Latest Research

Sameer Srivastava, Assistant Professor

Enculturation Trajectories: Language, Cultural Adaptation, and Individual Outcomes in Organizations

How do people adapt to organizational culture, and what are the consequences for their outcomes in the organization? These fundamental questions about culture have previously been examined using self-report measures, which are subject to reporting bias, rely on coarse cultural categories defined by researchers, and provide only static snapshots of cultural fit.

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By contrast, Srivastava and co-authors develop an interactional language use model that overcomes these limitations and opens new avenues for theoretical development about the dynamics of organizational culture. They trace the enculturation trajectories of employees in a midsized technology firm based on analyses of 10.24 million internal emails. The language-based model of changing cultural fit (1) predicts individual attainment; (2) reveals distinct patterns of adaptation for employees who exit voluntarily, exit involuntarily, and remain employed; (3) demonstrates that rapid early cultural adaptation reduces the risk of involuntary, but not voluntary, exit; and (4) finds that a decline in cultural fit for individuals who had successfully enculturated portends voluntary departure.

Przemyslaw Jeziorsk, Assistant Professor

Mobile Money in Tanzania

In developing countries, mobile telecom networks have emerged as major providers of financial services, bypassing the sparse retail networks of traditional banks. Jeziorski and his coauthor analyze a large individual-level data set of mobile money transactions in Tanzania to provide evidence of the impact of mobile money on alleviating financial exclusion in developing countries.

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The authors identify three types of transactions:(i) money transfers to others; (ii) short distance money self-transportation; and (iii) money storage for short to medium periods of time. The study takes advantage of a “natural experiment” – an unanticipated increase in transaction fees makes it is possible to examine how user behavior changes. The authors find that the willingness to pay to avoid walking with cash an extra mile is 2% of an average transaction. The same figure is 0.8% for storing money at home for an extra day. An important implication is that mobile money ameliorates significant amounts of crime-related risk related to handling cash.

Jose Guajardo, Assistant Professor

Mobile Technology and Social Media in Retail: Decomposing the Value of Geolocation Information

Consumer response to mobile and social media promotions can vary at different stages of the decision-making process. Guajardo and his coauthor examines this question based on a proprietary dataset reflecting the operations of a mobile platform that enables firms to send geolocated promotions.

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In this platform, information is gradually delivered to consumers, which allows for decomposing the value of geolocation information in influencing consumer’s awareness, consideration, purchase intention and recommendation behavior. The results indicate that geolocation information makes a significant difference in early stages of the purchase process (opening rates), but not in the conditional likelihood of accepting or recommending a promotion. These results suggest that the value of geolocation is reflected primarily in increased consumer awareness, and not in changing consumer behavior in later stages of the conversion funnel. Further analysis reveals that the impact of design features of geolocated campaigns varies throughout the purchase funnel. For example, timing variables have an influence on opening rates, while value proposition attributes are the main drivers of acceptance rates. The paper also shows that the performance of geolocated campaigns is in-between social media (Facebook) and non-geolocated campaigns, suggesting that geolocation information can be useful in resolving the trade-off between reach and effectiveness.

Faculty

Ernesto Dal Bó

Political Economics, Influence and Corruption

Omri Even-Tov

Financial Accounting, Corporate Debt

Paul Gertler

Impact Evaluation, Public Economics

Andrea Gorbatai

Knowledge Diffusion, Information Sharing

Jose Guajardo

Operations Analytics, Operations-Marketing Interface

Terrence Hendershott

Financial Market Data, Analytics, and Trading

Przemyslaw Jeziorski

Marketing Analytics, Mobile Marketing

Zsolt Katona

Network Analytics, Social Media and Mobile Marketing

Jonathan Kolstad

Healthcare Analytics, Public Economics

Yaniv Konchitchki

Macro-Accounting, Financial Information

Ming Leung

HR Analytics, Labor Markets

Ross Levine

Financial Regulation, Entrepreneurship

Abhishek Nagaraj

Information Economics, Digital Mapping

Hoai-Luu Q. Nguyen

Consumer Credit Analysis, Banking

Panos Patatoukas

Financial Statement Analysis, Economic forecasting

Sameer B. Srivastava

Organizational Sociology, Computational Linguistics

Toby Stuart

Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Network Analysis

Mathijs de Vaan

Social Network Analysis, Economic Sociology

Johan Walden

Networks in Capital Markets

Reed Walker

Environmental Economics, Public Economics

Grants and Fellowships

The Fisher Center for Business Analytics has a limited amount of funding available for research proposals from Haas faculty members, and invites you to submit a proposal. Priority will be given to junior faculty and to proposals that are willing to share data or otherwise collaborate with other interested Haas faculty members. This year the Center seeks to award $50,000. Through the support of the Ryoichi Sasakawa Foundation, the Center administers Fellowships to PhD students applying analytics in their doctoral research.

