A Word From Dean Frank

This issue of Research@Smith focuses on the award-winning research of three Smith PhD candidates, but there are many other Smith PhD students with equally impressive accomplishments.

Debora Viana Thompson, PhD candidate in the marketing department, was one of three winners of the Marketing Science Institute’s Alden G. Clayton Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Competition, perhaps the most prestigious honor a marketing student can achieve. Thompson explores the phenomenon of feature fatigue, when consumers purchase products that are overly complex because they tend to value the product’s capability more than its usability. Subjects used virtual products in Smith’s Netcentric Behavioral Laboratory to investigate how consumers balance their desires for capability and usability when they evaluate products.

Sophia Marinova, a PhD candidate in the management and organization department, received a Best Paper Award for her work on the way high investment human resource management affects the corporate climate and individual employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors.

Jason Kuruzovich, a PhD candidate in the decision and information technologies department, received a second place Best Paper award for his work on the role of technology in telecommuting success.

These achievements are a testament to the quality of our students, who after graduation go on to teach at major research universities around the world.

In this newsletter we are able to include only a sampling of the research being done by our PhD students and their faculty collaborators.

Howard Frank
Dean, Robert H. Smith School of Business