Join our retail faculty and industry experts as they discuss the development of new online platforms and delivery options, the management of supplier relationships, evolving customer demand and expectations and changing personnel needs and safety.
The staffing of parallel servers in a queue has interested operations researchers for decades, resulting in countless mathematical models studying queuing behavior. But to achieve tractability, these models typically assume the service rate and productivity of individual servers is independent of other servers and the status of the system. We question this assumption and consider whether inter-server dependence impacts queue performance, specifically through server task selection.
On Wednesday, April 14, Royal Caribbean Group Executive Vice President & CFO Jason Liberty joined UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Dean Doug Shackelford for an exclusive virtual discussion. Liberty discussed how his team handled the unknowns of the past year, his current work to ensure customer confidence and the short- and long-term impact of the pandemic on the cruise industry.
The Kenan Institute’s deep dive into stakeholder capitalism has exposed shortcomings in a key building block: ESG measurement. In this one-hour virtual session, we will convene a cross-sector group of panelists to discuss why ESG measurements matter to businesses large and small. The panelists will offer recommendations on scalable implementation, suggest how best to leverage such measures to meet the needs of different stakeholder groups, and provide tips on how to design reporting that is free from political influence and agendas.
A new personal gift from Bruce Van Saun, Citizens Financial Group Inc. chairman and CEO, and his wife, Kathleen (Katie) Van Saun, will support the Kenan Institute’s annual grand challenge. Starting in 2023, the three-year gift will support the institute’s Distinguished Fellows, who advance thought leadership around the grand challenge’s theme, a key issue that affects business and society. The program is making its debut this year with an exploration of stakeholder capitalism and ESG investing. The Van Sauns earned their MBAs from UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School in 1983 and were married in 1985.
In her new position as Kenan Institute director of research, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Finance Professor Paige Ouimet will maintain the institute’s connections with the school that create the steady flow of translational research for business practitioners and policymakers.
A panel from this year's Alternative Investments Conference discusses how venture capital is playing catch-up on ESG investing, "knowing what levers you can pull," and the opportunity for huge growth in this week's Kenan Insight.
In Part 1 of this article, economic incentives were estimated for relaxing the requirement that biocrude entering the refinery infrastructure be oxygen (O2)-free. It was concluded that an accurate estimate of these incentives is not possible without a significant amount of additional data. Part 2 examines key issues that must be addressed and the associated data needed for this constraint to be relaxed.
This article examines the historical relation between oil price movements and both public and private equity investments in the energy sector. By utilizing two proprietary private equity databases (one at the fund level and the other at the company level), the authors are able to show that investments in energy-focused private equity offer diversification benefits relative to similarly focused public equity and direct energy commodity investments. They find that public equity investments perform better than direct investments in energy commodities. Energy-focused private equity outperforms energy-focused public equity.
Brand and innovation management have become increasingly important priorities for firms over the last few decades. Firms rely on strong brands and product innovations to gain competitive advantage and fuel growth.
A project funded by the Institute for the Study of Business Markets to develop an understanding of the current state of business-to-business marketing and a research agenda for the field identified a lack of understanding of how the marketing function can or should best contribute to firms' innovation efforts as the top priority.
The objective of this article is to promote discussions and educational efforts among Ph.D. students, scholars, referees, and editors in strategic management regarding the repeatability and cumulativeness of our statistical research knowledge.
Auditors are expected by the public and to find all financial statement fraud, even though Generally Accepted Auditing Standards (GAAS) have long held that auditors may not be able to detect all frauds. In this article, we use examples from the experience of an expert witness in numerous major fraud cases where auditors were sued for not detecting fraud to illustrate situations in which auditors can, and cannot, reasonably be expected to detect fraud.
The purpose of the present article is to take stock of a recent exchange in Organizational Research Methods between critics and proponents of partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM).
Retailers routinely allow consumers to negotiate a discount off the posted price for big-ticket items such as home appliances and automobiles, and on online platforms such as Amazon and eBay. The profitability of such a strategy, relative to selling only at posted prices, depends on consumers’ willingness to initiate a negotiation and ability to negotiate a discount. In this article, the authors incorporate consumers’ decision of whether to negotiate into a demand model.
In this article, we analyze how retailers change their inventory investment behavior in response to macroeconomic shocks. We examine if service level, as measured by the ratio of stockout to inventory holding costs, can explain the differences in observed behavior across retailers. We use data on macroeconomic indicators and quarterly filings of US public retailers from 1985 to 2009 to estimate a dynamic model of short- and long-term impact of macroeconomic shocks on inventory investment.
The world is on the cusp of a universal technological revolution, with technological breakthroughs capable of fundamentally altering our world. But which tools in the digital arsenal are the game changers – and why? Albert H. Segars, director of the institute-affiliated Center for Sustainable Enterprise, explores seven transformative technologies in an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review.
This article presents a reduced-form model that contains frailty factors to predict mortgage default and develops a novel framework to model systematic risk of mortgages. We match default rates along multiple dimensions by extending the generalized autoregressive score (GAS) models.
This article introduces a new data enrichment method that combines revealed data on consumer demand and competitive reactions with stated data on competitive reactions to yet-to-be-enacted, unprecedented marketing policy changes. The authors extend the data enrichment literature to include stated competitive reactions, collected from subject-matter experts through a conjoint experiment.
A Triangle Business Journal article on the Kenan Institute’s Dean’s Speakers Series featuring Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman last week. Schwarzman and UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Dean Doug Shackelford discussed the makings of a CEO in their Kenan Center fireside chat before students, faculty, staff and UNC Chapel Hill community members.