Grants

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Topic

Research that applies analytics to business – broadly defined as:

  • Addressing a business problem
  • By using empirical methods to analyze data of non-trivial scale or
  • Constructing novel explanatory variables using analytics (e.g. text mining)
  • Applying analytics to integrate previously disparate data sets in novel ways.
  • Proposal may be limited to data collection for future research – priority given to researchers willing to share data

Funding Availability

Funds will be transferred to individual faculty research accounts by June 2017 to be used before June 30, 2018.

Grants Should Include:

  • A 2-3 page description of the research your project
  • Recent CV with related papers highlighted
  • Project budget (maximum $15,000)

Reporting Requirements

Grant recipients are required to

  • Produce a progress report or working paper before June 30, 2018
  • Present their work at a seminar upon request

Submission

Email proposals to:
businessanalytics@berkeley.edu

2020 – 2021 Funded Award Recipients

Anastassia Fedyk

Company Name Disambiguation and Industry Mapping

This project will focus on the development of a comprehensive dataset mapping companies to their respective industries.

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Specifically, the objective is to develop company name disambiguation and industry mapping solutions using a large resume dataset covering the universe of firms in the U.S. and a wide range of firms abroad. The employment dataset comes from a collaboration with a private partner.  The dataset spans approximately 1 billion individuals globally and is maintained in accordance with major data protection policies. These data offer a comprehensive view of each firm’s company profile, departments, and employees. The result of the project will consist of a corpus of company name variants, mapped to unique company identifiers and corresponding industry classifications including private firms and international firms. This corpus will support a wide variety of business research questions, including entity matching in unstructured data (e.g., news, patents, job postings, and information scraped from online sources such as Glassdoor).

Sameer Srivastava

Cultural carriers – job mobility and cultural change

What role does the mobility of organizational leaders play in shaping corporate culture?

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As firms seek better ways to measure and manage cultural change, researchers and practitioners alike are keen to understand the mechanisms by which such change occurs. While most cultural change efforts focus on internal policies, practices, and procedures, firms also recognize that the infusion of senior leaders from other organizations can often serve as a catalyst for change. Indeed, executives are often brought in from the outside in the hopes that they will serve as cultural carriers who can transmit desirable cultural features from one organization to another. Yet it remains unclear what kinds of leaders—for example, based on career stage or the sequence of prior career moves—have the capacity to be cultural carriers and the contexts—for example, the degree of similarity between the prior and new organization or financial health of the new organization—in which they prove to be most effective.

In this project, we partner with an executive search firm that has compiled a number of datasets on executive profiles, career histories, and organizational culture profiles. Applying methods in computational social science, we integrate data on the career mobility of senior leaders, internal cultural assessments of individuals and firms, external measures of organizational culture based on natural language processing of Glassdoor employee reviews, and Compustat data on firm characteristics and performance. The resulting data set will provide a rich portrait of how individual-level career mobility shapes organizational culture change and, ultimately, firm performance.

Nick Tsivanidis

Migration patterns from cellphone metadata data in Jordan

This project uses metadata from the universe of transactions on one of Jordan’s largest mobile operators to understand the dynamics of migration and the role of social networks in job finding for refugees.

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By merging this with a panel phone survey that collects information about migration, social networks and employment, we employ machine learning methods to predict these outcomes for the whole sample of phone users using only the signatures in the cell data. This allows us to create new insights and analytics into the process of refugee migration, assimilation and job finding patterns in urban environments, typically out of view of traditional administrative datasets.

Fellowships

Doctoral Fellows

Fellowships are part of the education mission.

Through the support of the Ryoichi Sasakawa Foundation, the Center administers Fellowships to PhD students applying analytics in their doctoral research.

Conferences and Seminars

The Center sponsors conferences that invite scholars from around the world to visit Berkeley and share their research by applying analytics to business challenges. The Center also hosts a cross-disciplinary research seminar series for faculty and PhD students.  Alternating between Haas faculty and industry data scientists, speakers introduce an algorithm in a particular problem domain and then engage the audience in a discussion of methodology, seeking new applications in different contexts.

Conferences

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Seminars

TBA

Research Computing

Haas Computing Support

Data Management and Preprocessing
Secure Data Hosting
Cloud Provisioning

Campus Computing Support

Exceed
Savio Cluster

When necessary, navigating campus administration to negotiate Non-Disclosure Agreements, Data Use Agreements, Publication, and Intellectual Property