HEC Paris Welcomes Five Top Research Professors

This year, five research professors join the ranks of HEC Paris’ faculty, making it a total of 116 HEC research professors in the faculty. The newcomers’ focus of research includes revenue management, consumer behavior, systems problems, human resources management, brand marketing and the French cinema industry.

How do airlines, hotels and stadiums determine their dynamic pricing strategy over time? How do retailers specify which assortment of products to offer to their customers among a universal set of items that could potentially be offered? These questions are at the core of firms’ operational decisions. Sajjad Najafi’s work mainly revolves around developing efficient and effective algorithms to solve such problems.

Sajjad’s work broadly lies at the intersection of operations management with economics, marketing and information systems, while his focus is to develop algorithms that are provably near-optimal and easily implementable in practice. Some of his works include real-time and dynamic pricing, online learning and optimization, assortment optimization, markdown optimization, inventory optimization in omni-channel retail, and supply chain management and coordination.

Sajjad Najafi received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and was a research fellow at Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan prior to joining HEC Paris. He is now Assistant Professor of Informations Systems and Operations Management, as an expert in applying mathematical models in operational research and computer science to business analytics problems. 

Federica De Stefano is an Assistant Professor in the Management and Human Resources Departement. She is also research fellow at Wharton People Analytics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Representative-at-Large of the Strategic Human Capital Interest Group in the Strategic Management Society (SMS). Prior to joining HEC Paris she earned her PhD from Bocconi University and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. 

Federica is specialized in human resource management and HR analytics. She uses data analytics to understand the effects of employee mobility on firm performance and employees’ careers. 

While at Bocconi, she published research on the performance consequences of employing temporary workers. This research, funded by the SHRM Foundation, leads to the conclusion that churning temporary workers can have high financial costs. She also published research on how HR practices can improve worker safety on the job. At Wharton, she conducted research on how employees build their careers inside organizations. Her current projects focus on how organization can manage worker safety and careers to maximize firm performance. 

Federica partners with several organization in Europe and in the US to collect and analyze original HR data on employee turnover and internal mobility. Her research informs HR professionals on how to use data analytics for people management. Learn more on her HEC Paris website.

What happens to your organization when one of your competitors is involved in a major corporate scandal? Julien Jourdan’s research shows that this question should not be taken lightly. His recent distinguished study published in the Academy of Management Journal shows that scandals are transformative events that reshuffle competition among organizations, and dramatically alter the evolutionary path of entire organizational fields.
 
Julien just joined the Management and Human Resources department as an Associate Professor. He is a Research Associate at Imperial College, and held academic positions at Bocconi University and PSL-Paris Dauphine University. He is a founding member of the Society and Organizations (S&O) Institute.
 
Julien’s research focuses on how organizations are evaluated by key stakeholders, and society at large, and how theses evaluations shape organizational conduct, strategy, and performance. His work leverages large-scale archival data as well as social media data and computer linguistics.
 
Prior to entering an academic career, Julien was an executive at Warner Bros. Pictures. He has retained as strong interest in creative industries.

January 8, 2019: Julien Jourdan presenting his research on firm responses to political stigmatization at HEC Paris S&O Institute’s seminar.

Luigi Paciello, Associate Professor at the Economics and Decision Sciences Department, is a macroeconomist with expertise in business cycles and monetary policy.  

Combining micro data with macro models, Luigi investigates the consumer’s behavior changes over product cycles. In other words, he looks at transactions data and many other data on consumption over the business cycle, to better understand whether consumers buy and try new products during recessions in the same way they do during booms. 

This research, funded by an European Research Council grant, is useful both for firms who want to know when to attract new customers and offer incentives to launch new products; and for policymakers who are interested in understanding the transmission of fiscal stimulus to consumption. 

Professor Paciello is also conducting research with HEC Professor and economist Gaetano Gaballo on the interaction of consumer’s shopping experiences and inflation expectations, and its implications for the transmission of monetary policy. 

He is also Associate Editor of the Review of Economic Dynamics and of the Journal of the European Economic Association, and a fellow of the CEPR.
 

Haris Krijestorac received his Ph.D. in Information Systems at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, before landing in France to join HEC Paris’ Information Systems and Operations Management Department as an Assistant Professor.

Professor Krijestorac’s research addresses various issues concerning rich digital media, digital marketing, and digital platforms. His extant work focuses on how digital media spreads online, and what interventions content creators can leverage to promote the spread of their media. To uncover such insights, Professor Krijestorac enjoys developing new empirical approaches drawing from machine learning, statistics, and economics to analyze large, rich data. 

Haris’s latest publication examines how posting videos onto multiple platforms can boost the virality of the content within the individual platforms, rather than cannibalizing attention across these channels. This occurs because introducing the video to a new platform exposes the content to a new audience, which can spread awareness to viewers within other platforms through word of mouth. Learn more on his research in this article on Medium.

Using "Personality-Based Content Engineering", Professor Krijestorac’s ongoing research focuses on obtaining empirical insights to complement human intuition when creating online videos. By analyzing over 16,000 speech-driven YouTube videos (e.g., TED Talks, Big Think), this research demonstrates how creating videos with the right personality can boost viewership significantly. 
Moving forward, Professor Krijestorac strives to find patterns in the chaos of virality and information diffusion, which are sometimes seen as “random” and therefore unmanageable phenomena. He hopes to explore modern day phenomena related to these themes, such as the spread of fake news and the impacts of online censorship. 

Prior to entering academia, Haris enjoyed a career in the technology industry, including a few years at IBM.

Welcome everyone!