Professors Oliver, Cooil, Masulis and Dilts Research Recognized Among the Best
December 18, 2007
Media Contact: Amy Wolf
Senior Public Affairs Officer | Vanderbilt University
(615) 322-NEWS | amy.wolf@vanderbilt.edu
NASHVILLE—Four faculty members from the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management were recently recognized with prestigious awards from leading academic journals and organizations. Papers authored by Owen professors were honored as follows:
Richard L. Oliver, professor of management, has been named the 2008 recipient of the prestigious Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award. Given annually since 2001, this award honors a research paper published between six and ten years ago in the Journal of Marketing that has made the most significant long-term contributions to marketing theory and practice.
Oliver’s heavily cited 1999 paper, entitled “Whence Consumer Loyalty,” explored the complex relationship between customer loyalty and satisfaction, and concluded that satisfaction is a necessary step in loyalty formation but becomes less significant as loyalty begins to set through other mechanisms, such as roles of personal determinism (“fortitude”) and social bonding at the institutional and personal level.
Bruce Cooil, Samuel Richmond Professor of Management, has been named the 2007 recipient of the Marketing Science Institute/H. Paul Root Award from the Journal of Marketing.
Cooil’s 2007 paper, entitled “A longitudinal examination of Net Promoter and firm revenue growth,” was co-authored with Owen alumnus Timothy Keiningham of IPSOS, Lerzan Aksoy of Koç University in Turkey, and Tor Wallin Andreassen of the Norwegian School of Management. It provides an eye-opening analysis of whether the widely embraced and adopted Net Promoter loyalty metric is the single most reliable indicator of firm growth, and calls into question claims of the “clear superiority” of the Net Promoter tool. The significance of Cooil’s paper led the Journal of Marketing to establish a dedicated blog for other academics and practitioners to contribute to the debate over the validity of the Net Promoter metric, and the journal also took the unusual step of making the article available online to the public.
Ronald Masulis, Frank K. Houston Professor of Management, is the 2007 winner of the Hana Bank Outstanding Paper Award at the Second AnnualInternational Conference on Asia-Pacific Financial Markets in South Korea.
Masulis’ paper, “Agency problems at dual-class companies,” showed that managers with greater control rights in excess of cash-flow rights are prone to waste corporate resources to pursue private benefits at the expense of shareholders. The award, co-sponsored by South Korean banking giant Hana Bank and Korean Securities Association, was presented to Masulis in December 2007 at the conference in Seoul.
David Dilts, professor of management and director of the Engineering Management Program in the School of Engineering, research was deemed among the most significant to be published in the Journal of Operations Management in 2006. The research received second place among all papers published that year in the journal; the award was presented to Dilts during a special session at the Academy of Management Annual Conference in August 2007.
Dilts’ paper, entitled “Impact of role in the decision to fail: An exploratory study of terminated projects,” was co-authored with Kenneth Pence, from the Vanderbilt University Engineering Management Program. It examined factors used by public service personnel and their contractors to reach the decision to terminate a project – studying the roles of executives and project managers. Dilts concluded that care must be given when surveying “managers” concerning subjective measures of “success” or “failure” as there can be radical perceptual differences by role.
Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management is ranked as a top institution by BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, Financial Times and Forbes. For more information about Owen, visit www.owen.vanderbilt.edu
