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George �鶹��Ƶ professor furthers impact of telemedicine in Ukraine

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 22:39:16 +0000

George �鶹��Ƶ professor furthers impact of telemedicine in Ukraine Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 01/14/2025 - 17:39

Ukraine’s health care system has been hit hard amid the ongoing war. Power outages, staffing shortages, and the destruction of hospitals have added up to a drastic reduction in available care for the already-vulnerable population. In a desperate attempt to bridge the gap, Ukraine’s Ministry of Health opened the country to telehealth solutions from overseas. But will these prove to be a successful substitute for at least some necessary services, or turn out to be no better than a tech Band-Aid?

Answering that question is where Mariia Petryk, assistant professor of information systems and operations management at the Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ, comes in. In her spare time, she works as volunteer director of analytics for TeleHelp Ukraine (THU).

Mariia Petryk

Founded by a cross-disciplinary group of Stanford students shortly after the war’s inception, THU was designed to succeed where other telemedicine initiatives in crisis-affected areas have failed. The founders worked tirelessly to assemble an international volunteer network comprising medical professionals, translators, interpreters and administrative “health navigators.” Aware that medical consultations were only part of the patient journey, THU’s founders sought to address the entire continuum of care.

Petryk stresses that while the project originated at Stanford, the technical team included “people from Chicago, Boston, other California schools…some very active volunteers were in Australia, South Korea, Canada and other countries.”

Petryk, herself of Ukrainian descent, was honored to lend her data science expertise to this worthy project. As analytics director, she manages a dozen or so number-crunching volunteers who measured and documented THU’s impact upon Ukraine’s displaced population during the initiative’s first full year.

As Petryk explains, “The Russian invasion created a humanitarian crisis where a lot of people were internally displaced. And when people relocate to a new place, they don’t know where to go for health care. They also are at higher risk for many issues, including mental health problems. And they don’t know where to turn to treat chronic diseases they may have.”

THU’s primary focus during its first year was delivering much-needed services to this population of war-ravaged internal exiles.

Petryk’s analytical work gave rise to a recent case study of THU published in Journal of Global Health. The paper’s other lead author was Aditya Narayan, a Stanford medical student and THU’s director of implementation and evaluation.

Their findings describe some impressive early successes. THU facilitated more than 1,200 virtual patient appointments from May 2022 to May 2023 alone. Despite often-chaotic conditions, patient attendance rates were above 70 percent for nine of the 13 months studied. As the first year wore on, the THU team found ways to prevent no-shows—for example, employing the popular texting platform Viber to communicate with patients and assigning an individual health navigator to each patient.

Even more impressively, 96 percent of patients reported that their health complaints were at least partially resolved during their visit.

The paper argues that aspects of THU’s model could be adapted for use in other humanitarian contexts. In its initial growth phase, THU had access to advanced technological infrastructure and a wide network of medical providers, by dint of its academic origins. This implies that partnerships with academia could be critical to replicating THU’s success outside Ukraine.

Petryk remains proud of THU’s impact and her role in helping define it. “Based on actual appointments and how much that amount of care would cost at a hospital, THU delivered an estimated $1 million worth of services in its first 13 months,” she says.

Looking ahead to THU’s future, she says, “I can only wish to see this ‘start-up,’ as it were, go for the IPO.”

For more information and to explore volunteering opportunities, visit THU’s website.

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Are U.S. ‘news deserts’ hothouses of corruption?

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 16:35:27 +0000

Are U.S. ‘news deserts’ hothouses of corruption? Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 11/19/2024 - 11:35

The March 24, 2021 edition of neighborhood newspaper Northeast News, out of Kansas City, Missouri, contained a surprise for its 9,000 subscribers. Where the front-page news should have been, there was a big, blank white space. This was no printer’s error, but a last-ditch cry for help. After 89 years in operation, Northeast News had found itself on the brink of insolvency due to the loss of key advertisers amid the COVID pandemic. The empty front page was designed to remind the community of what it would lose if its only local paper went under.

The gambit went viral, prompting a flood of online donations that is keeping the paper afloat, for now. Ironically, Northeast News owes its existence to the very force that has fueled the more general decline of local journalism in America—the internet.

Brad Greenwood

As advertiser dollars migrated to Facebook and Google, the business model that supported local newspapers for generations came to the edge of collapse. Since 2004, more than 2,500 American newspapers have ceased publication—around one-quarter of the total. Overall newspaper circulation has declined by more than half since 1990.

To be sure, digital alternatives have rushed in to fill the gap, such as citizen-journalist websites, nonprofit news organs, partisan blogs, etc. So, the question represented by the blank front page of Northeast News resonates: What do communities lose when newspapers fold that online journalism startups haven’t (so far, at least) been able to replace?

