04 Dec 2014

Four Harvard Business School Doctoral Students Win Prestigious Research Awards

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BOSTON—The Harvard Business School Doctoral Programs and their faculty chair, Kathleen McGinn, the School’s Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, have announced two recipients of the 2014 Wyss Awards for Excellence in Doctoral Research as well as two winners of the Martin Awards for Excellence in Business Economics. The annual prizes are presented based on excellence in innovative dissertation research.

The 2014 Wyss Award recipients are:

  • Kate Barasz (DBA, Marketing) – Barasz’s work focuses on the implications of decision making, examining the unseen and unanticipated causes and consequences of people’s choices. She has studied a range of related issues, including prediction error and the strength of cognitive biases.
  • Frank Nagle (DBA, Technology and Operations Management) – Nagle’s research aims at quantifying the effects of digitization on how firms innovate and compete in the modern business environment. Nagle especially focuses on firms working with crowd-sourced digital goods, using big data to investigate their impact and value.

The 2014 Martin Award recipients are:

  • Benjamin Hebert (Ph.D., Business Economics) – Hebert’s work explores the prevalence of debt securities, despite the excessive risk-taking they typically encourage. His theory holds that debt securities do the best job of minimizing variance for a principal’s returns and balancing the need to encourage effort and avoid excessive risk.
  • Ran Shorrer (Ph.D., Business Economics) – Shorrer’s research aims to develop reliable indexes for hard-to-measure systems. His approach accounts for the unpredictable and dynamic nature of the riskiness of a gamble or a delay in an investment cash flow and is applicable across a wide range of settings.

The Wyss Awards are named in honor of Hansjörg Wyss (MBA 1965), who established the Hansjörg Wyss Endowment for Doctoral Education in 2004. 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.

The Roger Martin Fund for Doctoral Research was established in 2006 through the generosity of Roger Martin (MBA 1981), former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. The fund was created in memory of HBS professor John Lintner, a world-renowned expert in finance, and one of Martin’s mentors.

Harvard Business School grants the Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) in five areas of study: accounting and management, marketing, management, strategy, and technology and operations management. It also offers Ph.D. programs in collaboration with Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in business economics, health policy management, and organizational behavior. At any given time, approximately 130 HBS doctoral students are completing course work or working on their dissertations at the School.

Contacts

Christian Camerota
ccamerota+hbs.edu
617-495-6931

About Harvard Business School

Founded in 1908 as part of Harvard University, Harvard Business School is located on a 40-acre campus in Boston. Its faculty of more than 250 offers full-time programs leading to the MBA and PhD degrees, as well as more than 175 Executive Education programs, and Harvard Business School Online, the School’s digital learning platform. For more than a century, faculty have drawn on their research, their experience in working with organizations worldwide, and their passion for teaching, to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. The School and its curriculum attract the boldest thinkers and the most collaborative learners who will go on to shape the practice of business and entrepreneurship around the globe.