Career Award for Excellence in Research

FRANCE BELANGER, R.B. Pamplin Professor and the Tom and Daisy Byrd Senior Faculty Fellow in the Department of Accounting and Information Systems, has published more than 170 articles. Her work has been cited in more than 10,500 publications. Her research focuses on digital interactions between individuals, businesses, and governments and the resulting privacy and security issues. Belanger has been invited to present her work worldwide, most recently to Germany’s Ministry of Education and Research, and has received more than $1.1 million in grants.

Doctoral Research Excellence

DANIEL VILLANOVA, a doctoral candidate in marketing, focuses his research on consumer usage of numerical information, identity-based consumer behavior, and inference-making. His dissertation, titled “Intuitive Numerical Information Processes in Consumer Judgment,” explores how the mode of product ratings influences consumer evaluations and choice. He has articles under review at the Academy of Marketing Science Review, the Journal of Consumer Research, and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. He has presented eight papers at national and regional conferences.

Doctoral Summer Research Grant 

YEGYU HAN, a doctoral student in marketing, for her proposal, “Voice and Reflectivity as Drivers of Consumer Relationships with Smart Agents.” The project will address how the vocal variations of smart agents (e.g. Amazon’s Alexa) affect a consumer’s relationship with these devices. She is specifically studying the difference between rational and emotional voice expressions and how these affect consumers’ perceptions and interactions with their devices. Han’s findings could inform the design of smart agents to help consumers build productive and resilient relationships with them.

Doctoral Summer Research Grant

SUKHWA HONG, a doctoral student in business information technology, for his proposal on using text mining to study human behavior and social norms. The project will analyze crowdfunding posts from Kiva, an international crowdfunding website to identify clusters of text with contextual meaning. Hong plans to use these clusters to predict and understand the successes of crowdfunding projects and funding behaviors of individuals.

Doctoral Summer Research Grant

FAN LI, a doctoral student in finance, for his proposal to perform additional studies on assessing abnormal returns following corporate events, such as dividend initiations and acquisition offers. Fan has found that the well-documented abnormal post-event returns can be attributed to imperfect benchmarking and that an important component of book-to-market ratio helps explain these returns.

Doctoral Summer Research Grant

YUTONG XIE, a doctoral student in finance, for his proposal to investigate how uncertainty in economic policy affects how firms allocate their internal cash flow through six decision outcomes — investment, cash, level of debt, dividends, repurchases, and sale of equity. The project will also investigate how different cash flow shocks affect these allocations. Xie will explore how firms choose between internal and external financing under economic policy uncertainty.