The School of Global Business welcomed students, faculty and staff to a research symposium on April 11. The first in a series of research symposia, the event aimed to enhance and support faculty research, encourage faculty-student research collaboration and provide opportunities for scholars in the community to share their research at Arcadia.

Dr. Raghu Kurthakoti, Assistant Professor of Marketing, presented “Event Study to Assess Brand Placement Effectiveness in Movies,” research about product placements in movies and how those movies have an effect on product success. He studied the focus of placement variables, such as duration of product placement time and audio versus visual placements, in assessing the worth of placements in movies. Kurthakoti shared that product placements are more likely to be successful in crime movies, for example, where viewers are in suspense and therefore extremely attentive, while placements in fantasy movies may be unsuccessful since the sight or mention of a product will likely bring viewers back to reality.

Siwei Gao, a Ph.D. candidate in the field of enterprise risk management at Temple University Fox School of Business, presented “A Risk-Based Risk-Finance Paradigm,” research based on a paper she co-authored with Dr. Zaneta Chapman, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, and Dr. Michael Powers, Professor of Risk Management and Insurance at Temple University, that has been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Financial Transformation.

Gao discussed the proposal of a new risk-finance paradigm that she believes would better define the criteria for diversification, a risk-management technique that mixes a wide variety of investments within a portfolio.

According to Gao, in order for a portfolio to benefit from diversification, the following conditions must apply: the frequency must be large enough to diversify to underlying risk, the individual risk should have less than perfect positive correlations, the portfolio should have light-tailed severities, where the tail of a distribution decays at least exponentially fast, and the portfolio should have a non-erratic frequency distribution.