Whether a CEO thinks they are winning or losing influences the risks they are willing to take. Reaching performance goals increases monetary awards and perceived employment security, thus they see themselves as winning and take fewer additional risks. CEOs that have not met their targets, however, tend to take on more risks in order to catch up to those targets which, if not met, could cost them their job – the biggest mediating factor in determining whether a CEO will take risks. On the other hand, the study found that comparing one’s compensation to that of peers did not influence risk-taking of CEOs.

Understanding this research provides companies the opportunity to influence CEO risk-taking. “Companies should be careful about how high they want to set performance goals for executives because they will try to achieve them,” explains Wiseman. “If they aren’t meeting those goals, then they will take on risk, sometimes excessive risks to achieve the targets contained in their contracts.”

But there is much more that companies must consider beyond performance goals. Wiseman cautions, “Compensation designs at top management are very complex. We have yet to fully consider the interaction among all of the elements of a contract to fully appreciate how CEOs might respond to these complex incentive agreements.”

Wiseman and scholars from Universidad Publica De Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, and Texas A&M University looked at a sample of 180 CEOs of U.S. firms that issued an IPO between 1993-95. Unlike previous studies which used lab or field measures, this study, which appears in Management Research, directly measured influences on CEO risk-tasking through CEO self-ranking of performance in relation to compensation contract targets, compensation related to peers and riskiness of specific business options.

Wiseman was awarded the 2012 Emerald Literati Network’s Outstanding Paper Award for this research. The award is determined by the journal’s editorial team based on papers from the previous year and honors outstanding contributions.

Wilson, who received his PhD from the University of Iowa, has taught at all levels of the Broad College during the past nearly 30 years. He has been active in the new MS program in Marketing Research. In addition, he has been the faculty coordinator of the Broad College’s MBA Case Competitions and the Big Ten Case Competition team. Most recently, he chaired the Broad MBA Task Force that redesigned the Full-Time MBA program.

His research focuses on marketing research and modeling, market communication, marketing strategy, brand management and new product testing. Wilson has published over 100 articles in top marketing journals including Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Retailing, and Journal of Business Research. He has also been an editorial board member or manuscript reviewer for over 22 marketing and advertising journals, including as an editor of Interfaces.

Prior to MSU, Wilson served as a faculty member at Penn State University and Cornell University. He was also Vice President and Director of Marketing Sciences at BBDO, a major New York-based international advertising company, where he served such clients as DuPont, General Electric, General Mills, Gillette, and PepsiCo. While at BBDO, he was responsible for building and implementing advertising and marketing decision models for these and other companies.

With a research focus in strategic supply management, Schoenherr has been published in several journals, including Management Science, Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Decision Sciences and Journal of Business Logistics. For his work, he received the 2009 Best Theoretical Paper Award at the International Conference of the Decision Sciences Institute, the 2011 Best Paper Award at the Annual Conference of the Midwest Decision Sciences Institute, and the 2012 Award for Excellence from the Emerald Literati Network for a Highly Commended Paper. In 2009, he was awarded the Institute for Supply Management’s Senior Research Fellowship. He is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Operations Management and serves on several additional editorial review boards. For his service, he received the Best Reviewer Award from the Journal of Operations Management in 2008 and 2010, the Journal of Supply Chain Management in 2008 and the Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management in 2011.

His exceptional teaching has garnered him several grants and awards while at MSU. For the 2010-11 academic year, Schoenherr was awarded MSU’s Lilly Teaching Fellowship, followed by the Richard J. Lewis Quality of Excellence Award in 2011. He was also the first Broad faculty member to be awarded the Michigan Campus Compact (MCC) Faculty/Staff Community Service-Learning Award due to his integration of service-learning into Supply Chain courses.

Schoenherr also represents MSU and the Broad College in various professional associations. He served as the 2009-2010 President of the Midwest Decision Sciences Institute, Associate Program Chair for the 2011 Annual Conference of the Decision Sciences Institute and Proceedings Coordinator for the 2012 Conference of the Production and Operations Management Society. He was recently appointed to serve on the Educational Resources Committee of the Institute for Supply Chain Management.

Schoenherr, who received his PhD in Operations Management and Decision Sciences from Indiana University, joined the Department of Supply Chain Management at the Broad College in 2008.

Accounting – 164

Finance – 249

General Management – 53

Hospitality Business – 170

Human Resource Management – 37

Marketing – 122

Supply Chain Management – 185

The Broad College undergraduate commencement speaker will be William Demmer, president and CEO of Demmer Corporation. The student speaker will be Colleen Grattan, Human Resource Management senior.

At the MSU undergraduate convocation on Friday, May 4, Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first female president, will address graduating seniors and be awarded an honorary doctorate of laws. Robert Skandalaris, an MSU alumnus, philanthropist and successful entrepreneur, will be awarded an honorary doctorate of business.

Also on Friday, May 4, an advanced degree ceremony will be held which will include the following graduates from the Broad College:

Doctor of Philosophy – 13

Full-Time MBA – 82

Masters (Accounting, Business Research, Finance, Supply Chain Management) – over 120

In addition, 169 Weekend MBA students will graduate from the Broad College after celebrating their completion this past March.

The advanced degree ceremony speaker will be Subra Suresh, director of the National Science Foundation.

“I am very proud of our students’ achievements during their time at MSU,” says Eli and Edythe L. Broad Dean Stefanie Lenway. “We look forward to celebrating their personal and professional successes as they launch their lives after graduation from the Broad College.”

For more information on commencement, visit http://commencement.msu.edu/.

