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BUSINESS Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne According to a recent analysis of the ISI Essential Science Indicators Web product, the University of Melbourne had the highest percent increase in total citations in the field of Economics & Business. This institution’s current citation record in this field includes 498 highly cited papers cited a total of 1,249 times to date. In this interview, Joshua Gans, Professor of Economics at the Melbourne Business School, talks about this citation achievement, the School’s development, and its goals for the future.
Taking a look at the most heavily cited papers, most of these have been published in the last five years and many of them by academics who came to Melbourne in the last eight years or so. As such, it appears that citations follow people. Indeed, looking at the older records of new arrivals, you would find their recent papers are (not yet anyway) their most cited work. Does this reflect a deliberate plan to enhance the institution’s research effort in this field, or was this an unexpected or serendipitous development? The quick growth rate was unexpected but the overall goal of hiring research-oriented people and encouraging faculty to publish high-quality papers is a strong feature of Melbourne Business School’s current strategy. We have recently overhauled our promotion and performance review criteria to place considerable emphasis on research. Junior faculty are expected to publish well to be moved to continuing contracts while senior faculty are promoted and hired primarily on their ability to generate research that will become highly cited. Of course, we need to judge whether that is going to be the case but it is very encouraging to see our good judgment confirmed in the actual citation data. What factors or circumstances led the university to its work in this field? The
University of Melbourne has two strong centers in Economics &
Business—its postgraduate-oriented Melbourne Business School
and its undergraduate-oriented Faculty of Commerce and Economics.
Each has faculty covering all elements of Economics & Business
and each has a long tradition of scholarship and research within
Australia. What has changed is our international orientation. Most
faculty are educated in the US or Europe and many are non-Australian
citizens. For my own part I place weight on developments in telecommunications
and the internet that has made the task of research dissemination,
journal submissions, awareness of latest results and international
collaborations so much easier. There is a much greater degree of
connectedness with world academic communities and the benefits of
those linkages are really paying off. What is your prediction for the state of our knowledge about this particular field 10 years from now? This area is becoming increasingly quantitative and technical, which is a very positive move in terms of ensuring academic rigor in any analysis of economic or business phenomenon. It is also a positive direction in bringing appropriate research tools to business. To take one example, strategy. In the past, strategic questions such as why some firms perform better than others were analyzed using simple qualitative frameworks and case studies. Today, researchers in those fields are using technical tools of game theory and bargaining theory to provide a means of predicting firm performance. For its part, researchers at Melbourne Business School are working with others at the Ohlin School (Washington University) and the Kellogg School (Northwestern University) to refine these techniques for use in research and in the classroom. The end result is a set of techniques that can give businesses far more confidence in their strategic choices. What research fields or capabilities do you see as critical for the future of your institution? Melbourne Business School is developing important research capabilities in the fields of negotiations and innovation. In negotiations, many of our faculty explore how negotiated agreements are reached (usually from a behavioral perspective) and what those negotiated agreements look like (from an economics and strategy perspective). This has created cross-disciplinary interest but also a set of offerings for our students that tied disparate fields together. In innovation, we jointly cooperate with other faculties in the government-funded Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia. Researchers explore the drivers of innovation and how policy initiatives might stimulate innovation. What are the implications of your institution’s work for the future of this particular field or neighboring fields? This is a hard question. Truth be told, we are still small in number and while individual streams of research have had impact, there is no "Melbourne" school of thought or approach as yet. Maybe this will come but at the moment we are growing and have yet to reach our hoped-for goals. Joshua
Gans
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