GWSB Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Program

REU Funded Projects: 2010-2011

Title: Acquisition of Hospitals within a Nation
Student: Shelley Xue
Professor: Wenjie Chen
Department of International Business

My name is Shelley Xue. I am a sophomore in the School of Business, considering concentrating in Marketing or Hospitality Management. I am currently working as a REU assistant in the International Business Department with Professor Wenjie Chen. Our recent project involves hospital acquisition across the nation.

I enjoy this experience a lot. REU has given me a number of opportunities to get involved in the School of Business, which encourages me to stay involved. When I was a Freshman, I did not participate in any activities on campus. However, I was still very eager to be part of an organization. When one of my friends first introduced me to this position, I simply took it as an opportunity to have a job. Soon after I found out that I gained access to more resources than I originally imagined. I was eligible to participate in various lectures hosted only for student leaders and I also worked closely with the business school professors and directors.

This experience taught me to have the courage to take initiative. It is so easy to be passive and wait for people to approach you. However, in the world today, opportunities don't wait. You have to take the initial action to show your interests so that your thoughts can be heard by others.

The major challenge I experienced in this position is that I was forced to be extremely detail oriented with all my work. Research requires a lot of attention and focus. A single mistake in data can generate discrepancy in all of the observations. It was the first time that I actually realized that a tiny mistake can have a huge impact.

 

Title: Analysis of Spectator Events
Student: Sarah Dalia
Professor: Lisa Delpy Neirotti
Department of Tourism & Hospitality Management

This research position entails a number of initiatives. One of the main focuses of this assistantship is improving the Green Sports Score Card website. The Score Card is designed to assess the degree of the carbon footprint a sports team, event, and/or facility leaves on the environment. A detailed report based on the results of the Scorecard offers the team advice on greening their practices. The website and Scorecard are designed to increase awareness of sports and sustainability.

Faculty advisor, Dr. Lisa Delpy Neirotti, is also working on a scholarly article about reducing the impact of sports teams, events, and facilities on the environment. This invovles a review of literature on the subject. These articles can often be extensive in length. Finding these articles is not enough -- a synthesis is required in order to ease the ultimate task of writing the scholarly article. Noting relevant concepts, quotes and statistics and writing a summary of the article is required in this research process.

Lastly, Dr. Neirotti enlisted my assistance in the management of the Sports Industry Networking and Career (SINC) Conference. More specifically, I assisted with speaker correspondence, scheduling of the program, and confirmations. Ultimately, the conference was a huge success, attracting 250 participants and 100 professionals who served as speakers, panelists, and round table leaders.

So far, this research position has involved working on a range of projects, and gaining a wide scope of experience within the field of Sports Management. I am very grateful to be able to work alongside Dr. Neirotti, who is a distinguished professor not only in The George Washington School of Business, but also within her field. I look forward to continuing to work with her and seeing how we can further develop the projects we've begun.

 

Title: Global Governance Research
Student: Justin Seitenbach
Professor: Srividya Jandhyala
Department of International Business

The research I am currently supporting Professor Srividya Jandhyala on revolves around the initiatives of The Global Compact set forth by the United Nations. This Global Compact as defined by the UN acts as “strategic policy initiative for businesses that are committed to aligning their operations and strategies with ten universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labour, environment, and anti-corruption.” (UN, 2011).

The focus of our research is to map the reaction of larger firms in accepting this global compact. Certainly, many developed nations already stipulate as law many of the ideas set forward by the Compact. It is for the companies in countries which have an underdeveloped business regulatory environment, for whom acceptance of the Global Compact would cause the greatest imposition and yield the most noticeable effect. I spent the first semester researching and organizing a wide range of corporate information (mostly financials and scopes of operation) from the Orbis database for the years 2000 through 2009 (or 2010, depending on the reporting date) for the 1,500 largest firms on Earth measured by total assets. I then linked each parent firm with their individual network of subsidiaries.

This current semester my focus shifted from the micro-environment to the macro-environment. Whereas previously I was researching specific corporations, I am now responsible for looking into national policies of different countries across the globe, relative to the four areas highlighted in the Global Compact. Specifically, I have been compiling different rankings of these four aspects as measured by a variety of firms. For instance, in ranking domestic anti-trust policy, a significant source has been Transparency International rankings, which is a weighted compilation of other groups’ rankings. Ultimately, the goal is to identify correlation between activity in firms who have agreed to the compact from lower rated countries across the four dimensions and common changes in the processes or financials of these firms.

 

Title: International Sporting Events
Student: Caitlyn O'Brien
Professor: Lisa Delpy Neirotti
Department of Tourism & Hospitality Management

The focus of this research project is on why spectators attend mega events, specifically the Olympic Games, their consumer behavior during the Games, and satisfaction with their experience. Spectators are very important to the atmosphere of the Olympic Games and the economic impact on the host city. Professor Neirotti and her graduate students have collected surveys on this topic at every Olympic Games since the 1992 Barcelona Summer Games; thus it is of interest to see any changes in responses over the years.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) recently realized the importance of spectators and assigned a staff person, Alexis Gros-Piron, responsible for spectator experiences. Mr. Gros-Piron has since contacted Professor Neirotti expressing interest in reviewing the GW data to better understand the spectator.