During over 10 years of service to the Broad College, Krishnan has earned numerous awards for her teaching and research. The Department of AIS has honored her impact on students with the Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award in 2004. In addition, she received the Withrow Endowed Emerging Scholar Award in 2006 for her teaching and scholarly activities at the Broad College. For her research, she has been recognized with the 2012 Greatest Impact on Managerial Accounting Practice Award, the 2006 Notable Contribution to Accounting Research Award, the 2005 Notable Contribution to the Management Accounting Literature Award and the 1999 McLaughlin Prize for Research in Accounting Ethics. She also received the Outstanding Faculty Research Award in both 2002 and 2008 from the Department of AIS.

The Withrow Teacher-Scholar Award honors faculty who have provided distinguished service to Michigan State University and the student body through excellence in institutional and scholarly activities. The primary consideration for the award is high quality, professional service in higher education while an MSU faculty member. Recipients of this honor demonstrate “sustained excellence as a faculty member, including exceptional teaching skill, development of innovative teaching methods, service to the business or academic communities, and scholarly excellence.”

Krishnan’s research focuses on managerial accounting and control, cost accounting, cost behavior and health care. Her research has been published in journals such as Contemporary Accounting Research, The Accounting Review and Journal of Accounting Research. She received her MBA and PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Krishnan was a visiting professor at Harvard Business School from 2008-09. She currently teaches both MBA and PhD accounting courses at the Broad College.

The more other customers look and act like us, the more likely we are to stay loyal to a particular store or product, according to a groundbreaking study co-authored by a Michigan State University marketing expert.

Surprisingly, the presence and behavior of other customers is just as important to brand loyalty as customer service, said Clay Voorhees. As a real-world example, he noted the fact that Abercrombie & Fitch offered to pay troublemaking cast members of the MTV reality show “The Jersey Shore” to stop wearing its clothes.

“We’re sizing up other customers all the time,” said Voorhees, assistant professor of marketing in the Broad College of Business. “Customers want to be around people they relate to, and the effect that the image of other customers has on loyalty was surprisingly dramatic.”

The study, which appears in the Journal of Retailing, is the first comprehensive examination of the role of other customers on customer loyalty.

Voorhees, along with scholars from Iowa State University and Texas Christian University, studied the customer loyalty of more than 840 people in three settings – a clothing store, a sit-down restaurant and a theme park.

Customer loyalty increased when the participants viewed other customers as similar to themselves. The general physical appearance and behavior of the other customers also played a role.

“Basically, do I feel like they’re the same type of person as me?” said Voorhees. “Do they look good? Do they behave? These factors increase the likelihood of people returning to the store.”

Companies that incorporate these factors into their marketing efforts could increase loyalty by 30 percent – nearly doubling the ability to predict customer loyalty compared to traditional survey approaches that narrowly focus on the quality of service provided by the employees.

Voorhees said most companies today have become good at customer service and managing their employees.

“So the next frontier is how to better manage their portfolio of customers,” he said. “This might give them the advantage for increasing customer loyalty.”

The importance of customer behavior was on display in 2011 when Abercrombie said “The Jersey Shore” characters’ “association with our brand could cause significant damage to our image.”

Via MSU News.

Haka will receive the prestigious national award at the association’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., in August.

Haka, Ernst & Young Professor of Accounting, is only the second MSU professor to be selected for the honor. The award – given to just one or two scholars annually since 1972 – recognizes contributions to accounting education through research and teaching for a sustained period.

“Professor Haka clearly has a sustained record as an outstanding member of the academic community,” MSU business professor Kathy Petroni said in her nomination of Haka. “Her influence on the field of international accounting is pronounced with respect to research, teaching and service.”

Haka has been a pioneer, Petroni said.

“Sue has cut a path across the accounting profession that serves as a model for women and men across the globe. She has had an outstanding impact on both the practicing and academic accounting communities.”

After obtaining her doctorate degree from the University of Kansas in 1982, Haka came to MSU as an assistant professor that same year. During her 30-year career, she has served as director of accounting doctoral programs (1990-1993) and chair of the Department of Accounting and Information Systems (1998-2001).

She has been senior associate dean of the Broad College since 2010.

Haka has written dozens of research articles and books, served as editor or associate editor for a number of major journals – including a six-year stint as co-editor of The International Journal of Accounting – and led the dissertation committees of many Ph.D. students at MSU.

Via MSU News.

Speaker: Paul Jaques, Internship Developer, Career Services and Placement, MSU

O’Donnell, professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Finance at the Broad College, began as an Assistant Professor of Financial Administration in 1956 and became chair of the Department of Finance and Insurance in 1985, serving until 1991. He taught Finance classes at all levels of the college, impacting countless students, faculty and staff throughout the years. He also served on numerous committees, including the MBA Policy Committee which instituted the MBA program, the University Curriculum Committee and the University Academic Policy Committee. In addition, O’Donnell served as Assistant and Acting Director from 1957-1959 of what is now known as the Institute of Public Utilities. In 1991, former Michigan Governor John Engler appointed him Commissioner on the Michigan Public Service Commission where he served until his resignation in 1995 to return as Professor of Finance at MSU. He remained an important presence in the college as Professor Emeritus since 1999.

As a notable Finance scholar and dedicated professor, O’Donnell was published and honored numerous times. He published several books on Finance, in addition to articles in publications including Public Utilities Fortnightly, Proceedings, Michigan Business Review, Business Topics and Michigan Economic Record. His work garnered him many awards, including the Michigan State News Awards of Appreciation (1982), the GTE Faculty Research Award (1979), the Finance Club Distinguished Advisory Award (1983 and 1989) and the MSU Turkish Alumni Association “Award for Outstanding Contributions to Higher Education” (1991), to name a few.

Prior to his time at MSU, O’Donnell served for four years in the British Army where he became an Acting Major. He then graduated from the University of Cambridge where he received his BA and MA in Economics before attending Indiana University for his MBA and DBA in the 1950s.