ACCOUNTANCY

William Messier, professor, was published twice recently. One article focused on experimental assessment of recent professional developments in non-statistical audit sampling guidance published in Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory. In addition, Messier contributed to "Error detection by industry specialized teams during sequential audit review" upcoming in the Journal of Accounting Research. He also presented a paper at the 2002 Auditing Midyear section meetings in Orlando, Fla.

COMPUTER INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Andrew Snow, assistant professor, spoke at a joint conference at Columbia Business School and the London School of Economics on how communications and information systems in the financial industry are affected by catastrophic events such as the attacks of September 11. Snow described how 9/11 was a catalytic event that will have an important effect on telecommunications systems in the future. Snow believes we will move from our current configuration of choice, a centralized architecture where off-site locations provide 100 percent redundancy, to more distributed architectures that can support the distribution of people to decrease the risk of outages. The conference was held October 17, 2001.

Detmar Straub, professor, had three works listed among the top 43 "Exemplary Works in IS Research" in a study conducted by Michael Whitman in ISWorld, 2001. Straub was also honored this year by being asked to deliver the keynote speech at the annual BITWorld Conference, held in 2001 in Cairo, and the keynote speech at the annual European Conference on Information Systems, held in 2002 in Gdansk, Poland. Few non-Europeans have ever been asked to deliver the latter address.

Ephraim R. McLean, professor and Smith Eminent Scholar, won the "Best Paper Award" for "Information System Success ­ Revisited," co-authored with William DeLone of American University, at the Hawaiian International Conference on Systems Science in January. McLean also presented a two-week course in January on "Strategic Issues in Information and Communications Technology (ICT)" to the full-time second-year MBA students at the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He later offered a similar course to the part-time MBA/MBI (master in business informatics) students at the RSM.

FINANCE

Gerald Gay, chair, and Peter Dadalt, assistant professor, published their study "Asymmetric Information and Corporate Derivatives Use" in the March 2002 issue of the Journal of Futures Markets.

A research project on hedge funds by Vikas Agarwal, assistant professor, has been awarded a prestigious research grant of $12,000 by the BSI Gamma Foundation. The study characterizes the systematic risks of hedge funds using buy-and-hold and option-based strategies. This project is co-authored with Dr. Narayan Naik of the London Business School. The BSI GAMMA (Global Asset Management Methods and Applications) Foundation is a private Swiss foundation established by BSI SA to mark the bank's 125th anniversary. Its board is composed of renowned academics, including Rene Stulz (Ohio State University) and Jean Dermine (INSEAD, France).

Jim Owers, professor, has been researching the causes and effects of earnings restatements during the 1990s, a topic which has become of considerable general interest in the context of the recent Enron scenario. The resulting research paper, "The Informational Content of Different Categories of Earnings Restatements," is forthcoming in the International Business & Economics Research Journal. It is co-authored with Chen-Miao Lin (PhD student in the RCB's Finance Department) and Ronald Rogers (University of South Carolina).

MARKETING

An article co-authored by Danny Bellenger, chair, was named one of the 10 most influential in sales management history, according to the Summer 2001 Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management. The article "Salesforce Socialization" was published in the Journal of Marketing in 1986.

The 8th Joint Conference of Robinson's Center for Business and Industrial Marketing (CBIM) and the Institute for the Study of Business Markets at Pennsylvania State University was held in February at the Renaissance Atlanta Hotel Downtown. In addition, the fall quarterly meeting of the CBIM was held October 26 at the Commerce Club. The speaker was Dan Singer, vice president of Averitt Logistics. Georgia-Pacific and Omnexus have joined the CBIM.

Ken Bernhardt, Regents' Professor and Taylor E. Little Jr. Professor, has been elected to the board of directors of Junior Achievement of Georgia and has been re-elected to the executive committee of the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau. He also served as the Panthers basketball team's first honorary faculty coach at the November 17 home opener against Valdosta State.

Naveen Donthu, Katherine S. Bernhardt Research Professor, was elected to the board of the INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences) College of Marketing. He will be the vice president for meetings and help organize the annual Marketing Science Conference in the spring as well as organize the marketing track at the fall INFORMS meetings. Donthu is also chairing the Relationship Management track at the 2002 Winter Educators Conference of the American Marketing Association. He has been appointed associate book review editor for the Journal of Marketing Research as well.

Wesley Johnston, CBIM RoundTable Professor of Marketing, presented a paper on "E-Business for Traditional Business-to-Business Companies" at the 17th Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Conference in Oslo, Norway in early September. The paper was co-authored with Mohamed Eid, Tamer Mosli and Ahmed al-Bakary (three alumni of the Cairo Joint MBA program).

Bronis Verhage, professor, published the fifth (Dutch language) edition of Grondslagen van de Marketing, the leading marketing text in the Netherlands. Verhage also wrote a marketing case book, published last month as a supplement to the text.

Don Lloyd Cook, assistant professor, contributed an article, "Lessons and Life in eCommerce: Some Thoughts About Auctioneers in the Online World," to the Winter 2002 Auction Marketing Institute newsletter.

David Nasser, instructor, was a guest panelist at the annual meeting of the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America) at the Atlanta Downtown Marriott on October 29. The topic of the panel was evolving business models for independent practitioners.

Atul Parvatiyar joined the marketing faculty as visiting associate professor and Robinson Research Fellow. He is managing director of the Global Account Management Project in the Center for Business and Industrial Marketing (CBIM).

George Moschis, Alfred Bernhardt Research Professor, wrote an article, "Life Events and Changes in Patronage Preferences," that was published in the Journal of Business Research.