Research Highlights

Despite the software industry’s rapid growth and deep pockets, tech companies are still engaged in bare-knuckles battle with cybercriminals. Nirup Menon and Pallab Sanyal's recent research confirms the existence of a willingness-to-pay (WTP) dilemma.

Managerial overconfidence is a serious risk that has drawn increasing attention from executives, investors, and researchers in recent years. Mindy (Hyo Jung) Kim, an assistant professor of accounting at Mason, has not only found that it’s possible to incorporate ability-adjusted overconfidence into real-world business assessments, but that it happens routinely.

The combination of two unlikely bedfellows—cryptography, a subfield of computer science, and currency, a topic in economics—is at the heart of the transformative potential of its underlying blockchain technology. But the uniqueness of the pairing can make it very difficult for research professionals in either field to predict, let alone positively influence, blockchain’s future development. Jiasun Li, an assistant professor of finance at Mason, is among an elite group of academics who are bridging the divide by merging relevant concepts from computer science with game theory—a subfield of economics that studies the interactions of decisions made by interdependent economic actors.

Siddharth Bhattacharya, a professor of information systems at Mason, recently co-conducted the first-ever empirical study on competitive poaching, the strategy of bidding on competitors' keywords.

Cheryl Druehl, an operations management professor at Mason as well as the Mason's School of Business associate dean for faculty, has found that unblind contests can foster contestant behaviors that constrain overall innovativeness.

Tarun Kushwaha, a professor of marketing at the George Mason University School of Business, recently ran an experiment that pitted the brainpower of actual human executives against trained algorithms.

Kelly Wentland, an accounting professor at the George Mason University School of Business, recently published a paper in Management Science that further specifies and quantifies firm response to tax uncertainty.

Information Systems and Operations Management Professor Brad Greenwood's forthcoming paper is by far the most extensive analysis of body-worn cameras' impact in a major American city.

Lin Sun, an assistant professor of finance at the George Mason University School of Business, has uncovered that even top investors share a very human weakness– their professional acumen can be thrown off by inclement weather.

Women who join tech companies must find a way to navigate a toxic workplace. Mandy O’Neill's forthcoming paper in Organization Science, written with Natalya M. Alonso of Haskayne School of Business, documents the “sexist culture of joviality” among trainees at a Latin American site run by a major U.S. tech company.

The call to prioritize social responsibility alongside profits can often create “an institutional contradiction” with “increased potential for conflict.” Bridging the areas of management, innovation and entrepreneurship, Professor Toyah Miller’s research illuminates the issues that will determine whether companies succeed or fail in their newly broadened mission.