Faculty

Mike Whinston has won the 2019 Best Paper Award from the Association of Competition Economics (ACE). This award recognizes “the best paper published on antitrust and consumer protection in the previous year in an economic journal.” Whinston's winning paper, co-authored with Gregory S. Crawford (University of Zurich), Robin S. Lee (Harvard), and Ali Yurukoglu (Stanford), is entitled “The Welfare Effects of Vertical Integration in Multichannel Television Markets” (Econometrica, 86(3), 891-954, May 2018).

Nathan Wilmers has won the Academy of Management, Organizational and Management Theory Division 2020 Best Paper Award. Wilmers was honored for his paper, “Wage Stagnation and Buyer Power: How Buyer-Supplier Relations Affect U.S. Workers’ Wages, 1978-2014.” This award recognizes “the empirical or conceptual paper submitted to the Academy of Management annual meeting that offers a significant contribution to the field of organization and management theory.”

Nathan Wilmers has won the 2021 ASQ Dissertation Award, which recognizes a paper published in Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) in the previous year that was based on a dissertation and best exemplifies the criteria for publication in ASQ, combining significant theoretical advances with extensive data collection and rigorous analysis. Wilmers’ sole-authored winning paper, published in ASQ in 2020, is entitled “Job Turf or Variety:  Task Structure as a Source of Organizational Inequality.”

The award, usually announced in person during the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, (due to the pandemic) was announced recently in an ASQ letter from the Editor, which states that Wilmers’ “novel paper reveals the importance of the job itself—and the task structure within the job—to explain pay inequalities.” The award committee noted that Wilmers identifies “a really intriguing research question, develops novel theory to explain it, and writes with the requisite clarity for those not doing research on labor markets to read, understand, and appreciate.”

The 2013 WFE Award for Excellence will be awarded to Professor Robert C. Merton, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Professor Myron Scholes, Stanford Graduate School of Business and the late Fischer Black, former director of the Quantitative Strategies Group at Goldman Sachs, in recognition of their development of the groundbreaking Black-Scholes Model in 1973. The WFE Award for Excellence is presented annually in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the advancement of regulated exchange markets. The award acknowledges innovation and advancement leading to greater understanding and better usage of the world's capital markets.

Nikos Trichakis won the 2018 INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Optimization Society Young Researchers Prize. This award recognizes one or more outstanding paper(s) in optimization published by, or forthcoming in a refereed journal within the previous four years, authored by a young scholar (having obtained their last degree within the past eight years).  Trichakis’s winning paper, co-authored with Dan A. Iancu (Stanford), is entitled, “Pareto Efficiency in Robust Optimization” (Management Science, Vol. 60, No. 1 (January 2014): 130-147).

Y. Karen Zheng and Retsef Levi have won the 2020 MSOM  Responsible Research in Operations Management award for the paper “The Impact of Unifying Agriculture Wholesale Markets on Prices and Farmers' Profitability,” coauthored with Manoj Rajan and Somya Singhvi. MSOM, which stands for Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, presents this award in order to encourage studies that may “make the world a better place,” through “evidence-based” practices. 

Haoxiang Zhu has won the 2017 Amundi Smith Breeden Prize (First Prize) for the best paper in any area other than corporate finance in The Journal of Finance, which is the official publication of The American Finance Association. Zhu’s winning paper, co-authored with Darrell Duffie (Stanford) and Piotr Dworczak (University of Chicago), is entitled, “Benchmarks in Search Markets” (The Journal of Finance, 72(5):1983-2044). The award was presented at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association in Philadelphia.

Nick Pudar  and Rodrigo Verdi (Accounting) were named co-winners of the MIT Sloan School Teacher of the Year for the 2020-2021 academic year. Each year, students nominate instructors for these teaching awards and the final recipients are chosen based on the quantity and quality of their nominations. Deputy Dean Michael Cusumano thanked the winners of this year's teaching awards for "exemplifying the dedication to pedagogical excellence that is so central to our mission at MIT Sloan."

Tom Kochan has won the Thomas A. Mahoney Mentoring Award from the Human Resources Division of the Academy of Management. This annual award recognizes Kochan’s record of extensive and distinguished work mentoring PhD students (chairing dissertation committees for 24 students and serving on the dissertation committees of 20 others), which demonstrates not only his dedication to his students, but also his long-term impact on the field through them. 

The award citation notes that Kochan’s past doctoral students “highly value his enabling, inclusive and empowering mentoring style and his ability to provide tremendous emotional support to his students.” This award is sponsored by the Center for Executive Succession at the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business.

The award was presented during the Academy of Management Annual Meeting. A video of Kochan’s full acceptance speech, as well as some highlighted quotes from his remarks can be viewed in this article of the Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative at MIT Sloan.

A video of Kochan’s full acceptance speech, as well as some highlighted quotes from his remarks can be viewed in this article of the Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative at MIT Sloan.

 

Professor Thomas Kochan is one of several faculty members at MIT Sloan who have won the 2019 Ideas Worth Teaching Award from The Aspen Institute’s Business & Society Program. The other MIT Sloan winners are Barbara Dyer, Leigh Hafrey, and Christine Kelly. This award recognizes 10 exceptional courses, and honors faculty who are redefining business education, providing learning experiences that equip managers of tomorrow with the context, skills, and decision-making capabilities needed to lead in an increasingly complex business environment and world. The award celebrates innovative teaching that challenges conventional thinking and tests new approaches to divisive issues, rethinking the path forward for business and society and preparing students to make business decisions that create both financial and social value.

The winning course, 15.S02 “Bridging the American Divides: Work Community and Culture —USA Lab,” is MIT Sloan’s U.S.-focused Action Learning Lab, developed by the Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative at MIT Sloan in partnership with the MIT Mens et Manus America Initiative and MIT Sloan Action Learning.