In the past, industry observers and researchers have linked community newspaper closure to diminished civic trust and political participation, among other negative effects. New research from Brad Greenwood, the Maximus Corporate Partner Professor of Business at the Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ, builds on this discourse, finding evidence that when local papers topple, political corruption springs up in their wake.

Greenwood’s paper, coauthored by Ted Matherly of Tulane University, was published in MIS Quarterly.

The researchers focused on U.S. federal districts that lost a major daily newspaper during the years 1996 to 2019. They compared the number of corruption charges (bribery, embezzlement, fraud, etc.), defendants, and cases filed in district court before and after the newspaper closure. The results were striking: Overall, the disappearance of a newspaper delivered a 6.9% increase in charges, a 6.8% increase in the number of indicted defendants and a 7.4% increase in cases filed.

“We looked at federal charges for three reasons. First, the overwhelming amount of statutory enforcement occurs federally. Second, it gives us a uniform definition of what constitutes corruption across every domestic jurisdiction. Finally, and most importantly, federal conviction rates are over 90%,” Greenwood says. “They don’t charge people unless they have a good-faith belief they will prevail at trial.”

Moreover, post-newspaper corruption cases were more likely to go to trial as opposed to resolving in a plea deal, thus incurring greater public costs.

“In an age of misinformation, the solution is not rejecting the professional press, it is embracing it, and ensuring that well-trained and hard-working men and women have both the ability and venue to hold those in power to account."

Greenwood and Matherly also examined whether digital-era upstarts were adequate substitutes for newspapers, in terms of curtailing corruption. They tracked 352 such websites, and found they had no impact on the number of charges, defendants or cases in the districts concerned.

“While it’s hard to say precisely why we don’t see an effect from online news, there are several candidate explanations. Not only do citizen journalists lack the standing and training to tackle questions of public corruption and elevate discourse in the public square, but many of these sites aren’t even legitimate news vendors,” says Greenwood, referencing what are commonly referred to as “pink slime websites.”

Greenwood goes on to suggest that the corruption-preventing power of the defunct papers came not necessarily from journalistic acumen, but rather from the ability to elevate the actions bad actors had taken in public discourse, a process journalism researchers refer to as agenda setting.

Whatever the cause, the ramifications for society are very real. In the Northern District of Illinois alone, corruption-related cases involving more than 1,700 officials cost taxpayers a staggering $550 million per year from 1976 to 2012. The coffers of communities that lose newspapers may suffer more than most, since these cases tend to end up in expensive courtroom proceedings rather than plea deals.

Further, the study only looks at corrupt officials who got caught. Presumably, there are many more whose corruption went unpunished.

All told, these findings suggest that community newspapers should not be regarded as just another business model ill-adapted to digital disruption that should be allowed to fail. Their demise comes at significant public cost, financial and otherwise. “In an age of misinformation, the solution is not rejecting the professional press, it is embracing it, and ensuring that well-trained and hard-working men and women have both the ability and venue to hold those in power to account,” Greenwood says.

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The NYPD gave officers iPhones. Here’s what we learned about race and policing

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 16:50:43 +0000

The NYPD gave officers iPhones. Here’s what we learned about race and policing Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 06/04/2024 - 12:50

In This Story

Brad Greenwood

The controversy about biased policing seems to draw endless fuel from race-based differences in public perception. Simply put, the vast majority of White citizens in the United States believe the police are doing a good job, including on issues of racial equality, while a similar percentage of Black citizens hold the opposite opinion. And while a growing number of studies have indicated persistent patterns of racial discrimination in policing, an emergent concern among scholars is that the data these papers rely on are also subject to baked-in biases, since they often derive from officers’ self-reports of their own behavior.

Brad Greenwood

Enter Brad Greenwood, professor of information systems and operations management at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ. One of his research interests lies in how digital technologies are bringing unprecedented transparency to police practices. For example, Greenwood’s 2022 paper documented how the introduction of body-worn cameras for the New York Police Department (NYPD) resulted in a significant reduction in abuse-of-authority complaints.

His latest work on policing is forthcoming in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Along with Gordon Burtch from Boston University and Jeremy Watson from the University of Minnesota, Greenwood examined the recent rollout of iPhones across the NYPD, which included a series of digital tools designed to replace the handwritten memo books officers previously relied on. Instead of scribbling in the physical books, which NYPD officers were required to hang onto even into retirement, officers could log their activities directly into a centralized database maintained by the NYPD. These detailed digital records shed fresh light on how cops spend their time—and attention—on the beat.

The researchers tracked data on NYPD stops and complaints in 2017 and 2018, the period when iPhones were being rolled out across precincts in New York City. A curious pattern emerged. There was an 18% increase in reported stops after a precinct received iPhones, which would be consistent with the digital tools making it easier for officers to report a citizen interaction. Further, the researchers discovered that this increase resulted in neither more arrests nor more complaints from the public. It wasn’t, therefore, that the phones were somehow causing the police to stop people more often, but rather that so-called “unproductive stops”—those leading to no further action—were being reported more often.