The survey questions cover spectator demographics, factors in deciding to attend the Olympics, how spectators planned their trip (people are more frequently planning their own trips with the growth of travel websites like Expedia), opinions about sponsors, feelings towards the host city before and after the Games, and safety perceptions. At more recent Olympics two separate surveys have been administered with different intentions: one based around economic impact and one around motivation. Each Olympic Games offers a different set of data, which we are in the process of translating to graphical format in order to easily recognize any trends or disparities. From that point, more complex analyses can be made. I am reviewing current literature on the topic as well as working with SPSS to determine the descriptive statistics of the survey responses. There is currently a wide range of scholarly articles related to consumer behavior and satisfaction at the Olympics. These include some of Professor Neirotti’s previous articles concerning spectator motivation and perceived safety, including “Motivation to Attend the 1996 Summer Olympic Games” and “Impact of Olympic Spectator Safety Perceptions and Security Concerns on Travel Decisions.”

In addition to making a contribution to current studies on the spectator (as a stakeholder in the Olympics), hopefully our time series analyses will be of assistance to the IOC in creating a central database dedicated to examining spectator satisfaction and motivation.

 

Title: Investigating Bank Lending during Financial Crisis
Student: Rhea Sud
Professor: Hein Bogaard
Department of International Business

I worked with Professor Hein Bogaard on a project entitled 'Investigating Bank Lending during Financial Crises'. I utilized the ORBIS database to search for information on the lead and participant banks of syndicate loans which included the amount of deal values, shares of loans held by each bank, and the bank role in the syndicate. I also categorized lead banks based on their structure and determined whether they received government support during the financial crisis. I recently have been working on creating graphs to represent quarterly trends in data, based on the total deal values and average deal values as well as borrower type and industry. I really enjoyed participating in the monthly workshops with the research assistants from other disciplines to share our researching techniques and present our findings.

 

Title: The New Introductions of the Chevrolet Volt and the Nissan Leaf
Students: Nan Hu, Woody Jang and Jason Katz
Professors: Robert Dyer and Marilyn Liebrenz-Himes
Department of Marketing

Nan Hu:
I really enjoyed this opportunity to work as an REU research assistant. It gave me a chance to investigate the promising automobile industry and to discover business concepts behind different marketing campaigns. Also, the job allowed me to interact with GWSB faculty members a lot; I gained thought provoking insights and guidance from them. By working closely with professors, I was able to cultivate mutual understanding and a stronger academic relationship with the professor. Moreover, conducting this research helps me explore my interests, as well as improve my analysis and teamwork skills.

Jason Katz:
My research project involves analyzing the impact that the Chevrolet Volt has had on General Motors. Specifically, I am investigating how the introduction of the Volt has affected GM's reputation in the marketplace, the marketing methods that GM is using in the Volt's promotion, and why GM has invested so much into the Volt in the first place.

 

Title: Participation in Case Study Competitions
Student: Jiayi (Daphne) Wang
Professor: Joelle Davis Carter
Undergraduate Programs

My name is Daphne Jiayi Wang, from Shanghai, China. I am currently a sophomore in the School of Business, considering concentrating in Marketing and possibly dual concentrating in International Business. I am working with Dr. Joelle Carter now in the Research Experience for Undergraduates program. Our area of research examines the experiences of undergraduate business students who have participated in business case study competitions.

People may rarely connect the idea of undergraduate students with research projects. However, my experience has proven that it is absolutely possible and working with business school faculty closely is an amazing learning opportunity. I have learned how to conduct surveys, how to write a consent form, and what the general processes are that needed to be in place before the project started.

Research is a challenging but fun job. In the beginning I was inexperienced and very unfamiliar with what it takes to be a good research assistant. I started with a literature review for my project, which allowed me to become more familiar with the project. Dr. Carter helped me a lot by leading me through the process, showing me not only how to do my job as a research assistant, but also how her job was done, so that I can see the whole picture in relation to the process of our project.

In the Research Experience for Undergraduates Program, we had workshops where every research assistant would meet and communicate with each other about their work. We also have the opportunity to learn together from the librarian about how to do research using databases.

I enjoyed my experience and will continue working and learning from my job in the REU program.

 

Title: Relating Variables in Software Projects
Student: Haihan Zhang
Professor: Shivraj Kanungo
Department of Decision Sciences

The research I have conducted as an REU Research Assistant aims to link project level variables, such as team cohesion and team agreement indices, with individual attributes in order to assess their combined effect on project performance. We used primarily face-to-face, telephone interviews, as well as traditional paper-based surveys to collect data. We have also developed a list of interview questions that would help us retain our results. A core question is asking the subject to identify the differences among collaboration, correlation and cooperation. The information we collect is then analyzed using a standard HLM system, thus drawing a conclusion about the significance of the three terms on project management.