As part of a continuing series on safety problems at Parkland Memorial Hospital, the Dallas Morning News asked Vanderbilt Professor Ranga Ramanujam, who researches operational failures in high-risk work settings, what a new Parkland CEO should to to help fix the hospital’s problems. This post is adapted from that op-ed. Most people know Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas for its heroic efforts to help save the life of President John F. Kennedy after he was shot in November 1963. Fifty [...]
Vanderbilt Marketing Professor Steve Posavac says the 2013 Super Bowl offered some interesting ads — lots of very good ones, and more than a handful of very bad ones. Here are Steve’s winners: Go Daddy. Working in tandem, Go Daddy’s two ads accomplished three things for their brand: (a) The Bar Rafeli ad in the first quarter succeeded at associating Go Daddy with both sexy and smart. (b) The second ad in the second quarter was clever, and establishes a [...]
“Most people are just sort of fooling around with goals and incentives and assuming that humans, like rats in mazes and cages, will just respond quite simply to pecuniary or extrinsic incentives arranged in a certain way. Our work suggests that if you really want people motivated for the long run you have to engage in much more complicated sort of portfolio of approaches trying to tap into their psychology.” — Prof Bruce Barry Listen to Vanderbilt Management Professor Bruce [...]
Vanderbilt Marketing Professor Steve Posavac says this year’s Super Bowl advertisers have everything to gain — and little to lose — by trying to build online buzz before their ads air on Sunday night. He’s talked to USA Today and CNBC about the trend. And here he expands on his thoughts about this year’s ad teasers. The point of releasing a social media teaser is to gain a place in consumers’ minds before the Super Bowl, generate excitement about the [...]
For the last 25 years, Vanderbilt’s Financial Markets Research Center has each spring sponsored a conference on a current issue in the financial markets. In this the 25th consecutive annual conference, we look back to some of those issues and evaluate the changes in financial markets and in the field of finance. Have financial markets become more efficient and more stable or are markets becoming more volatile, more complex and more costly? How and to what extent have the issues [...]
Professor Michael Lapré has won this year’s Stan Hardy Award for the best paper published in Operations Management research in 2011. The paper, “Reducing Customer Dissatisfaction: How Important is Learning to Reduce Service Failure?” which appeared in Production and Operations Management (Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 491-507), examines how a customer’s propensity to complain, as opposed to actual service failures, negatively impacts a firm’s long-term rates of satisfaction. The committee that selects the annual award polls the editors of top [...]
[youtube 3-JN8l4E0ys 600 400] Watch video of Sen. Lamar Alexander who joined other key players from the history of Tennessee’s auto industry March 12 for a panel discussion at Vanderbilt University’s Central Library. “The Auto Industry Comes to Tennessee” was co-sponsored by Vanderbilt Libraries and Owen Graduate School of Management. The panel discussion was part of special programming scheduled in conjunction with the exhibit “Come on along: Lamar Alexander’s Journey as Governor,” an exhibit drawn from the prized pre-Senate papers [...]
The trading volume of stock options has more than quintupled in the past decade, as banks, hedge funds and other traders have flocked to the investments. But retail options investors may be getting left out in the cold, unknowingly giving up as much as $1.9 billion in lost profits over a similar time frame, according to new research from Vanderbilt University finance professors Kathryn Barraclough and Robert Whaley.
Bruce Barry: Asking For Social Media Passwords Won’t Tell Employers Much
The Associated Press raises the topic of a new privacy hurdle for this year’s job hunters: Handing over social media passwords as a way to vet new employees: Since the rise of social networking, it has become common for managers to review publicly available Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and other sites to learn more about job candidates. But many users, especially on Facebook, have their profiles set to private, making them available only to selected people or certain networks. [...]