However, when breaking the results down across White and non-White citizens, the researchers found that unproductive stops involving non-White citizens were entirely responsible for the increase. In other words, the observed changes were based on police encounters with non-White members of the public, that would likely have gone unreported in the days of pen and paper. More specifically, after switching to the smartphone system, officers logged 22% more stops involving non-White citizens, while the number of reported stops of White citizens remained unchanged. These are statistical averages—the pattern was more marked in high-crime neighborhoods and those with a greater proportion of non-White residents.

Greenwood offered an interpretation of the finding: “The concern here is that we have an underreporting, which is concentrated in certain groups and means that we need to be cautious when interpreting prior work. On the one hand, it opens the door to bias in police interactions with civilians being worse than initially anticipated, at least based on the frequency of stops. On the other hand, it could mean that older data doesn’t accurately reflect the likelihood of an arrest once a stop occurs. And we need to be doubly cautious, because we don’t know if officers are reporting stops more frequently just because it is easier, or for some other reason.”

Greenwood cautions against making sweeping conclusions based on the study. “The only thing we know for sure is that more and deeper work is needed by scholars and policy makers to ensure transparency between law enforcement and the people they are charged to protect,” he said.

On the whole, however, the study raises the possibility that race-based disparities in policing are not only very real, but may have been underestimated thus far because of reporting gaps.

As police officers are not obligated to document all civilian interactions, their decisions regarding what—and what not—to report can be biased. The introduction of new technology, as in the case of the NYPD, can help counter such biases, but is not the only avenue worth pursuing. The researchers recommend that police departments “investigate the appropriate organizational complements (i.e., policies and procedures) necessary to uncover and eliminate such biases.”

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Costello College of Business finance professor receives coveted NSF early-career award

Greg Johnson — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 15:43:13 +0000

Costello College of Business finance professor receives coveted NSF early-career award Greg Johnson Thu, 02/22/2024 - 10:43

Jiasun Li, a recently promoted associate professor of finance at the Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ, has received a prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Jiasun Li

According to the NSF website, the CAREER award is given to “early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.”

The award totals $711,679 over five years. It will support Li’s ongoing research into the organization of digital services with the rise of emerging technologies.

This project jumps off from recent developments in cloud and decentralized computing. Both technologies present radical new possibilities for off-premise digital services, as evidenced by the rise of numerous cloud service providers as well as blockchain platforms.

However, the presence of strategic incentives may undermine the smooth and reliable functioning of such systems. For example, cloud providers may opt to short-charge clients when it comes to the provision of services, if it is in their best interests to do so. Alternatively, strategic actors may also disrupt the consensus protocols governing decentralized systems.

Li proposes to tackle these problems in an interdisciplinary manner, blending tools from computer science (as the topic is inherently about digital services) and economics (since incentive analysis traditionally falls in the domain of economics). He has finely honed this approach in a series of papers applying analytical models based on economic principles to decentralized systems such as blockchain proof-of-work technologies.

The ultimate goal of Li’s project, as stated in his NSF proposal, is to “guide the efficient organization of digital services for productivity gains, and thus enhance the economic competitiveness of the United States.”

Previously, Li received individual and collaborative grants from �鶹��Ƶ’s Multidisciplinary Research Initiative, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the Ethereum Foundation, among others. He was recently named an inaugural Faculty Fellow of �鶹��Ƶ’s Institute for Digital Innovation (IDIA).

“I am extremely honored to receive an NSF CAREER Award because such grants are traditionally rare in business schools," said Li. "I really appreciate the trust NSF bestowed on me. This recognition is only possible thanks to the tremendous support and many forward-looking initiatives from �鶹��Ƶ and the Costello College of Business, as well as many colleagues across different disciplines who have inspired, guided, and elevated me over the years. I look forward to carrying out the interdisciplinary research projects under the continued support from NSF and the University/Costello College of Business.”

Ajay Vinzé, dean of the Costello College of Business, said, “This prestigious award from NSF is a fitting recognition of Jiasun’s superb/impactful research record and a proud moment for Costello College of Business--Congratulations Jiasun! As the evolution of the digital economy plays out, research like Jiasun’s project is going to provide relevant and actionable insights. I look forward with great excitement to contributions that are forthcoming.”

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Do you criticize or celebrate your colleagues? It may depend on your social position

Marianne Klinker — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 14:49:21 +0000

Do you criticize or celebrate your colleagues? It may depend on your social position Marianne Klinker Wed, 09/27/2023 - 10:49

Online technology has made real-time performance feedback a workplace reality. But a pair of �鶹��Ƶ professors have found out about a major bias in the system.

Online technology is fundamentally reshaping employee evaluations. In the last decade or so, companies such as IBM, Amazon, and General Electric have adopted performance feedback apps that allow employees to "review" one another in real time. These apps take the 360-degree paradigm to its logical extreme by removing temporal, hierarchical, and geographical barriers to feedback.

