Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business is expanding its operations management program due to increased demand from students and industry. The school has also recruited Tolga Tezcan, a leading scholar in business analytics and operations management.

Successful business operations strategies are the foundation for growing and distributing a company’s products, services and profits in a post-pandemic world, school leaders said.

Joining Rice Business from the London School of Business, Tezcan has conducted extensive research on designing and managing service systems in customer service and healthcare systems. He has been published in Management Science, Operations Research, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, Annals of Applied Probability and other academic journals.

Tezcan and Amit Pazgal, the Friedkin Chair in Management and professor of marketing and operations management at Rice Business, will be the first two faculty in the new operations group, with three additional faculty expected to be hired in the next year to further expand the areas of focus.

Pazgal is the academic director of operations management, a leadership role in operations management curriculum design across all Rice Business programs. His research has been published in leading marketing, management, operations and economic journals.

“Our operational management faculty aim to deliver a deeper understanding of a company’s competencies rather than a technical engineering view of operations,” said Jeff Fleming, deputy dean of academic affairs at JGSB. “Tolga and Amit’s work will elevate Rice Business’ current offerings and pave the way for innovation in an expanding industry.”

Owl Have You Know

Season 1, Episode 16

Pranika Sinha ’04, managing director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Organizational Development at Greystone, joins host David Droogleever. She talks about what stops her from hitting the snooze button in the morning, how a sense of belonging factors into diversity and inclusion, and what unconscious bias is and how to recognize it.

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Increased internet-access spending by Texas public schools improved academic performance but also led to more disciplinary problems among students, a study of 9,000 schools conducted by a research team from Rice, Texas A&M University and the University of Notre Dame shows.

Whether students benefit from increased internet access in public schools has been an open question, according to the researchers. For example, some parents and policy advocates contend it increases children’s access to obscene or harmful content and disciplinary problems. Others believe it promotes personalized learning and higher student engagement.

To address these policy questions, the research team created a multiyear dataset (2000-14) of 1,243 school districts representing more than 9,000 Texas public schools. The team measured internet-access spending, 11 academic performance indicators and 47 types of school disciplinary problems. It used econometric techniques to develop causal estimates linking internet-access spending to academic performance and disciplinary problems. Using student earning, the researchers calculated the economic impact of increased annual internet spending.

To date, this is the largest and most comprehensive study linking school internet-access spending to academic and disciplinary outcomes, the researchers said.

The team found that increased school district internet spending is associated with not only improved graduation rates, but also higher numbers of students meeting SAT/ACT criterion and completing advanced courses. It also led to an improvement in commended performance in math, reading, writing and social studies. Interestingly, the researchers noted these improvements were stronger for students who lived in counties with greater internet access (as measured by the number of broadband providers).

On the flip side, increased school district internet spending also led to higher rates of disciplinary problems at schools, they said.

The team also calculated how much economic benefit a school district’s internet access will bring students during their lifetimes. It found that a $600,000 increase in annual internet-access spending produces a financial gain of approximately $820,000 to $1.8 million per school district, together with losses from disciplinary problems totaling $25,800 to $53,440.

In other words, investments in internet access are well worth the costs.

“We are proud that Texas public schools can serve as a live learning case for understanding education policy,” said study co-author Vikas Mittal, a professor of marketing at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business. “Investments in internet access provide clear and meaningful academic benefits. Yet, schools need to implement policies to address increased disciplinary issues such as cyberbullying.

“K-12 education has transformed into virtual learning due to COVID-19,” he continued. “Our research conclusions apply to a setting where physical learning is supplemented by internet access.”

However, Mittal cautioned that these benefits cannot be expected to hold if physical learning is completely supplanted by internet-based learning.

The paper, “Investigating the Academic Performance and Disciplinary Consequences of School District Internet Access Spending,” which appeared in the February issue of the Journal of Marketing Research, was co-authored by professors Shrihari Sridhar of Texas A&M and Yixing Chen of Notre Dame. It can be downloaded at https://doi.org/10.1177/0022243720964130.

Constance Porter, assistant clinical professor of marketing at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, has joined the leadership team of the school’s newly expanded Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).

As the senior associate dean of the DEI office, Porter is part of the Rice Business Task Force on Racial Equity and Social Justice, which is charged with researching, evaluating and recommending actions to promote diversity and inclusion at the school.

“I am honored to serve in this new role at a momentous time in the history of our school. The task force established by Dean (Peter) Rodriguez paved the way for the expansion of our DEI office,” Porter said. “I look forward to engaging and partnering with students, staff, faculty, alumni and stakeholders in our greater community as we continue the work to be done to amplify DEI at Rice Business.”

Porter joined Rice in fall 2011 and teaches marketing, marketing research and customer relationship management, consistently earning outstanding reviews from her students. She also leads an experiential learning course, Marketing Lab, as well as two integrative executive seminars.

“I look forward to working with Connie as she brings her deep insight and thoughtful perspective to this new position as we commit to advancing the school’s goals of diversity, equity and inclusion with students, staff, faculty, alumni and beyond,” Rodriguez wrote in an announcement to the campus.

Porter earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (with dual concentration in finance and public policy), an MBA from the University of Michigan (with dual emphasis in operations and corporate strategy) and a Ph.D. in marketing from Georgia State University. Prior to her career in academia, she spent several years as a management consultant with multiple firms.

Owl Have You Know

Season 1, Episode 15

Kyle Judah, Executive Director of the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie) at Rice University, and Sophie Randolph ’22, join host Christine Dobbyn. They discuss programming at Lilie during the pandemic, Houston's startup ecosystem and resources for alumni entrepreneurs.

