Faculty

Antoinette Schoar has been appointed as co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Corporate Finance program. The NBER is a nonprofit economic research organization, dedicated to conducting research on a wide variety of issues confronting society, as well as disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals. With more than 1,400 scholars who are professors of economics and business at colleges and universities in North America, the NBER is a private and nonpartisan organization supported by research grants from government agencies and private foundations, by investment income, and by individual and corporate contributions. Twenty-seven Nobel Prize winners in Economics and 13 past chairs of the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers have held NBER affiliations.  

Schoar was appointed for her “wide-ranging” research that “spans many issues, including venture capital, entrepreneurship, household finance, and financial intermediation.” She has been a member of the NBER CF program since 2001 and also directs the NBER Working Group on Entrepreneurship.

Schoar is co-leading the NBER Corporate Finance program with Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Their term began in January.

Wanda Orlikowski (Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Management and Professor of Information Technologies and Organization Studies) has received an Honorary Doctorate in Economics and Business Administration from the Copenhagen Business School (CBS). The degree citation recognizes Orlikowski’s “distinguished scholarly contribution to Information Technologies and Organization Studies … the outstanding quality of her research in this discipline, and … the great esteem in which her published works are held.”

This honor was formally bestowed in a virtual ceremony in May 2022, and an interview (“Learning from the digital undertow”) followed her CBS lecture.

Jim Orlin has won the 2020 INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Optimization Society Khachiyan Prize for lifetime achievements in the area of optimization, honoring innovativeness and impact in the field. The award citation notes Orlin’s “deep and extensive contributions to network flows and combinatorial optimization, including novel results for max flows, min cost flows, min cuts, and shortest cycles.”

John Sterman has won the System Dynamics Society Outstanding Service Award. This award recognizes individuals who have made exceptional contributions to the society over an extended period of time, on a volunteer basis, in a way that benefits the development and advancement of system dynamics, helps the society achieve its goals, and sets a standard to inspire others.  Professor Peter Milling, chair of the award committee, noted that awardees are “individuals who besides having exhibited the highest standards of service excellence, dedication, and accomplishment … also have taken initiatives to move the society forward and created positive results for society members and the larger community of people interested in System Dynamics.” He highlighted Sterman’s service in leadership roles on the society’s policy council, as conference program chair, as editor of the System Dynamics Review, and as creator of numerous society initiatives.

Christopher Palmer  and Ben Shields (Managerial Communication) were each awarded the 2022 Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching, established to honor educational innovation and excellence. The Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching Award is the most prestigious teaching prize offered by the school. The award was established in 2006 and is awarded each year to two MIT Sloan faculty members, as well as two electrical engineering and computer science faculty members, for their contributions to educational excellence at MIT. The Jamieson faculty prize is selected by a review committee at MIT.

Christopher Palmer was honored with the Best Paper in Corporate Finance Award in 2019. 
The award, given by the Society of Financial Studies, was for the paper, “The Capitalization of Consumer Financing into Durable Goods Prices.” Palmer's paper co-author's were
Bronson Argyle, Taylor Nadauld, and Ryan Pratt.

Georgia Perakis’s appointment as editor-in-chief for Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (M&SOM), effective January 1, 2021 for a three-year term, has been approved by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Board of Directors. M&SOM, published quarterly, is the premier operations management journal. In addition to the appointment reflecting her outstanding record and reputation in the operations management research community, Perakis has the noteworthy distinction of being the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief at any of the top journals in the field—M&SOM, Management Science, Operations Research, and Production and Operations Management.

Georgia Perakis has won first prize in the 3rd Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) Applied Research Challenge (ARC), a biennial competition recognizing rigorous applied research that is innovative and relevant to practice in its managerial insights, implementable ideas, and impact on practice and research. An academic panel selected finalists to present their work at the 2018 POMS Annual Meeting, and a practitioner judge panel of recognized practice leaders selected the winner. Perakis’s winning paper, co-authored with her MIT Operations Research Center PhD students Lennart Baardman and Divya Singhvi as well as industry collaborator Igor Levin (Johnson & Johnson), is entitled “Leveraging Comparables for New Product Sales Forecasting.” An extended abstract of the paper will be published in Production and Operations Management (POM), and the paper is currently under review for publication at Operations Research.

Georgia Perakis has received two Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) honors. First, she received the 2021 Distinguished Fellow Award from the INFORMS Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Society. This rare distinction recognizes outstanding research and scholarship in operations management.

The citation notes Perakis’ “exceptional research, spanning theory to practice with fundamental contributions to the price of anarchy, dynamic pricing and data analytics,” with “research impact felt not just through the papers she has generated and the many practical innovations that have arisen from those papers, but also through how transformative it has been on the lives of many of the people she works with.” In addition, Perakis received honorable mention (second place) in the INFORMS 2020/21 M&SOM Practice-Based Research Competition, which recognizes outstanding unpublished operations management research papers with a high potential or realized impact on practice.  (Jónas Oddur Jónasson won first place, so MIT Sloan faculty won both prizes).

Perakis’ honored paper describing work with Wayfair, “Ancillary Services in Targeted Advertising: from Prediction to Prescription” (MIT Sloan Working Paper 6239-20) was co-authored with Divya Singhvi (IBM Research AI Residency Program; MIT ORC PhD ‘20), Omar Skali Lami (MIT ORC PhD student; MIT Sloan MBAn ’17), Alison Borenstein (Assurance IQ; MIT Sloan MBAn ’20), Jiong Wei Lua (Singapore National Service; MIT Sloan MBAn ’20), and Ankit Mangal and Stefan Poninghaus (both of Wayfair).

 

Bob Pindyck (Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor in Finance and Economics; Professor of Applied Economics) has received the Galbraith Award from the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA). This award recognizes scholars and leaders who, like its namesake John Kenneth Galbraith, “possess a record of intellectual leadership with service to the nation and the world.”  Pindyck’s award citation in particular notes “recognition of breakthrough discoveries in economics and outstanding contributions to humanity through leadership, research and service.”