Prominent Marketing Professor Joins SOM Faculty The Internet changes everything, and Brian T. Ratchford, The School of Management's new professor in marketing, studies what those changes mean for retailers and consumers. Dr. Ratchford arrived at The University of Texas at Dallas in December 2005, coming from the University of Maryland, where he was the Pepsico Chair in Consumer Research. While there, he taught marketing research classes and conducted doctoral seminars in marketing models and the economics of information. These topics dovetail with his research, which focuses on durable goods. "Dating back to my dissertation, [I] have studied choices of durable goods [such as cars] characterized by multiple performance attributes such as price, acceleration, reliability, leg room of a car," he says. "This naturally led to how consumers go about searching for a best buy, and an interest in the economics of information. The relatively recent introduction of the Internet as a medium gave a new life to this stream of research." The research confirms what many probably already suspect. "Consumers now tend to substitute the Web for information that had been obtained at the dealer," he says. "In particular, they obtain price information on the Internet and come to the dealer armed with this information. This allows consumers to get better buys but also lowers time that salespeople spend in negotiations with buyers. These changes are predicted to lead to changes in the structure of auto retailing. There will be less need for salespeople and more uniform prices across consumers." After receiving his MBA in 1966 and doctorate in 1972 in business administration from the University of Rochester, Dr. Ratchford joined the faculty of State University of New York at Buffalo. He moved to the University of Maryland in 1999. While there, he resurrected a dormant doctoral program, helped build it into one that retained most of its students, and vastly improved its placement record. He is on the editorial review boards of Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research and Journal of Retailing, and was editor of Marketing Science from 1998 to 2001. At UTD, Dr. Ratchford is teaching MBA and doctoral classes related to consumer behavior and retailing. Three Professors Share Best-Paper Honors The research of three UTD School of Management faculty members received special recognition with a best-paper award at the annual meeting of the Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS). Vijay Mookerjee, Ph.D., Wei T. Yue, Ph.D., and Radha Mookerjee, Ph.D., were co-winners of the coveted award for their paper, "Maintaining a Diagnostic Knowledge-Based System: A Control Theoretic Approach." The award was given at the 15th annual WITS held in Las Vegas, Nevada, in December 2005. The SOM trio shared best-paper honors with three researchers from Purdue University. Professor Prabuddha De and Assistant Professors Mohit Tawarmalani and Karthik Kanna's winning submission was "A Mechanism for Allocating Objects in a Network of Symmetric Caches." Dr. Vijay Mookerjee and Dr. Radha Mookerjee are husband and wife. University of South Australia Names Institute for Professor Bass University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) School of Management Professor Frank M. Bass, Ph.D., has gained special recognition with the University of South Australia in Adelaide's announcement that it has created the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, named in honor of Dr. Bass and Professor Andrew Ehrenberg of South Bank University in London. Dr. Bass, Eugene McDermott University of Texas System Professor of Management, also was awarded an honorary doctoral degree by the Australian university. University of South Australia Professor Byron Sharp, director of the newly formed institute, presented the degree at a luncheon hosted in October by School of Management Dean, Hasan Pirkul, Ph.D., on the UTD campus. Dr. Bass, who has been at UTD since 1982, was awarded an honorary degree from The Ohio State University last August, and the 2005 INFORMS Marketing Science Conference at Emory University held a special conference last June in his honor. Additionally, the University of Groningen in The Netherlands established the Frank M. Bass Chair and announced its first recipient last September. In 1988, Purdue University awarded Dr. Bass the degree of Doctor of Management honoris causa. Dr. Bass says that he was particularly surprised by the creation of the new South Australian institute. "They have established a curriculum for students built around the research that [Professor] Ehrenberg and I have done," he says. "They thought it would be a nice way to honor us. I was surprised, because I didn't know anyone (from the University of South Australia) and had no idea they had built the institute." The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science is devoted to the discovery and applications of trends in marketing, consumer behavior and brand performance. When the university's large research center, previously named the Marketing Science Centre, reached the status of institute, school officials decided a name change was in order. "It was decided to [re-name it] after the two academics famous for promoting empirical generalization as the foundation for scientific knowledge about buyer behavior and marketing," Professor Sharp explained at the presentation ceremony. "Professor Bass showed that it is possible to discover scientific laws concerning buying behavior." Professor Ehrenberg's major contribution to marketing science is that he discovered it is possible to find law-like regularities in buyer behavior. He formally received his recognition award from the Australian institute in London last November. A leading operations research theoretician and practitioner, Dr. Bass earned international recognition with his development of the Bass Model in 1969. That mathematical model was used to predict the sales and life cycles of various consumer products, from color television sets and disposable diapers to digital satellite radios. Two years ago, the research journal Management Science hailed his paper as one of the most-cited research papers in the journal's 50-year history. Dean Pirkul says that Dr. Bass' recognition was well-deserved. "Dr. Bass is widely recognized as one of the founding fathers of the field of marketing science, and we are pleased to see him recognized in this way," Dean Pirkul says. Dr. Bass is a native of Cuero, Texas, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, an M.B.A. degree from The University of Texas at Austin and a B.B.A. degree from Southwestern University. He joined the faculty of Purdue University in 1961 and later became the Loeb Distinguished Professor of Management at Purdue's Krannert School of Management. New Books Analyze International Dynamics in New Ways New books from two School of Management (SOM) professors in the Organizations, Strategy and International Management area are attracting a good deal of academic attention. Global Strategy (South-Western College Publishing, 2006), written by Mike W. Peng, Ph.D., Provost's Distinguished Professor of Global Strategy, is a best-selling textbook on the subject. The book broadens the definition of global strategy beyond the scope of multinational enterprises, providing, as South-Western says, "in-depth and consistent explanation