Research

Schools close, elderly populations isolate and businesses shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. Dr. Özgür Araz, associate professor of supply chain management and analytics, believes decisions imposed to change the way we live in the short-term stem from critical research analysis now in the hands of government and health care providers.

Araz’s research examines decision sciences specifically related to health systems, like pandemic decision-making. He teaches predictive analytics and knows his work impacts lives in a time of crisis.

Everyone knows the frustration of not having the right change to complete a purchase. Dr. Yunxia (Peter) Zhu, assistant professor of supply chain management and analytics, believes his research exploring the supply chain of currency may contain solutions to a situation made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“At the beginning of the pandemic, consumers were faced with shortages in toilet paper and other products,” said Zhu, who came to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 2018. “For these products, the flow in the supply chain is one direction – manufacturers produce products and then retailers sell those products to customers.”

Dr. Todd Thornock, assistant professor of accountancy, investigates how only the knowledge of peer managers’ environments, without knowing peer actions, affects managerial behavior. Utilizing a two-part experiment in a participative budgetary reporting setting, Thornock and his co-author show managers project their decision-making process onto peer managers who share similarities in role and reporting environment. These self-projected group norms create a sense of validation. In viewing themselves as one of many, managers perceive their peers’ behavior to be a mirror image of their own desired behavior.

While eviction has its negative effects on a person, research shows the extent of its consequences are minimal compared to the financial strain experienced years leading up to the eviction. Alongside that, the study showed minor impact from evictions on debt in collections, residential mobility or neighborhood poverty.

Policies in place to retrieve money from executives who profited from financial misconduct, known as clawbacks, show a variance in levels of adoption by corporations. Research indicates that some organizations who have adopted these clawback policies shifted their strategies to decrease tax revenue, while other organizations showed hesitancy to adopt the policies due to lack of guidance from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Dr. Alok Kumar, associate professor of marketing and W. W. Marshall College Professor, explores the existing literature on American multinational corporations (MNCs) within marketing. Although MNCs represent a common and complex organizational form, there is little research devoted to channel management from an MNC perspective. Aiming to address this gap, Kumar and his co-authors, including Dr. Amit Saini, professor of marketing and W. W. Marshall College Professor at Nebraska, propose an organizing framework to spur and guide further research. For practitioners, their integrative piece suggests three elements MNCs should consider in managing their foreign distribution channels: the headquarter-subsidiary relationship, the subsidiary-channel partner relationship, and the local institutions and legal differences of the countries in which the channels operate.