the insecurities and negative social feedback that harm women’s self-esteem; recognizing new empowerment possibilities as a result of viewing the ad; the desire to share the empowering message with others; and how the ads themselves could be improved (e.g. by showcasing a more diverse group of women, or by mentioning inner as well as outer beauty).

The authors concluded that the reactance provoked by problematic advertisements and the good feelings induced by “femvertising” can help build resistance to deep-rooted sexism. As a mechanism for communication and social networking on a massive scale, the internet is key to amplifying this pushback. To be sure, there are staunch reactionaries commenting online too. In the Fiat-vs.-Chevrolet study, Vadakkepatt says “there were people who like the sexist ad...who said they wanted to date the woman and all that. But there were 15-20% of the people, men and women, who actually said, ‘No, this is not right. You’re objectifying a person.’” In contexts where gender equality is particularly lacking, online reactions to “femvertising” can help even the score.

Vadakkepatt, however, would reiterate that correlation is not causation. He does not claim to have located definitive proof that advertising is directly responsible for women’s recent advancements. But his investigation traces intriguing connections and tests some intuitions that suggest the advertising that blankets our cultural landscape is not wholly divorced from the social progress, or lack thereof, occurring around it. This research is not intended to be the final word on the matter, but help provide a footing for future research and stimulate new questions around advertisings and women’s equality, says Vadakkepatt.

“As advertisers, you have a choice now, right?” he says. “What we’re proposing is that positive messages, empowering messages, would actually help. Not just to improve the brand of the company but also help society move forward.”

Source: Gautham Vadakkepatt, Andrew Bryant, Ronald P. Hill and Joshua Nunziato (2022). “Can advertising benefit women’s development? Preliminary insights from a multi-method investigation,” in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science

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Tech Talent Investment Pipeline (TTIP)

In an Algorithmic Workplace, How Can Humans Excel?

Marianne Klinker — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 16:42:37 +0000

In an Algorithmic Workplace, How Can Humans Excel? Marianne Klinker Tue, 12/07/2021 - 11:42

Any job that can be automated, will be.

Like it or not, this rule of thumb largely conforms to labor trends. Just look at the manufacturing sector. In the U.S. alone, as many as five million factory jobs were lost to automation between 2000 and 2010.

According to some reports, knowledge workers may face even fiercer competition from automation than their manual-laboring counterparts. No wonder white-collar workers are worried. Consider the superhuman volume of data that AI can process and funnel into almost instantaneous decision-making.

However, most executives would argue there’s much more to making decisions than just the numbers. A smart, experienced human has gut instinct and familiarity with how the real world operates. You can’t capture that on an Excel spreadsheet.

Tarun Kushwa

Tarun Kushwaha, a professor of marketing at the ��AV School of Business, recently ran an experiment that pitted the brainpower of actual human executives against trained algorithms. Together with co-author Saravanan Kesavan, a professor of operations at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, aimed to discover whether humans possessed decision-making advantages over algorithms – and if so, what conditions or circumstances brought those advantages out.

The professors collaborated with an automobile replacement parts retailer to launch a randomized controlled trial (RCT) centered on the corporate buyers responsible for stocking the shelves for affiliated stores across the United States. These are tough selections. Hundreds of automobile models are currently available in the U.S., each one containing approximately 30,000 parts, most of which are non-transferrable to other models. Multiply these numbers by hundreds of store locations, and you have a dizzying array of possible combinations numbering in the billions.

Moreover, auto parts differ from most other retail industries in that customers won’t wait for back orders. Navigating most places in the U.S. is next to impossible without a functioning car, so the demand for a replacement part must be fulfilled right away or the customer will look elsewhere. And with 30,000 parts that could potentially need replacement, demand is spread incredibly thin – annual inventory turnover for this industry is close to one. In a low-turnover, high-margin business like this one, everything hinges on demand prediction.

The company decided to supplement the buyers’ intuition with some algorithmic firepower. They created an AI tool to flag underperforming products for removal so that they would no longer occupy valuable shelf space. The algorithm uses local car registries, prevailing weather conditions and detailed product histories (among other resources) to generate demand forecasts that are highly targeted both by item and by store. However, the gut-trusting buyers rejected the algorithm’s choices more than half the time, opting to hang onto the flagged products rather than remove them.

For obvious reasons, the retailer wanted to know whether buyers were vetoing the AI recommendations out of sheer pride, or because they knew something the robots didn’t. Kushwaha and Kesavan devised an experiment whereby the human overrides were followed in some store locations but ignored in a random selection of other stores. The trial lasted 12 months and involved more than 30,000 discrete products.

Taken as a whole, the results appeared to be bad news for the buyers. The stores that honored the human overrides were 5.77% less profitable than those that obeyed algorithmic recommendations to the letter. However, that’s not the end of the story. The professors also looked at growth-stage (i.e. new to market), mature-stage, and decline-stage products as isolated categories. They found that the algorithmic advantage was confined to the latter two stages. For growth-stage products, the buyer overrides drove more than 23% greater profitability. The simple reason for the overall 5.77% difference was that the vast majority of car parts were either mature- or decline-stage.

