Doctoral Research in Motion

At the crossroads of death and consumer behavior, Grossman explores the process of bequeathing possessed objects through generations. In his research, he focuses on the type of sentimental associations that lead an object to be passed down as an heirloom. His data suggests that people prefer passing down items associated with memories of achievements and they do this to motivate subsequent generations to strive for accomplishments in their own lives. Grossman is currently preparing this manuscript for submission at the Journal of Consumer Psychology and has other work currently under review at the Journal of Consumer Research.

Pai's research documents an unstable relation between stock market prices and variance. Her work shows that this evidence poses a challenge to extant risk-based asset pricing theories. To address the puzzle, she has developed a consumption-based asset pricing model with two (good and bad) variances: the stock market price correlates positively with good variance but negatively with bad variance. Consistent with the model's predictions, Pai found that the two variances jointly explain the unstable stock market price-variance relation, stock market return predictability and the cross-section of stock returns. Pai is currently preparing a manuscript for submission to a top economics or finance journal, and her work has been accepted for publication in Real Estate Economics. 

Sundrup's research, "Getting Away from Them All: Managing Exhaustion from Social Interaction from Telework" in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, looks at how a part-time telework intervention provides relief from social interaction fatigue, which is prevalent due to the highly-connected and interactive nature of IT development work. The research aims to help balance telework practices in light of multiple job characteristics and their opposing effects on work exhaustion.

Detecting missing attributes, features, options, issues or possibilities is surprisingly difficult. Although people often recognize that there must be information not shown in a context (e.g., ad campaign or political speech), they still rely heavily on available information at the expense of other information not mentioned. Wu's research examines the effects of belief about one’s age and about one’s knowledge on omission neglect and how it may lead people to form extreme judgments or make poor decisions. Wu’s work is currently under second and third review/revision at the Journal of Business Research and Marketing Letters. Her other work on pricing is under revision at the Journal of Consumer Psychology.