Archive for December, 2010

Analytics Boom

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

Writing on Forbes.com, Smeal’s John Jordan looks at the growing use of analytics to make business decisions, arguing that “numbers-driven decisions are no longer the exclusive province of people with hard-core quantitative skills.” Loosely defining analytics as using “statistical and other methods of processing to tease out business insights and decision cues from masses of data,” Jordan indentifies three examples of the growing use of data-based decision making:

- The “flash crash” of May 2010 focused attention on the many forms and roles of algorithmic trading of equities. While firm numbers on the practice are difficult to find, it is telling that the regulated New York Stock Exchange has fallen from executing 80 percent of trades in its listed stocks to only 26 percent in 2010, according to Bloomberg. The majority occur in other trading venues, many of them essentially “lights-out” data centers; high-frequency trading firms, employing a tiny percentage of the people associated with the stock markets, generate 60 percent of daily U.S. trading volume of roughly 10 billion shares.

- In part because of the broad influence of Michael Lewis’ bestselling book Moneyball, quantitative analysis has moved from its formerly geeky niche at the periphery to become a central facet of many sports. MIT holds an annual conference on sports analytics that draws both sell-out crowds and A-list speakers. Statistics-driven fantasy sports continue to rise in popularity all over the world as soccer, cricket and rugby join the more familiar U.S. staples of football and baseball.

- Social network analysis, a lightly practiced subspecialty of sociology only two decades ago, has surged in popularity within the intelligence, marketing and technology industries. Physics, biology, economics and other disciplines all are contributing to the rapid growth of knowledge in this domain. Facebook, al-Qaida and countless startups all require new ways of understanding cellphone, GPS and friend/kin-related traffic.

 Also on Forbes.com, Jordan lists nine reasons for “The Data Analytics Boom.”

Tags: Jordan, Technology
Posted in News | 11 Comments

Smeal Professor Discusses Iran’s Kish Island on CNBC

Monday, December 6th, 2010

Smeal’s Fariborz Ghadar, director of the Center for Global Business Studies, sat down with CNBC’s Erin Burnett this afternoon to discuss Iran’s Kish Island, a free trade resort island in the Persian Gulf. In the 1970s, Ghadar served as the president of the Export Promotion Center for the Government of Iran during the Shah’s reign. During that time, he was responsible for all non-oil exports from Iran and “created the rules for the Kish free zone,” says Burnett.

Here is a link to Ghadar’s interview on CNBC’s “Street Signs”: http://bit.ly/gp6su2.

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Best Paper Honors

Wednesday, December 1st, 2010

Two studies by Smeal faculty members recently won best paper honors.

“Risk Uncertainty and Supply Chain Decisions: A Real Options Perspective,” co-authored by Smeal’s Chris Craighead along with G. Tomas M. Hult of Michigan State and Smeal alumnus David J. Ketchen, Jr. of Auburn, won the 2010 Decision Sciences Best Paper Award.

“Balancing Borders and Bridges: Negotiating the Work-Home Interface via Boundary Work Tactics,” by Smeal’s Glen Kreiner with Elaine Hollensbe of the University of Cincinnati and Mathew Sheep of Illinois State, won the 2011 Owens Scholarly Achievement Award, recognizing it as the best publication in the field of industrial and organizational psychology in 2009.

Kreiner discussed the results of this paper with Smeal’s Research with Impact website last year. Click here to learn more about the 11 tactics Kreiner and his coauthors recommend for achieving that elusive work-life balance.

Tags: Announcements, Craighead, Kreiner
Posted in News | 2 Comments