The professors theorized that AI’s vaunted data processing capabilities fell flat when faced with new products, which by definition have no past performance record on which to base decisions. By contrast, buyers can tap their networks for priceless clues. This is particularly important in the auto parts industry, because replacement parts are handled through car dealerships, rather than external retailers, during the warranty period. The dealers, in turn, source parts directly from the original manufacturer (Bosch, Johnson Controls, etc.). Auto parts suppliers, therefore, are rich sources of information about buying activity early in the product life cycle. Algorithms cannot get at this information independently. But buyers can. It’s as easy as asking your buddy at Bosch out for a drink. Through interviews conducted as part of the research process, the professors learned that these info-sharing conversations between buyers and suppliers happen all the time.

Armed with this knowledge, Kushwaha and Kesavan are working with the retailer on further experiments that they hope will help define the ideal way for humans and AI to make joint decisions.

Needless to say, every company and context is different. What works for the U.S. auto parts industry today may not for another time, place or sector. But the general principle seems universally sound: Smart humans have private information that should be extracted and added to the data-driven decision making that algorithms perform much better. For this retailer, that may mean the buyers choose which products to stock, and the algorithm draws upon their selections to allocate store inventory. This would leverage buyers’ private information about the likely market performance of products. It would also radically simplify the choices presented to buyers, freeing up time for activities that they – not the algorithm – do best, such as supplier negotiations, scouting for promising new products, or drinking in more precious information at happy hour..

Source: Saravanan Kesavan, Tarun Kushwaha (2020). Field Experiment on the Profit Implications of Merchants’ Discretionary Power to Override Data-Driven Decision-Making Tools.

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Tech Talent Investment Program

��AV Joins Research Effort of Self-Driving Shuttle Project

Marianne Klinker — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 19:29:37 +0000

��AV Joins Research Effort of Self-Driving Shuttle Project Marianne Klinker Thu, 11/18/2021 - 14:29

In This Story

Eric Maribojoc

The Center for Retail Transformation and the Center for Real Estate Entrepreneurship at ��AV School of Business have entered into a research collaboration with Fairfax County on the Relay project in Merrifield, Virginia. Relay is an autonomous (self-driving) electric public transportation shuttle that will circulate between the Mosaic District and the Dunn Loring Metrorail Station.

Led by Gautham Vadakkepatt, the director of the Center for Retail Transformation, ��AV will develop surveys and collect information from social media postings to understand changes in public perception of autonomous vehicle technology over the test period.

Relay is an autonomous (self-driving) electric public transportation shuttle that will circulate between the Mosaic District and the Dunn Loring Metrorail Station.

This is the first public-private partnership for an autonomous public transportation demonstration project in Virginia. Dominion Energy purchased the vehicle which is manufactured by the French company EasyMile. The Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation and Fairfax County are providing the vehicle operating costs.

“Autonomous vehicles will dramatically shape the future, presenting major opportunities and risks,” said Vadakkepatt. “Not only will they change how people travel and create new mobility choices, it has the potential to transform industries such as retail.”

“While there is increasing positive sentiment about adoption of these technologies, there is wide variance in individual willingness to adopt these technologies,” continued Vadakkepatt. “Understanding these differences can hasten adoption of this technology and its integration into the day-to-day operations of an economy. The Relay rollout presents an opportunity to understand these adoption dynamics in our own local region. I’m delighted that Mason could play a role in this effort,” Vadakkepatt said.

The surveys and social media tracking administered by ��AV will provide information on how autonomous electric vehicles can be safely and effectively adopted as a new solution connecting mass transit to commercial hubs and residential neighborhoods. The Relay pilot project will also educate the community on new mobility options and more eco-friendly low-emission travel.

“Autonomous vehicles have great potential to influence the use and design of neighborhoods, buildings, parking, and infrastructure,” said Eric Maribojoc, director of the Center for Real Estate Entrepreneurship. “After considerable hype a few years ago, autonomous vehicle technology is moving to the much more difficult stage of practical research and testing in real-world conditions. It’s great that George Mason will contribute to this important step.”

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Center for Retail Transformation

Center for Real Estate Entrepreneurship

Specialization Is Key for Government Contracting Industry Success

Marianne Klinker — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 18:29:14 +0000

Specialization Is Key for Government Contracting Industry Success Marianne Klinker Fri, 11/12/2021 - 13:29

In This Story

Brett Josephson

John G. (Jerry) McGinn

Brett Josephson, assistant professor of marketing, has studied government contracting since he was a PhD student. In recently published research, Josephson—together with Ju-Yeon Lee, assistant professor of marketing at Iowa State University, and Babu John Mariadoss and Jean Lynn Johnson, associate professors of marketing at Washington State University—recommended that companies focus on specialization.

Brett Josephson

Reviewing 16 years of data, Josephson and coauthors researched more than 1,300 publicly traded firms that do business with the government. Whereas diversification is often recommended for companies, this research shows that when it comes to the federal government, the more specialized a company can be, the higher the return in stock prices will be.

“Concentration is the key finding of this paper,” says Josephson. “You can’t serve all agencies. It’s very expensive. You have to concentrate on one or two within the federal government, build that core knowledge. That’s where firms see the largest increase to their stock price.”

Jerry McGinn, executive director of Mason’s Center for Government Contracting, says, “Brett is doing dynamite research that is directly applicable to the $500 billion government contracting industry. His work is providing great fuel for our center, and I very much look forward to continuing collaboration with Brett and other School of Business faculty.”

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