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Based on research by Alessandro Piazza

• Professional musicians often come to question the value of playing second fiddle to anyone – even an A-lister.
• Research by Rice Business professor Alessandro Piazza confirms the musicians are right to wonder: bands that consistently open up for groups with higher status earn less money – and are more likely to break up than those that don’t.
• These findings fly in the face of much existing business research, which concludes that affiliating with high-status colleagues often gives newcomers a professional boost.

In a timeless scene from the mockumentary "This Is Spinal Tap," an 80s metal band swaggers in for a performance only to find they’re billed second to a puppet show. Though the film is farce, real musicians often come to question the value of playing second fiddle to anyone – even an A-lister.

Now research by Rice Business professor Alessandro Piazza and colleagues Damon J. Phillips and Fabrizio Castellucci confirms those musicians are right to wonder. In fact, they discovered, the only thing worse than performing after a puppet may be opening up for an idol. Bands that consistently open up for groups with higher status, the researchers found, earn less money – and are more likely to break up than those that don’t.

“Three cheers,” The Economist wrote about the researchers, for confirming “what many people in the music industry have long suspected – that being the opening band for a big star is not a first class ticket to success.”

While the findings may be intuitive for seasoned musicians, they fly in the face of existing business research. Most research about affiliations concludes that hobnobbing with high-status colleagues gives lowly newcomers a boost. Because affiliations give access to resources and information, the reasoning goes, it’s linked with individual- and firm-level successes such as landing jobs and starting new ventures. 

Both individuals and organizations, one influential study notes, benefit from the “sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships.”

That’s largely because in many fields up and comers must fight to be taken seriously – or noticed at all. This problem is often called “the liability of newness:” In order to succeed, industry newcomers first need to be considered legitimate by the audience they’re trying to woo. 
Showing off shiny friends is a classic solution. In many fields, after all, linking oneself with a high-status partner is simply good branding: a shorthand signal to audiences or consumers that if a top dog has given their approval, the newcomer must surely have some of the same excellent qualities.  

Unfortunately, this doesn’t always hold true – especially in the creative world, Piazza’s team found. In the frantic world of haute cuisine, for example, a faithful apprentice to a celebrity chef may actually suffer for all those burns and cuts in the star’s hectic kitchen. Unless they can create meals that are not just spectacular, but show off a distinct style, consumers may sneer at the newcomer as a knockoff of the true master. 

So what determines if reflected glory makes newcomers shine or merely eclipses them? It has to do with how much attention there is to go around, Piazza said. While partnering with a star helps in some fields, it can be a liability when success depends on interaction between audience and performer. That’s because our attention – that is, ability to mentally focus on a specific subject – is finite. Consumers can only take in so much at a time. 

Marketers are acutely aware of this scarcity. Much of their time, after all, is spent battling for consumer attention in an environment swamped by competitors. The more rivals for advertising attention, research shows, the less a consumer will recall of any one ad. In the world of finance, publicly traded companies also live and die on attention, in the form of analyst coverage of their stocks and angel investors’ largesse.

Musicians who perform live, Piazza said, are battling for attention in a field that’s gotten progressively more fierce, due to lower album sales and shorter career spans. Performing in the orbit of a major distraction such as Taylor Swift or Beyoncé, however, only reduces the attention the opening act gets, the researchers found. Though performances are just a few hours, the attention drain can do lasting harm both to revenue and career longevity.

To reach these conclusions, the researchers analyzed data about the live performances and careers of 1,385 new bands between 2000 and 2005. Supplementing this with biographical and genre information about each band along with musician interviews, the team then analyzed the concert revenue and artistic survival of each band. 

They discovered that in live music, high status affiliation onstage clearly diluted audience attention to newcomers – translating into less revenue and lower chance of survival.

In part, the revenue loss also stems from the fact that even in big stadium performances, performing with superstars rarely enriches the underdogs. According to a 2014 Billboard magazine report, headliners in the U.S. typically absorb 30 to 40 percent of gross event revenues; intermediate acts garner 20 to 30 percent and opening acts for established artists bring as little as $15,000.

The findings were surprising, and perhaps dispiriting, enough for the researchers to carefully spell out their scope. Affiliation’s positive effects, they said, are most often found in environments of collaboration and learning – for example academia. In these settings, a superstar not only can bestow a halo effect, but can share actual resources or information. In the music world, however, the fleeting nature of a shared performance makes it hard for a superstar band to share much with a lower-ranked band except, perhaps, some euphoric memories.

Interestingly, in many businesses it’s easy for observers to quickly assume affiliations between disparate groups. In the investment banking industry, for instance, research shows that audiences infer status hierarchies among banks merely by reading “tombstone advertisements,” the announcements of security offerings in major business publications. Readers assume underwriting banks to be affiliated with each other when they’re listed as being part of the same syndicate – even if the banks actually have little to do with each other beyond pooling capital in the same deal. 

In the music business, star affiliations mainly help an opening act a) if the audience understands there’s an affiliation and b) if they believe the link is intentional. But that’s not always the case because promoters and others in Big Music often line up opening bands. When possible, though, A-listers can do their opening acts a solid by making it clear that they’ve chosen them to perform there.

Otherwise, Piazza and his colleagues concluded, the light shed by musical supernovas typically gets lost in the darkened stadium. For the long term, business-minded bands may do best by working with peers in more modest venues – places where the attention they do get, like in Spinal Tap’s classic metric, goes all the way up to 11.

Alessandro Piazza is an assistant professor of strategic management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Piazza, A., Phillips, D. J. and Castellucci, F. High-Status Affiliations and the Success of Entrants: New
Bands and the Market for Live Music Performances, 2000–2012. In-press at Organization Science

Owl Have You Know

Season 1, Episode 14

Joan Dunlap ’02 joins host David Droogleever to discuss her experience as an engineer, the role of team chemistry in entrepreneurship and how problem solving plays a role in career satisfaction.

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