According to Mariia Petryk, assistant professor of information systems and operations management (ISOM) at �鶹��Ƶ School of Business, “People are trying to tap into new sources of employee engagement across all management and employment tiers. For millennials and Gen Z, instant communication is the norm, and they are not going to wait a year to get feedback. They want to know how they perform here and now, and be able to comment on other people’s performance in the same way. So when we merge these trends of social connectedness, instant communication, and use of technology, we come up with this wonderful application.”

As with any breakthrough technology, though, appropriate use of real-time performance feedback depends upon understanding its inherent limitations. After all, increasing the scale and speed of feedback is not guaranteed to erase deep-seated biases based upon gender, race, hierarchical position, etc. In a recent paper for Information Systems Research, Petryk and her ISOM colleague Siddharth Bhattacharya, concentrate on a relatively neglected—but, as it turns out, subtly powerful—category of bias related to how individuals are embedded within the informal (i.e. social) network of the organization.

Mariia Petryk (left) and Siddharth Bhattacharya

Their co-authors were Michael Rivera and Subodha Kumar of Temple University, and Liangfei Qiu of University of Florida.

Working from a unique data-set from technology provider DevelapMe, comprising nearly 4,000 instances of real-time performance feedback spanning five organizations, the researchers mapped the informal networks of each organization. They then compared reviews submitted by employees who were positionally embedded—i.e. those who moved in influential circles, though they may not themselves have been high-ranking—to ones by those who were structurally embedded, meaning they had larger clusters of weak ties.

For millennials and Gen Z, instant communication is the norm, and they are not going to wait a year to get feedback. They want to know how they perform here and now, and be able to comment on other people’s performance in the same way.

For example, both a C-level executive and their assistant could be considered positionally embedded. A middle manager whose work touches multiple teams would be structurally embedded.

The professors found that positionally embedded employees tended to give higher scores to colleagues, while structurally embedded employees skewed negative in their ratings.

Bhattacharya says, “Informal network bias could be explained as a matter of perspective. From atop the hierarchy, it’s difficult to see how projects came together and who made what happen. Positionally embedded people have a coarse rather than a granular view. Therefore, they may give highly visible individuals more credit than they deserve for collaborative work—for example, they may wrongly assume that a team member chosen to present a project to them was primarily responsible for said project.

By contrast, structurally embedded employees have wider and more diverse networks and thus a much broader base of comparison. This makes them prone to detect and emphasize the flaws of co-workers.”

Organizations using feedback apps such as DevelapMe can usually set limits on the number of anonymous reviews they allow, although the identities of anonymous raters are always visible to HR and senior leadership. The researchers found that anonymity magnified informal network bias for both structurally embedded and positionally embedded employees.

Further, since reviews included both numerical score and explanatory text, the researchers analyzed how informal network bias influenced the wording of reviews. They saw that positionally embedded raters, though more generous with their numerical rating, were relatively neutral and formal in their written feedback. Structurally embedded reviews exhibited the opposite pattern: Comparatively strict in their scoring, but positive and encouraging in their written content. The researchers speculate this points to contrasting motives—constructive vs. motivational—the two groups had for delivering feedback.

Easy ways to counter informal network bias, then, would be for organizations to carefully consider the amount of anonymity to permit, and for them to recommend or even require that each instance of feedback be accompanied by text.

Beyond that, Bhattacharya and Petryk suggest that companies employ a combination of training and technological refinements to help address informal network bias. For example, positionally embedded managers should be reminded to temper their reviews with a bit more objectivity—perhaps peering outside their bubble to get a more complete picture of an employee’s work. Tech providers and consultants could use tools such as social network mapping to help organizations better account for informal network bias in their employee performance data.

Petryk says, “Our data and findings show the mechanisms of how people—not necessarily high-ranking people—can have power over rewards, because at the end of the day the ratings will be factored into a formal evaluation. And bonuses will be distributed on the basis of the evaluation. How that decision is being made can be greatly impacted by the data that we analyze, and that we obtain from this network.”

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In This Story

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Building a 'digital twin' of the real world

Jennifer Anzaldi — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 14:02:39 +0000

Building a 'digital twin' of the real world Jennifer Anzaldi Mon, 09/26/2022 - 10:02

In This Story

Jingyuan Yang

As artificial intelligence (AI) has become more adept at anticipating people’s wants and needs, predictive algorithms have been mingled with almost everything we do digitally. When we are done watching a Netflix show, they take the liberty of queueing up the next one—they finish our sentences in Outlook and Gmail.

Jingyuan Yang

In the offline world, however, the complex and multidimensional nature of many of our most pivotal decisions defies algorithmic analysis. That is, unless AI can learn to detect how real-world contingencies, such as specifics of time and place, govern our choices.

