William Paterson University’s Cotsakos College of Business Faculty Win Bright Idea Awards for Innovative Research

Research papers by Prabakar Kothandaraman and by Raza Mir, Hannah Wong, William Healy, and Sia Nassiripour, all faculty members in the Cotsakos College of Business, won awards given by the New Jersey Policy Research Organization Foundation.

A research paper by Prabakar Kothandaraman and a second research paper co-authored by Raza Mir, Hannah Wong, William Healy, and Sia Nassiripour, all faculty members in the Cotsakos College of Business, each won a Bright Ideas research award from the New Jersey Policy Research Organization Foundation (NJPRO). Their papers were chosen from a field of approximately 150 entries.  The awards were presented at a ceremony at Middlesex County College on October 26 2012.

Kothandaraman received the Bright Idea award for an article co-authored with Raj Agnihotri and Adam Rapp titled, “An emotion-based model of salesperson ethical behaviors.” Their research showed that the capacity of a salesperson to show empathy towards the welfare of others and feel guilt for any questionable sales practices led to improved ethical behavior. In a study of sales people in a services selling situation, the authors find that empathy and guilt guide ethical attitudes. This is one of the first research studies to address the link between emotions, ethical attitudes and ethical behavior in salespeople.

The second paper by Mir, Wong, Healy, and Nassiripour, was titled "Transfer price setting in multinational corporations." The paper argued that in the new global landscape and particularly in the era of global economic uncertainty, the multinational corporation is no longer the vertically integrated unit it used to be, but a much more amorphous network.  The research explored transfer pricing, a process by which goods and services are transferred across different subsidiaries of the multinational corporation, and the ways in which it can be used as a tool of control by the multinational corporation.

The Bright Ideas Awards are sponsored annually by NJPRO (an affiliate of the New Jersey Business & Industry Association), New Jersey Business Magazine, and the Stillman School of Business at Seton Hall University.  NJPRO’s annual business research compilation, Bright Ideas for Business, recognizes the best business research being conducted at state colleges and universities.