25th Anniversary Distinguished Scholar Series

Distinguished Scholar Series

In honor of the college's 25th anniversary in 2009-2010, each academic department is hosting a distinguished scholar who will visit the college to interact with its students, faculty, and staff, and make a presentation open to the university community. These visits are scheduled throughout the year.

Monday, November 2, 2009
William Starbuck
Professor in Residence
Lundquist College of Business
University of Oregon
Web site

Hosted by the College of Business Department of Management
"Organizational Research Should Involve Design, and
Design Should be Discovery, Not Application"
3:00 to 5:00 p.m.
2117 Gerdin Business Building

William Starbuck is professor in residence at the Lundquist College of Business of the University of Oregon and professor emeritus at New York University, where he was the ITT Professor of Creative Management at the Stern School of Business. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in industrial administration at Carnegie Institute of Technology, after receiving an A.B. in physics at Harvard. He has also been awarded honorary doctorates by universities in Stockholm, Paris, and Aix-en-Provence. Earlier, he held faculty positions in economics, sociology, or management at Purdue University, the Johns Hopkins University, Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and New York University, as well as visiting positions in universities and business schools in England, France, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. As well, he was a senior research fellow at the International Institute of Management in Berlin. He has been the editor of Administrative Science Quarterly; he chaired the screening committee for senior Fulbright awards in business management; he directed the doctoral program in business administration at New York University, and he was the President of the Academy of Management. He has been elected a fellow of the Academy of Management, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the British Academy of Management, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

He has published over 150 articles on accounting, bargaining, business strategy, computer programming, computer simulation, forecasting, decision making, human-computer interaction, learning, organizational design, organizational growth and development, perception, scientific methods, and social revolutions. He has also authored two books and edited seventeen books, including the Handbook of Organizational Design, which was chosen the best book on management published during the year ending May 1982. In his latest book The Production of Knowledge, he reflects on his own academic journey and on the challenges associated with management and social science research.

Friday, November 6, 2009
John Lynch
Professor of Marketing
Ted Andersen Professor of Free Enterprise
Leeds Business School
University of Colorado
Web site

Hosted by the College of Business Department of Marketing
"Consumer Planning and Intertemporal Choice"
10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
3164 Gerdin Business Building

Most consumer decisions involve trade-offs of costs and benefits over time of smaller, sooner rewards or costs versus larger, later ones. Consumers’ “discount” future resources such as time and money that are required to produce consumption utility.  We will discuss a program of research on why people discount.  The starting point is a “resource slack” theory of discounting, wherein the value of the same resource now versus some time in the future is a function of relative “slack” – absence of opportunity costs.  Consumers’ intertemporal behavior is therefore guided by what are often illusions about the relative freedom from opportunity costs now or later. We show how these illusions might stem from differential planning for the use of a resource now versus the future, and how the asymmetries in planning for the short and long run differ across resources.  We develop a scale of propensity to plan that can be adapted to refer to time or money planning at different time horizons. Different propensity to plan for time and money explains differences between time and money in the “planning fallacy” – whereby people underestimate the resources necessary to complete some task.  Our measures of propensity to plan for time and for money predict a number of interesting intertemporal behaviors.  Planning for time predicts use of costly self-control strategies to avoid procrastination. Planning for money predicts FICO credit scores, controlling for income, education, and other demographics. Thus, people of similar circumstances with very different propensity to plan the long run use of their money face very different costs of credit associated with the financial missteps of those who do not plan as much. We will close with a discussion of the connection of these phenomena to public policy issues in consumer protection.

Professor John G. Lynch, Jr. is a decorated researcher and teacher who has been honored by the American Marketing Association for outstanding contributions to the science of marketing.

His paper on Internet shopping is the 3rd most cited paper to appear in any marketing journal from 1997 to the present and won the 1998 Paul Root/MSI award “for greatest contribution to the practice of marketing.” His paper on price sensitivity on the Internet is the 5th most cited paper to appear in any marketing journal from 2000 to the present. This work has been credited with changing retailers approach to pricing when considering selling their products to consumers on the internet. A core theme is his work is why manufacturers and retailers sometimes avoid electronic marketplaces that enhance consumer choice and make it easy for consumers to compare offerings because of fears of intensified price competition. More recently, Lynch has been studying consumer decision making in markets for financial services such as retirement savings plans and mortgages.

Lynch has been honored for his teaching and was recognized by Business Week as an “outstanding faculty member.” He was also the Roy J. Bostock Professor of Marketing at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Lynch is past president of the Association for Consumer Research, past associate editor for the Journal of Consumer Research and past associate editor and co-editor for the Journal of Consumer Psychology . He has published many articles in academic journals on consumer behavior and marketing research methods. His current research focuses on consumer decision making.

He received the 2003 Society for Consumer Psychology Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award and the 2004 American Marketing Association Paul D. Converse Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Science of Marketing. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and Fellow of the Society for Consumer Psychology. Four of his papers have been honored as outstanding article of the year, twice by the Journal of Consumer Research, once by the Journal of Marketing Research and once by the Journal of Marketing. He is a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Marketing.

February 11-12, 2010
Vallabh Sambamurthy
Professor of Marketing
Eli Broad Professor of Information Technology
Eli Broad College of Business
Michigan State University
Web site
Hosted by the College of Business Department of Logistics, Operations, and Management Information Systems

March 11-12, 2010
Morgan Swink
Professor and Eli Broad Legacy Fellow of Operations and Supply Chain Management
Eli Broad College of Business
Michigan State University
Web site
Hosted by the College of Business Department of Logistics, Operations, and Management Information Systems

March 25-26, 2010
Shyam Sunder
James L. Frank Professor of Accounting, Economics, and Finance
Yale School of Management
Web site
Hosted by the College of Business Department of Accounting

April 14-15, 2010
Mark Flannery
Bank of America Eminent Scholar in Finance
Warrington College of Business Administration
University of Florida
Web site
Hosted by the College of Business Department of Finance