2014 Henry J. Leir Prizes Awarded to School of Management Faculty

This year's Henry J. Leir Prizes have been awarded equally to the papers presented by Jim Cicon and by Ben Chou and Ellen Thomas.  The Annual Henry J. Leir Prize awards the two best working papers and associated research proposals submitted by the School of Management’s junior faculty. The following research was recognized:

Assistant Professor Jim Cicon is using facial emotion recognition software. Professor Cicon reports that "we quantify the facial emotive state of CEOs during video interviews.  In a sample of Fortune 500 firms, from 2006 to 2012, we find that the emotion 'fear' incrementally explains the market performance of the firm.  When CEOs under interrogation convey an increased emotional state of fear, the market value of the firm increases around the interview date.  We submit that this occurs because the market perceives a fearful CEO to be a motivated CEO, and that a motivated CEO increases firm value.  We analyze the determinants of CEO facial emotions and find that older CEOs are more fearful, that tenured CEOs display greater anger and disgust, and that CEOs show more surprise when the interview topic concerns corporate governance issues (for example, CEO replacement).  We also show that the market only prices facial emotions which occur in the first two minutes of a interview.  We argue that  this occurs because the CEO works to ameliorate, the initial and unintentional revelation of fear, over the remainder of the interview.”

Senior Lecturer Ben Chou and Assistant Professor Ellen Thomas studied "A Game Theory Perspective of Asymmetric Alliances for New Product Development." In their research they report that "We provide a game theoretical model to characterize the strategic interactions between asymmetric firms in an alliance for new product development. We also integrate the game theoretical literature and empirical studies to show that a broader-scope link alliance tends to benefit the larger firm, while a narrower-scope scale alliance tends to benefit the smaller firm.  The asymmetry of benefits also enables the larger firm to subsidize the smaller firm to maintain the stability of the alliance if it is beneficial for the larger firm to do so."