Jingyuan Yang, an assistant professor of information systems and operations management at �鶹��Ƶ School of Business, is at the forefront of AI research that aims to crack the codes of the physical world. Her results so far point toward innovative solutions for some of the biggest societal, governmental, and business challenges we face.

Several of her papers to date investigate urban bike sharing, a “last mile” extension of public transport systems designed to coax commuters out of their cars. Some early adopters of bike sharing, such as New York City and Taiwan, have seen long-term success with the model. But elsewhere, including major Chinese cities, oversaturation has led to bicycle-flooded sidewalks or, even worse, rivers and vacant lots turning into bicycle graveyards—an environmental disaster that produced friction with local politicians.

Yang discovered that in Shanghai, part of the problem was that the distribution of bikes across the city did not match demand. Some areas had far more available bikes than riders, while in others the opposite was the case. Additionally, Shanghai’s system allowed commuters to dismount wherever they chose. This dockless model made predicting rider demand even more challenging, as bikes could be located virtually anywhere.

With a team of six other researchers[1], Yang developed a data-driven model for predicting traffic flows within dockless bike-sharing systems, based on a dataset provided by leading provider Mobike. Spanning the period February 2017-March 2018, the Mobike data contained more than 957 million riding records from nearly 315,000 shared bikes.

The research team extracted flow patterns from the data by partitioning the city and “smoothing out” areas with the lowest levels of activity. The resulting grid-like “flow matrix” carved Shanghai’s bike traffic into spatio-temporal snapshots that could be studied and compared. After clustering these based on their similarities, the researchers could construct “base matrices” that provided broader, deeper points of reference for prediction than temporal or geographic cues alone. Using the base matrix, the algorithm could identify emergent patterns in a certain area as those associated with central business districts on a rainy holiday morning and forecast bike traffic in that area over the next few hours accordingly.

Yang says she was surprised by what this technique of algorithmic mapping revealed. “There are a number of surprising factors we can discover that cannot be covered by traditional model analysis. As an example, we find that there is a slight increase in bike traffic near subway stations during rain, because people want a shorter commute,” she says.

The team tested their model against six other algorithms designed for the same purpose, to see which was the most accurate at predicting actual bike traffic flow in Shanghai. Yang’s team’s solution consistently outperformed the rest on sample datasets for regular working days, rainy working days and holidays–meaning it achieved the lowest degree of prediction error. Perfect predictions are impossible, because all sorts of irregular real-world occurrences, from auto accidents to one-off public events, can cause traffic on a given day to break with the pattern. “Really odd events, we cannot capture,” Yang says. “But the base matrix lets us capture basic trends.”

For Yang, optimizing bike sharing is part of a necessary push toward environmentally sustainable options for urban living, including fewer polluting modes of transport. “All these papers are intended to help companies go a more sustainable way and help the user to tackle the last mile in an eco-friendly manner-without waste and damage to the environment.”

With some tweaks to the logic, however, the same AI-based methods can apply to a range of pressing business issues. The territory mapped by algorithms need not be geographical; researchers can also “map” a network of individuals or companies. Yang’s experiment in the field of B2B marketing is a case in point. She helped build[2] an automatic recommendation engine for marketing campaigns based on customer profiles (similar in concept to the bike-sharing base matrices) reflecting corporate affiliation as well as individual employee status. Customers from the same “region” on the grid, i.e. the same company, are treated holistically to improve recommendation quality.

“When you’re selling to a company, you’re usually dealing with a group of decision-makers who are at different buying stages," Yang explains. "To estimate buying propensity, you need to consider that they may share information. Their behavior should be considered together. Therefore, we use matrix representation to extract their shared knowledge.”

One of Yang’s current research projects focuses on predicting employee flow within networks of companies, again borrowing spatio-temporal techniques. Similar to Shanghai’s urban environment, the job-hopping professional grid has its own version of “weather”—favorable or gloomy economic conditions – that may alter the pattern.

“Based on different job positions, you can group the companies. You can aggregate company profiles and predict, collectively, how many people will leave based on the stock price,” she says.

Yang’s research suggests that by building a chessboard-like “digital twin” of the real world, spatio-temporal AI solutions can help business and society predict–and thus prevent–harmful losses such as human capital flight and damage to the natural environment.

[1] Jingjing Gu, Qiang Zhou and Yanchao Zhao (of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics), Yanchi Lui and Hui Xiong (of Rutgers University), Fuzhen Zhuang (of Chinese Academy of Sciences)

[2] In collaboration with Chuanren Liu (of Drexel University), Mingfai Teng and Hui Xiong (of Rutgers University) and Ji Chen (Google).

