Research Highlights

According to a recent working paper co-authored by Mason finance professors Lei Gao and Bo Hu, more than 80 percent of U.S. public firms use graphics in their annual reports. Further, visual presentation has market benefits as well as aesthetic ones.

Bret Johnson, assistant professor of accounting at Mason, recently co-authored a paper in Management Science finding that SEC comment letters are leaking out among investors close to the company concerned, who then use it to their advantage. Technically, such information-sharing violates Regulation Fair Disclosure (FD), which prohibits companies from sharing secrets with network partners such as institutional investors and analysts.

Turbulent times are challenging for decision-makers in business. This pervasive condition scholars call economic policy uncertainty (EPU) can turn a wise move into a costly one virtually overnight and is known to weigh on firm innovation, investments and value. When confronting EPU, what’s a firm to do? Saurabh Mishra, professor and area chair of marketing at Mason, and co-authors explores that question.

Brad Greenwood, associate professor of information systems and operations management at George Mason University School of Business, and coauthors recently launched a research study that is forthcoming at Information Systems Research that explores what happens to a community’s abortion rates when a workaround for capital constraints becomes available.

​​​​​​​A paper co-authored by Jessica Hoppner, associate marketing professor at Mason, has been named a finalist for the American Marketing Association’s prestigious Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award.

The rules of the economy are being wholly rewritten right under our noses, and distributed ledger technology wields the pen. That’s the core contention of Sarah Grace Manski, an assistant professor in George Mason University's School of Business.

Victoria Grady, associate professor of management and program director of the Masters of Science in Management at Mason, has a new book, Stuck: How to WIN at Work by Understanding LOSS, which is the result of years of research and writing with her co-author Patrick McCreesh, an adjunct management professor at Mason. Stuck plumbs an area of psychology known as attachment theory, first developed in the mid-20th century by John Bowlby, a British psychoanalyst.

Research by Gautham Vadakkepatt, associate professor of marketing, finds strong indications that gender equality in advertising and actual outcomes for women are on parallel rising trajectories, in the markets that need it most.

Recent research from Heather Vough, associate professor of management at Mason, argues that gaffes have potential negative consequences that go far beyond an awkward or uncomfortable moment.

Despite the software industry’s rapid growth and deep pockets, tech companies are still engaged in bare-knuckles battle with cybercriminals. Nirup Menon and Pallab Sanyal's recent research confirms the existence of a willingness-to-pay (WTP) dilemma.

Managerial overconfidence is a serious risk that has drawn increasing attention from executives, investors, and researchers in recent years. Mindy (Hyo Jung) Kim, an assistant professor of accounting at Mason, has not only found that it’s possible to incorporate ability-adjusted overconfidence into real-world business assessments, but that it happens routinely.

The combination of two unlikely bedfellows—cryptography, a subfield of computer science, and currency, a topic in economics—is at the heart of the transformative potential of its underlying blockchain technology. But the uniqueness of the pairing can make it very difficult for research professionals in either field to predict, let alone positively influence, blockchain’s future development. Jiasun Li, an assistant professor of finance at Mason, is among an elite group of academics who are bridging the divide by merging relevant concepts from computer science with game theory—a subfield of economics that studies the interactions of decisions made by interdependent economic actors.