Faculty

The MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative’s Aggregate Confusion Project won the Institutional Investor’s 2022 Allocators’ Choice Award for Partnership of the Year.

The MIT award winners are:
Jason Jay (team leader; director of the Sustainability Initiative; senior lecturer);
Florian Berg (project co-founder; research scientist);
Julian Koelbel (project co-founder; research affiliate);
and Roberto Rigobon (Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management and Professor of Applied Economics).

In addition to the MIT team, the initiative includes the Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management Board, Qontigo, MFS Investment Management, AQR Capital Management, and Asset Management One. The project works to reduce the level of noise in ESG (environmental, social, and governance) measurement by improving data available to managers and allocators.  More information about the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative’s Aggregate Confusion Project is online here.

Maryam Farboodi has received the Outstanding Paper Award 2022 from the Swiss Finance Institute. This honor recognizes an unpublished research paper expected to make an outstanding contribution to the field of finance.

Farboodi’s winning paper, co-authored with Dhruv Singal (Columbia University), Laura Veldkamp (Columbia University),  and Venky Venkateswaran (New York University), is entitled “Valuing Financial Data.” It focuses on how an investor or financial firm should value financial data in today’s modern economy.

Vivek Farias (Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor and Professor of Operations Management), along with several students in his research group and a team at Anheuser-Busch InBev, has received the 2022 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). This award recognizes the successful use of operations research, analytics, and innovative mathematics in practice.

Farias' winning paper, “Generalized Synthetic Control for TestOps at ABI: Models, Algorithms, and Infrastructure,” was co-authored with MIT students Tianyi Peng, Luis Costa, Patricio Foncea, and Jingyuan (Donna) Gan; and from Anheuser-Busch InBev, Ivo Rosa Montenegro, Ayush Garg, Dusan Popovic, and Kumarjit Pathak.

More information about their work that “results in millions in monthly revenue” with its “profound applications of analytics and O.R. to understand experimental power relative to alternatives using physical retail experiments and the platform, ‘TestOps’,” is in the prize announcement.

The award was presented in October during the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, IN. 

Haihao Lu was awarded the Michael H. Rothkopf Junior Researcher Paper Prize (first place) while he was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

This prize recognizes the best paper by a young researcher in the area of Auctions and Market Design, with a particular focus on the use of Operations Research and/or Management Science techniques in the design or analysis of markets. The winning paper is entitled “The Best of Many Worlds: Dual Mirror Descent for Online Allocation Problems”, jointly with Santiago Balseiro (Columbia University) and Vahab Mirrokni (Google Research).

Jackson Lu (Sloan School Career Development Associate Professor of Work and Organization Studies) has received four honors (with three of them for three different papers).

First, Lu received the 2022 Early Career Award from the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM). This award honors scholars in the first five years post-PhD, “who have shown exceptional promise for making significant contributions to the study of conflict and negotiation.”  The award announcement in April includes: “Jackson Lu has been prolific, with influential and important work that touches on key areas of conflict in society … Jackson published over 25 papers, in journals such as Nature Human Behavior, PNAS, JAP, OBHDP, JPSP, and Psych Science.”

Lu also won the 2022 IACM Outstanding Conference Paper Award for his solo-authored paper entitled “Asians Don’t Ask? Relational Concerns, Negotiation Propensity, and Starting Salaries,” published earlier this year in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Third, Lu won the 2022 Award for Best Paper in Graduate Management Education from the Management Education and Development Division of the Academy of Management for his paper entitled “The Surprising Underperformance of East Asians in US Law and Business Schools: The Liability of Low Assertiveness and the Ameliorative Potential of Online Classrooms.” The winning paper was co-authored with Richard E. Nisbett (University of Michigan) and Michael W. Morris (Columbia University) and published earlier this year in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

Finally, Lu received the 2022 Academy of Management Annals Best Article Award (chosen from those published in 2021) for another paper, entitled “Multicultural Experiences: A Systematic Review and New Theoretical Framework” and co-authored with William W. Maddux (UNC-Chapel Hill), Salvatore J. Affinito (Harvard Business School), and Adam D. Galinsky (Columbia University).

Don Lessard (Epoch Foundation Professor of International Management, Emeritus; Professor of Global Economics and Management, Emeritus; and Professor of Engineering Systems, Emeritus) has received the 2022 Academy of Management IM (International Management) Division Hyundai Motor Eminent Scholar Award. The IM Division has a focus on content pertaining to the theory, research, and practice of management with a cross-border or cross-cultural dimension. This award recognizes Lessard’s lifetime achievement in international management scholarship. 

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.” 

Jim Utterback and the late Ed Roberts have both been elected Fellows of the Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), which provides an annual international platform for academics, industry professionals, and government representatives to exchange new knowledge in the management of engineering and technology. Roberts and Utterback received two of the 11 PICMET Fellow Awards given this year to recognize outstanding contributions to the development and growth of this discipline.  

The many nominees were evaluated in technology management research, education, and other aspects of technology management leadership by a global panel of judges assessing worldwide impact on technology management and innovation. Roberts, who died in 2024, and Utterback, were both cited as “influential scholars throughout the world” in these fields. Roberts had been a faculty member since 1961, and Utterback has been a faculty member since 1979.

 

Juanjuan Zhang has received the 2021 John D. C. Little Award. Named after MIT Institute Professor Emeritus John D.C. Little, this award is given annually to the best marketing paper published in Marketing Science, Management Science, or another INFORMS (The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) journal. 

Zhang’s winning paper, coauthored with Xinyu Cao (NYU Stern, MIT Sloan PhD ‘18), is entitled “Preference Learning and Demand Forecast” (Marketing Science, 2021). 

The same paper was also a Finalist for the Frank M. Bass Dissertation Paper Award for the best marketing paper published in an INFORMS-sponsored journal that was derived from a Ph.D. thesis (Zhang was Xinyu Cao’s thesis supervisor and paper coauthor).

In addition, Zhang’s paper entitled “Rational Herding in Microloan Markets” (Management Science, 2012), coauthored with Peng Liu (Cornell), was a finalist for the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS) Long Term Impact Award, given annually to a marketing paper published in Marketing Science, Management Science, or another INFORMS journal in recognition of its significant long-run impact on the field of Marketing.

Deborah Ancona won the 2022 Samuel M. Seegal Faculty Prize. 
The Seegal Prize is shared with the MIT School of Engineering and is awarded every other year to a professor “who inspires students in pursuing and achieving excellence.” The award was established by Paula Seegal-Thompson for her father, a member of the class of 1922. The Seegal faculty prize is selected by a review committee at MIT.