of cutting-edge research" and engaging methodology. Culture and Demography in Organizations (Princeton University Press, 2005), co-written by J. Richard Harrison, Ph.D., associate professor of organizations, strategy, and international management, examines how corporations and other organizations maintain and transmit their cultures over time. Dr. Peng's Global Strategy not only explores the foreign side of conducting international business but also examines how domestic firms compete against each other and against foreign entrants. "Historically, most of the non-global strategy research relied on Michael Porter's five forces theory," Dr. Peng says. It "basically says that you have a diversity of strategy by firms around the country, depending on the dynamics and difference within any given industry, or [on] the resource-based school of thought," explains Dr. Peng. "The most interesting finding in the research I've been doing is the realization that institutions matter, that institutions are the rules of the game. In my view, global strategy research is adding a third leg to the strategy tripod." Because Michael Porter was working in the U.S. economy, he could say that government really doesn't matter because regulations are generally consistent throughout the country, Dr. Peng notes. "But if you go outside the United States, even in fairly familiar ground such as Canada and Mexico, regulations are very different; and [that is] multiplied if you are doing business in China, Russia or India," he says. "If you are a Dallas company, for example, and you are trying to do business in the Middle East, you have to know the rules of the game there - from formal laws and regulatory systems to informal norms and values - or you will be flying in total darkness." In Culture and Demography in Organizations, Dr. Harrison and co-author Glenn R. Carroll, Ph.D., the Laurence W. Lane Professor of Organizational Behavior and Change at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, introduce new analysis based in mathematical tools and computer simulation. In the book, the scholars base their analysis on a formal model with three components: hiring, socialization and employee turnover. In exploring the model's implications through computer-simulation methods, the authors cover topics such as organizational growth and decline, top management teams, organizational influence networks, terrorist organizations, cultural integration following mergers, and organizational failure. For each topic, they identify the conditions influencing cultural transmission. "By changing parameters in the simulation program - such as cultural selectivity in hiring, the socialization influence of management relative to co-workers, the level of turnover and its sensitivity to cultural fit, and the rate of growth or decline in the size of the organization - we are able to examine an organization's cultural behavior under different scenarios," Dr. Harrison explains. "For example, we can use different combinations of parameter settings to examine differences in Japanese and American organizations. Compared to American firms, Japanese firms tend to be more selective in hiring, to put more emphasis on socialization by management and to have lower turnover rates." Professor Liebowitz Delivers Keynote Address at Innovation Conference in Malaysia UTD School of Management (SOM) Professor Stan Liebowitz, Ph.D., delivered the keynote address last November at a conference in Malaysia on the convergence of information systems and business. Dr. Liebowitz, professor of managerial economics and director of SOM's Center for the Analysis of Property Rights and Innovation (CAPRI), presented a talk titled "Who Wins and Why" at the one-day event. The conference, called the "Regional Innovation Forum 2005," was held in Putrajaya, Malaysia's new administrative capital, located about 15 miles from the capital city of Kuala Lumpur. The conference was sponsored by the Business Software Alliance, an international trade group founded in 1988 whose members include many of the leading software publishers. The group's principal activity is fighting piracy of software produced by its members. Dr. Liebowitz founded CAPRI in 2004 to conduct academic research in the area of property rights and innovation and related issues in the expanding digital domain. It was one of the first think tanks of its kind in the country. Dr. Liebowitz is an expert on the economic effects of piracy on digital media, such as the illegal downloading of music from the Internet. (http://som.utdallas.edu/capri) Nobel Laureate to Speak at Conference Honoring Professor Sethi Nobel Prize winner Harry M. Markowitz, Ph.D., was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at a conference in May at The School of Management to honor the contributions to the field of operations research of SOM faculty member Suresh Sethi, Ph.D. Friends, colleagues, classmates, students, postdoctoral fellows and teachers of Dr. Sethi, who is University of Texas at Dallas Ashbel Smith Professor of Operations Management and director of SOM's Center for Intelligent Supply Networks, organized the three-day conference, which was scheduled for May 20 through May 22. Dr. Markowitz is the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his theory of portfolio choice. He is professor emeritus at Baruch College, The City University of New York, and owner of a San Diego-based consulting company. The topic of his address at the conference was to be "A Detailed, Asynchronous Stock Market Simulator." Scholars from around the world also were scheduled to deliver papers at the May conference on a range of topics that included control and game models in marketing, economics and financial engineering, flexible manufacturing systems, optimal control theory and applications, and supply chain management. In addition to celebrating Dr. Sethi's 60th birthday, conference organizers said they wanted to recognize Dr. Sethi's profound influence on the field of operations research and optimal control communities as well as his service to their profession. Dr. Sethi also has made fundamental contributions to operations management, finance and economics, marketing and industrial engineering, conference organizers said. SOM Professor of Operations Research Kathryn Stecke, Ph.D., served as chair of the conference's 17-member organizing committee, which included scholars from the United States, Canada and China. The May event marked the second time within a year that Dr. Sethi was honored with a conference to celebrate his 60th birthday. In June 2005, more than 40 people gathered in Aix en Provence, France, to honor his work and scholarly contributions. Dr. Sethi, who received his Ph.D. in operations research from Carnegie Mellon University, came to The University of Texas at Dallas School of Management in 1997 from the University of Toronto, where he was a faculty member for more than 20 years. Dr. Sethi has been recognized by his peers numerous times. In 2005, he was named a fellow by the Production and Operations Management Society. He was named a fellow in 2003 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. The same year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science also named him a fellow. He is also a fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences and of the Canadian Academy of the Sciences and Humanities.