O.R. IN THE NEWS

Compiled by Barry List

The INFORMS archive of podcasts continues to offer provocative conversation with leading O.R. practitioners and thinkers. It includes recent interviews about the environment with Eric Bickel of the University of Texas and supply chain management with David Simchi-Levi, editor in chief of Operations Research. Visit www.scienceofbetter.org and www.informs.org to download the latest selections.

Share your news-making research with the INFORMS Communications Department. Contact INFORMS Communications Director Barry List at barry.list@informs.org or 1-800-4INFORMs.

And now, O.R. in the news:

Disney, masters of queueing

“To handle over 30 million annual visitors – many of them during this busiest time of year for the megaresort – Disney World long ago turned the art of crowd control into a science. But the putative ‘Happiest Place on Earth’ has decided it must figure out how to quicken the pace even more. A cultural shift toward impatience – fed by video games and smartphones – is demanding it, park managers say. To stay relevant to the entertain-me-right-this-second generation, Disney must evolve.

“And so it has spent the last year outfitting an underground nerve center to address that most low-tech of problems, the wait.”

New York Times, Dec. 28, 2010

The religion of brand names

“People who refer to the ‘cult’ of Apple may speak more truth than they realize. A new paper empirically tests the idea that brands constitute a substitute religion for our secular age ...
“ ‘Brands: The Opiate of the Nonreligious Masses?’ Ron Shachar, Tülin Erdem, Keisha M. Cutright and Gavan J. Fitzsimons, Marketing Science (forthcoming)”

Wall Street Journal, Dec. 11, 2010

Advertising and R&D recession spending good for certain firms

“New research co-authored by a professor in Penn State’s Smeal College of Business identifies what firm types benefit from increases in advertising and research and development spending during recessions.

“In the forthcoming, ‘Should Firms Spend More on R&D and Advertising During Recessions,’ [former TIMS President] Gary L. Lilien, distinguished research professor of management science, and his co-authors examined more than 10,000 firm-years of data from publicly listed U.S. firms from 1969 to 2008, a period that included seven recessions.

“The authors found that, during these recessions, some firms overspent on R&D and advertising, some underspent, and others spent about at the right level. To determine which types of firms spent effectively, the researchers looked at how changes in R&D and advertising spending affect firms’ profits and stock returns ...”

Penn State Live, Dec. 17. 2010

O.R. game for kids in time for holidays

“ ‘Rush Hour’ – This single-player game involves freeing a red car in a traffic jam by moving other cars and trucks back and forth. It will develop mental stamina and is a great introduction to the field of operations research.”

WKYC-TV Cleveland, Dec. 15, 2010

Misleading ads for mutual funds

“A recent study by Jay Koehler, a law professor at Northwestern University Law School, and Molly Mercer, an accounting professor at DePaul University, examined whether fund performance advertisements mislead investors in this way. The study was published in the July 2009 issue of Management Science. Participants in the study were each shown one version of a performance advertisement for a hypothetical fund company’s two growth funds that had outperformed the S&P 500 by several percentage points a year. The advertisement was modeled closely on an actual advertisement that had been used by a major fund company. After reading the advertisement, participants were asked about their perception of the quality of the funds’ management company and about their willingness to invest in a new growth fund being introduced by the fund company.”

Ahmed Taha, blog, Forbes, Dec. 8, 2010

The warrior mathematician

“With his doctorate from Princeton, Army Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has become the prime example of a special breed of soldier: the warrior-scholar, trained in history and politics as well as how to fight wars.

“Now there’s a variation on the theme: the warrior mathematician, adept in the complex modeling that has become a key part of military planning.

“With roadside bombs the leading killer of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, military commanders have turned increasingly to the use of social network analysis to identify the key players in the groups responsible for the bombs, which the military calls improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.”

National Public Radio, Dec. 3, 2010

Attorney General Holder names Blumstein to new science board

“Attorney General Eric Holder today named 18 experts – scholars and practitioners in criminology, statistics, sociology and practitioners in the criminal and juvenile justice fields – to the newly created Office of Justice Programs (OJP) Science Advisory Board. Laurie O. Robinson, OJP’s Assistant Attorney General, recommended the creation of the advisory board as a means of bridging the divide between research and practice in criminal justice fields. The first meeting of the board will take place early in 2011 ...

“Chair: [former INFORMS President] Alfred Blumstein, Ph.D., The H. John Heinz III College, Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Blumstein is a previous winner of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology and serves as the J. Erik Jonsson Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon Heinz College.”

TTKN News, Nov. 26, 2010

Resist the complainers

“Arnold Barnett is George Eastman Professor of Management Science at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. He has worked on aviation security for the Federal Aviation Administration, the Transportation Security Administration and several airlines and airports …

“ ‘I agree with everyone that the backscatter scanner is very unpleasant. … But then I remember a basic question. What if the 9/11 terrorists had been thwarted at the security checkpoint? We would have been spared not only the worst terrorist attack in American history, but probably two wars that have gone on for nearly a decade.’ ”

New York Times, Nov. 23, 2010

Retain creative employees by putting them on teams

“A Management Science study shows that lone inventors are more likely to be picked off by competitors than members of creative teams.”

EurekAlert!, Nov. 30, 2010

Positive effects of negative publicity

“Marketing and business experts constantly warn about the dangers of ending up on the wrong side of public opinion, particularly in the age of social media, when gripes and mockery seem to explode overnight. Then again, there’s the old cliché that there’s no such thing as bad publicity – better that people are talking about your brand than not, period. Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the Wharton School, was interested in these contradictory views and recently published research in which he and his colleagues Alan T. Sorensen and Scott J. Rasmussen (both of Stanford University) tried to determine which argument wins in the real world. ‘Can negative publicity actually have a positive effect?’ they ask in the article published this month in the journal Marketing Science. ‘And if so, when?’ ”

New York Times Magazine, Oct. 31, 2010

Barry List (barry.list@informs.org) is the director of communications for INFORMS.