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An 'ethics of care' for journalists covering mass shootings

Jennifer Anzaldi — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 15:00:17 +0000

An 'ethics of care' for journalists covering mass shootings Jennifer Anzaldi Wed, 08/31/2022 - 11:00

In This Story

Ashley Yuckenberg

Ashley Yuckenberg

Before May 24 of this year, much of the country had never heard of Uvalde, Texas. But the horrific incidents of that day catapulted the small city to national consciousness. Its name became synonymous with the crisis of gun violence gripping the United States. In the process, a local tragedy was made part of a sorrowful lineage—only the latest, and fully expected not to be the last, in a string of similar calamities. Yet the 21 lives lost, among them 19 children, were unique individuals whose loss caused unimaginable grief for their community.

The manifold meanings of traumatic events like Uvalde and other mass shootings create thorny ethical dilemmas for journalists, over and above their usual concerns about accuracy and the ideal of non-intervention. Beneath the blinding light of the national stage, there is an ever-present risk that in trying to get the story right, reporters may inadvertently add to the violence’s toxic aftereffects.

In her 2021 dissertation, Ashley Yuckenberg, a trained journalist and assistant professor of business communications at �鶹��Ƶ, plumbs the ethical quandaries of crisis coverage and provides a framework for guiding journalists through them.

Yuckenberg completed the dissertation, titled “Ethical Implications of Communicating Risk in the Media: A Heuristic for Reporting on Crisis Events with a Focus on Mass School Shootings,” for a PhD in Writing and Rhetoric from �鶹��Ƶ. Her research builds upon concepts from late-20th-century feminist philosophers, who argued against ethical absolutism and for an “ethics of care” that considers actions in light of their effect on others. Yuckenberg was also strongly influenced by the 2008 book Horrorism, in which feminist thinker Adriana Cavarero explores the uniquely traumatic characteristics of contemporary violence targeting the most vulnerable (e.g., suicide bombings and school shootings).

But Yuckenberg’s interest in the issue is more than theoretical. “As a K-12 teacher for eight years, I had to take students through active shooter drills, and we had to be aware,” she says.

The 2007 Virginia Tech shooting also touched Yuckenberg personally as a community resident. “The shooter went to high school with me. He was a year younger than me. And one of my friends lost his sister.”

Her research took her to the Library of Congress, where she analyzed a total of around 700 articles about the Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Parkland school shootings. Yuckenberg used local newspapers—rather than, say, the New York Times—because their closeness to the affected communities increased the immediacy of their coverage as well as its emotional impact for those most directly traumatized by the event. She opted for print editions over digital articles so she could capture subtleties of journalistic presentation such as the original headlines, selection and placement of photos, etc.—suggestive nuances that can influence how readers interpret the news.

Through the evolution of media narratives, Yuckenberg was able to track how journalistic missteps (which were no doubt well-intentioned) in the wake of the violence distorted the national conversation. On the day of the 1999 Columbine shooting, for example, reporters interviewed traumatized students fresh from the scene of slaughter. False rumors circulating amongst the teenagers ended up being reported as fact, e.g., that the perpetrators had formed a gang called the Trench Coat Mafia to avenge supposed bullying. These questionable accounts, related as part of a breaking news story, helped form a terrifying template of the disaffected school shooter that stalks the American imagination to this day. They also introduced elements into the national discourse that arguably had no business being there, such as the putative role of goth culture in motivating school shootings.

In 2017, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued guidance for reporters covering mass shootings, including a sensible crop of general principles such as avoiding angles and language that could glamorize the carnage, thereby inspiring copycats. Yuckenberg drew upon her journalistic training, as well as her research and theoretical framework, to translate the CDC’s guidelines into a practicable technique for journalists. Just as the “five W’s” are a near-universal reference point for structuring news stories, Yuckenberg hopes her mnemonic device—or, in academic parlance, “heuristic”—will be widely adopted by journalists covering crisis events.

Her dissertation’s “WHIMM” heuristic acronymizes five essential ethical trouble spots for journalists:

Witnesses—Relying on unverified information from witnesses—who may still be in shock—may result in misinformation.

Harm—Gratuitous details about the crimes may satisfy a certain craving for sensationalism among some segments of the public, but can re-traumatize affected communities. Information should be included in stories only if the benefit to society as a whole (e.g., helping prevent future shootings) justifies the potential for emotional distress.

Influence—By indulging the shooter’s desire for widespread infamy, journalists can influence others who feel they have nothing to lose to chase fame through a copycat crime.

Missing side—Offering differing perspectives to contextualize information can prevent harmful misconceptions from forming. For example, facts about a shooter’s psychological history could be offset by quotes from experts clarifying that only a small minority of mentally ill people commit acts of violence.

Missing information—Especially as the crisis event is unfolding, facts usually filter out in piecemeal fashion. Situations change from hour to hour, sometimes moment to moment. This can plunge the news audience, primarily in the affected community, into a state of serial trauma as updates continually arrive. Yet the absence of information can produce excruciating suspense, an emotional trade-off calling for the utmost delicacy.

