ISOM Faculty Research

Jingyuan Yang, an assistant professor of information systems and operations management at Mason's School of Business, is at the forefront of AI research that aims to crack the codes of the physical world. Her results so far point toward innovative solutions for some of the biggest societal, governmental, and business challenges we face. 

Long before COVID was a household word, Dr. Ajay Vinzé, now dean of Mason’s business school, helped pioneer a collaboration with public-health officials in Maricopa County, Arizona, to help predict possible outcomes of various interventions as part of research on pandemic response. Vinzé calls this nearly decade-long partnership “a major part of my research and professional journey.”

Brian Ngac and Nirup Menon, from the information systems and operations management area at the School of Business, were recently awarded a $100,000 grant from the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) located in Arlington, Virginia. This Commonwealth Cyber Initiative Grant was awarded for their proposal to develop a new experiential learning program that will engage students and companies from the Commonwealth.

These days, devising an outsourcing strategy involves a host of challenges and opportunities. Between deglobalization and pandemic-induced supply chain issues, the 20th century practice of moving manufacturing to wherever labor was cheapest is paying smaller and smaller dividends. As the value proposition of cost-cutting diminishes, a different rationale for outsourcing—one based upon maximizing synergies—is gaining traction. Cheryl Druehl, associate professor of operations management and associate dean for faculty at Mason, lays out a model to help managers think about how to outsource in this new world in her recently published paper in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management.

Brad Greenwood, associate professor of information systems and operations management at George Mason University School of Business, and coauthors recently launched a research study that is forthcoming at Information Systems Research that explores what happens to a community’s abortion rates when a workaround for capital constraints becomes available.

Siddharth Bhattacharya, a professor of information systems at Mason, recently co-conducted the first-ever empirical study on competitive poaching, the strategy of bidding on competitors' keywords.

Despite the software industry’s rapid growth and deep pockets, tech companies are still engaged in bare-knuckles battle with cybercriminals. Nirup Menon and Pallab Sanyal's recent research confirms the existence of a willingness-to-pay (WTP) dilemma.

Cheryl Druehl, an operations management professor at Mason as well as the Mason's School of Business associate dean for faculty, has found that unblind contests can foster contestant behaviors that constrain overall innovativeness.

Information Systems and Operations Management Professor Brad Greenwood's forthcoming paper is by far the most extensive analysis of body-worn cameras' impact in a major American city.

Amit Dutta, information systems and operations management professor, and LeRoy Eakin endowed chair at the School of Business, together with international colleagues Biju Paul Abraham, Rahul Roy, and Priya Seetharaman from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta, India, conducted research that identified structural mechanisms underlying these performance problems and suggested constructive managerial interventions to alleviate them.