HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL HONORS DOCTORAL CANDIDATES FOR INNOVATIVE RESEARCH
Three Prizes Awarded through the Hansjoerg Wyss Endowment for Doctoral Education
BOSTON - The 2006 Wyss Awards for Excellence in Doctoral Research have been presented by the Harvard Business School Doctoral Programs to three HBS doctoral candidates. Jill Avery (who is pursuing a doctorate in business administration – DBA – in the field of Marketing), Jakub Jurek (a Ph.D. candidate in Business Economics), and Richard Lai (a DBA candidate in Technology & Operations Management) were selected from more than 20 applicants in the HBS doctoral programs and each awarded $12,000 for their innovative dissertation research.
- Through ethnographic analysis, Jill Avery’s work explores how the intertwining of the identities of consumers and their brands affects consumer response to changes in the marketplace meaning of their brands. Consumers “save face” by attempting to influence the meaning of the brand for their social audience and, in doing so, collectively author new discourses about the brand – a process that leaves the brand’s identity value less accessible to other consumers.
- Jakub Jurek’s research employs the theory of dynamic portfolio choice with time-varying investment opportunities to study topics ranging from the long-horizon properties of the value premium to the asset pricing implications of market illiquidity and the risk-return characteristics of statistical arbitrage strategies. His ongoing research seeks to link the momentum effect to the cross-sectional pricing of volatility and credit risk, and examines option-based models of the costs of immediacy in capital market transactions.
- Richard Lai focuses on empirical operations management, looking at financial contagion along supply chains, the validity of the bullwhip effect, and the tendency of retailers to stock less inventory when they are concerned about their stock price.
The Wyss Awards are made possible by a $25 million donation from Hansjoerg Wyss (MBA 1965) in 2004, which established the Hansjoerg Wyss Endowment for Doctoral Education. A native of Switzerland, he built Synthes, Inc., into a leading international medical device company specializing in orthopedic instruments and implants. The Wyss Endowment supports a broad range of efforts to strengthen the HBS Doctoral Programs, including fellowships and stipends for doctoral students, increased support for field research, new doctoral course development, teaching skills training, and the renovation of doctoral facilities on campus. To honor Wyss’s extraordinary dedication to Harvard Business School and higher education, Sherman Hall, which houses the Doctoral Programs’ offices on the HBS campus, will soon be rededicated as Wyss House, and doctoral candidates receiving support from the endowment will be known as Wyss Fellows.
Harvard Business School grants the DBA in five areas of study: accounting and control, marketing, policy and management, strategy, and technology and operations management. In addition, in conjunction with Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, it offers programs in business economics, health policy, information technology and management, and organizational behavior leading to the Ph.D. At any given time, approximately 95 HBS doctoral students are completing course work or working on their dissertations at the School.
About Harvard Business School
Founded in 1908 as part of Harvard University, Harvard Business School (www.hbs.edu) is located on a 40-acre campus in Boston. Its faculty of more than 200 offers full-time programs leading to the MBA and doctoral degrees, as well as more than 40 Executive Education programs. For almost a century, HBS faculty have drawn on their research, their experience in working with organizations worldwide, and their passion for teaching to educate leaders who have shaped the practice of business around the globe.