Yuckenberg’s dissertation was completed before the tragic events in Uvalde. Reflecting on the news coverage to date of this latest school shooting, she renders a mixed verdict. “I think they did a better job than they had in the past with Parkland and Columbine” in terms of focusing on the victims instead of the shooter, she concludes. However, the conflicting and changing reports in the hours and days after the shooting could have been curbed or condensed out of respect for the community.

“If we’re going to have an ongoing debate about how police should be responding to school shootings, it’s important that we have accurate information,” Yuckenberg says. “The more eager you are to release anything that comes through from a source for clickbait purposes or whatever, the more you risk muddying those waters and making it impossible to get your hands on the facts.”

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Business Foundations Faculty Research

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

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Costello College of Business

The Link Between Abortion and Peer-to-Peer Lending

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 15:09:36 +0000

The Link Between Abortion and Peer-to-Peer Lending Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 03/29/2022 - 11:09

In This Story

Brad Greenwood

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade established a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester. But a legal right is not the same as guaranteed access. In the years since Roe, state and federal regulations have increased the financial hurdles involved in obtaining an abortion.

It stands to reason that capital constraints would have a suppressive effect on abortion rates. But how much of an effect? And can it be quantified? Brad Greenwood, associate professor of information systems and operations management at �鶹��Ƶ School of Business, recently launched a research study designed to answer those questions.

The resulting paper (co-authored by GT Ozer of University of New Hampshire and Anand Gopal of NTU-Singapore), forthcoming at Information Systems Research, explores what happens to a community’s abortion rates when a workaround for capital constraints becomes available.

Greenwood says, “I believe we show, and fairly cleanly, that when you democratize access to capital in forms of lending, and specifically lending where there is some level of anonymity or privacy, you do see a small but notable increase in the number of women who elect not to carry to term.”

The researchers reasoned that peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms such as LendingClub can provide women access to capital under conditions of anonymity that evade the widespread social stigma attached to abortion. LendingClub, registered in 49 states, operates like an online bank, whose members can obtain personal loans of up to $40,000 at standard interest rates, as well as other financial products.

The professors compared detailed data on the timing of LendingClub’s entry into specific U.S. states, with county-level per-capita abortion rates for the years 2005-2010. They also looked at other county-specific factors (population, demographic makeup, education level, etc.), which served as controls and comparisons.

Performing systematic comparisons between demographically similar counties both with and without access to LendingClub, Greenwood and his co-authors found that the P2P platform was associated with a significant increase in abortion rates. All told, results suggest that the entry of LendingClub is associated with an increase of between 278 and 675 abortions annually in the U.S. Keep in mind, LendingClub is just one of many fintech platforms providing alternative avenues for access to capital, and Greenwood indicates that the research team obtained similar results when Prosper entered the market.

How you interpret these findings may depend on your position on abortion. Pro-life advocates may be reassured that the strategy of staunching capital flows has been at least minimally successful. But the democratization of access to capital – through innovations such as LendingClub -- may undermine this strategy over time, as suggested by Greenwood’s results.

Greenwood believes that in the post-Roe legal context, his findings may also be relevant for supporters of a woman’s right to choose. In a famous 1992 opinion (Planned Parenthood of Southern PA v. Casey), Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that states could regulate abortion prior to fetal viability (usually considered to be 23-24 weeks), provided they didn’t place an “undue burden” on the mother. What “undue burden” means when applied to abortion is still being decided on a case-by-case basis in the courts. But as Greenwood points out, research studies such as this one may strengthen legal challenges to state-level regulations using the “undue burden” standard, since it shows that women are indeed foregoing their legal right to abortion for lack of funds.

“We postulate about burden, but can we test whether or not there’s a change in the burden? The answer appears to be yes,” Greenwood says.

As polarizing as abortion is, not everyone takes an extremist position. “If you are one of the Americans—and polling from numerous sources suggests this is the largest contingent of the electorate—who believe abortion should be ‘safe, legal and rare,’ the secondary findings of the paper may be of interest to you,” Greenwood says. LendingClub’s entry had less of an effect on abortion rates in counties whose residents were better educated. Further curtailing of the effect was seen in counties with mandatory sex education. Finally, the effect was significantly stronger in deeply religious counties—i.e., those with a higher percentage of people observing a particular religion.

“If we really want to reduce the number of abortions that occur, we need to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies,” Greenwood says. “Education literature would corroborate that’s a function of increased use of contraception and awareness about safe sex.” By contrast, abstinence-only education programs, which are disproportionately favored by religious communities, received over $100 million in federal funds last year alone.

To be sure, upcoming holdings from the Court may overturn Roe entirely. Nullifying this precedent would also presumably reduce the need for pro-life lawmakers to attempt to defund the practice. However, Greenwood’s findings seem to support the common pro-choice assertion that any “abortion ban” would affect poor women first and foremost.

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Costello Research Health & Well-being at Work

Costello Research Competitive Strategy

Winning the Keyword Wars

Jennifer Anzaldi — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 17:40:36 +0000

Winning the Keyword Wars Jennifer Anzaldi Wed, 02/16/2022 - 12:40

In This Story

Siddharth Bhattacharya

Among other things, Google’s search engine is the most successful billboard ever invented. Keyword marketing—i.e., placing text-based ads at the top of search results—has become an over $100 billion business responsible for the majority of Alphabet’s revenue.

Search marketing offers a variety of avenues for matching supply to demand. For example, companies can bid on their own keywords (e.g. brand and product names), putting ads in front of already-curious customers. Marketers can also bid on their competitors’ search terms, thus co-opting the brand recognition of others. The latter practice, known as competitive poaching, is increasingly prevalent, as casual Google users may have already noticed.

There are no hard and fast rules for winning the keyword wars. For researchers, it’s a tantalizingly uncharted area. Siddharth Bhattacharya, a professor of information systems at �鶹��Ƶ, recently co-conducted (with Jing Gong and Sunil Wattal) the first-ever empirical study on competitive poaching. In a real-life experiment, the researchers tried out differently worded ads piggybacking on various competitor keywords, measuring performance based on click and conversion rates.

Across two distinct sectors—business academia and automotive sales—they noted similar results that help provide actionable guidelines for poachers and poachees. From the user perspective, their findings also contribute to understanding whether competitive poaching improves or detracts from overall search quality.

There were four varieties of ads used in the experiment, listed here in no particular order. First, ad copy stressing vertical, or quality-based, differentiation—expressed in phrases like “Top Ranked School. World Class Faculty” and “Best-Selling Luxury Car.” Second, horizontal-focused ads suggesting unique features and providing multiple options to consumers—e.g. “Extreme Versatility. Great Driver Assistance” and “Flexible Schedule. Mobile-Friendly Format.” Third, prescriptive copy conveying an aspirational appeal—e.g. “Have the Power. Push the Limits” and “Discover Opportunities. Leave Transformed.” Finally, control ad copy making no particular claim and serving as our baseline for comparison (“Upgrade to an Audi Today”).

No one type of ad performed best across the board. Rather, the effectiveness of the ads was directly related to the quality of the brands being poached upon, the researchers found. When poaching from high-quality competitors such as top-ranked business schools or luxury auto brands, vertical ad copy was up to 114 percent more effective than the control ad copy in driving clicks. On the other hand, for low-quality competitors, horizontal ad copy was up to 84 percent more effective in comparison to the control ad copy. Prescriptive ad copies did not show any effectiveness in driving click-throughs.

Bhattacharya explains the results by pointing out that different customer segments are after different things. Luxury consumers are sensitive to quality-based indicators, hence they respond to vertical differentiation. However, mass-market buyers have resigned themselves to not being able to afford the absolute best, but are looking for realistic options that meet their specific needs.

The prescriptive ads did not particularly resonate with either segment because their aspirational claims could not be verified. But that doesn’t mean prescriptive copy should never be used. For Bhattacharya, it comes down to the distinction between search-based and experience-based products. Search-based goods, such as the graduate degree programs and automobiles in the present experiments, are subject to objective evaluation based on their attributes. Experiences aren’t. A suspenseful, violent novel or movie, for example, may be well-made but nevertheless unappealing to those who dislike the thriller genre. More research is needed looking at experience-based products specifically.

The very first step when planning a competitive poaching campaign, Bhattacharya says, is to know whether what you’re selling is search-based or experience-based. Experiences are outside the purview of this research study. But for search-based products, your best bet is to tailor your ad copy depending on the quality of the poached brand.

The other determining factor of poaching success was physical distance. As you might expect, it proved difficult to poach from far away. Targets in close proximity, such as competing auto dealerships in the same town or city, worked better for driving clicks on poacher ads.

The experiment also investigated the presence of competition, i.e.ß, presence of competitor’s own ad appearing alongside the poacher’s ad on the search results page. Surprisingly, the presence of both ads increased clicks to the poacher—but only for high-quality keywords. Low-quality keywords resulted in fewer clicks on the poacher ad when the poachee was also present.

This implies that competitive poaching has mixed implications for search quality. On the one hand, it allows discerning high-end consumers to make more educated choices and comparisons between competing products. On the other, it seems to dissuade mass-market consumers, who may find the dueling messages distracting or confusing.

Bhattacharya believes the relevance of the study may extend beyond product marketing in the most strictly defined sense. Political campaigns are also avid keyword marketers. Vertical and horizontal approaches to advertising roughly parallel the ever-widening rhetorical divide between managerial elitism and working-class populism in many locales. If the analogy holds true, Bhattacharya’s study may offer a glimpse into the future of political messaging.

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