Imperfect information in complex analytics

The health care industry depends a great deal on decision-making analytics for planning, management, clinical-decision making, and improving service. In any complex decision-making process that has to consider several factors, there can be flaws in the processing of information. This poses a challenge for healthcare professionals who need to interpret the analysis and make important decisions while having to consider all possible outcomes. These professionals can benefit from robust decision-making tools, which can offer an invaluable solution to various decision-making challenges in the health care sector.

What’s the research about?

Associate Professor Sarah Ben Amor from the Telfer School of Management extends her previous analytics work to develop robust decision-making tools that can benefit the health care industry. She hopes to produce a cloud-based software, a robust-decision making tool that can support health professionals in analyzing complex information. She has received a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Who will gain from this research?

The potential benefit from an online tool for robust-decision making is limitless. Ben Amor’s work could improve a range of real-world decision problems in healthcare, including the ranking of hospitals, sorting drugs for reimbursement applications, and clustering therapy pathways for oncology treatments. Moreover, a cloud-based tool can benefit many researchers and professionals, beyond the health care industry, like risk assessment, innovation, and sustainable development.

The Telfer School of Management is committed to developing cutting-edge research in a variety of topics in management. As our faculty continues fostering research excellence, the Telfer School community and partners also benefit from valuable insights with impact. Over the next days, we will give an overview of the three research projects that received the prestigious NSERC Discovery grant in 2019.

Learn more about the NSERC Discovery Program.

The Telfer School of Management assembled on May 9^th for the annual end-of-year PhD celebration, to recognize the hard work and accomplishments of all our doctoral students over the year. Since the launch of the PhD program in 2016, three cohorts of outstanding doctoral students have joined the Telfer School.

“The inauguration of the PhD program was a significant milestone for the Telfer School, as it welcomes the best and brightest of students, and raises the bar for the school to aspire to be a top business school in Canada,” said Dean François Julien.

The event also celebrated the recipients of the 2018-2019 Telfer PhD Awards competition. Here are our award winning students:

John Duncan and Deb Cross Award

The John Duncan and Deb Cross Award recognizes the quality and impact of a student’s publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The 2018-2019 recipient was Alexander Chung for his article entitled “Where the shoe pinches: Realizing dominant problems as an organizational social media business profile evolves” and published in the International Journal of Information Management.

PhD Engagement Award

The PhD Engagement Award recognizes an exemplary doctoral student who demonstrates continued initiative in applying for funding and scholarships, leadership and engagement in the PhD Program, academic success, and persistent research progress. The 2018-2019 recipient was Yanhong Li.

Other Achievements

Two of our PhD students were also recipients of the provincial Ontario Graduate Scholarship. Well done Alexander Chung and Nicolas Legendre!

Congratulations to all our PhD students for another excellent academic year!

“The doctoral program is crucial for the Telfer School. These young and bright minds challenge our professors with intellectual discussions and innovative ideas,” concluded Wojtek Michalowski, Vice-Dean (Research).

Learn more about our graduate student awards.

People living with disabilities not only face barriers in daily life, they also face adversity on the labor market. Why do they not experience the same access to work opportunities as their counterparts without disabilities do? The most likely culprit is misinformation: employers still believe in unfounded myths about how people living with disabilities are likely to perform in the workplace.

In a new article entitled "The Participation of People with Disabilities in the Workplace Across the Employment Cycle: Employer Concerns and Research Evidence," Professor Silvia Bonaccio from the Telfer School of Management looked at the empirical evidence speaking to the employment of people living with disabilities and identified common concerns shared by employers. When examining the validity of those concerns, Professor Bonaccio and her co-authors found out that these concerns were either unfounded or blown out of proportions.

“Our research suggests that these barriers are often the result of lack of information by managers,” explains Professor Bonaccio. “Many employers harbor ill-founded views about the work-related abilities of people living with disabilities. Managers consistently report that they find it difficult to attract and hire qualified employees living with disabilities, but data shows the considerable potential of this segment of the workforce is underused."

Read the full press release.

Research from the Canadian Disability Participation Project was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Update on the subject

June 2021

This knowledge translation piece was written to highlight a paper that was in press, now published, at the Journal of Business and Psychology (JBP). Published in Open Access, the paper has now been downloaded more than 75,000 times, making it the most downloaded paper in the Journal's history. The level of interest on a global scale shows the need for managers and HR personnel to have evidence-based information to help them be more inclusive employers. This paper has been helpful to job seekers and employees with a lived experience of disabilities as well their allies (e.g., job developers, career coaches). 

The impact of social commerce and online shopping

Today’s society depends heavily on online commerce, mostly for convenience. However, consumers lose the advantages of in-person shopping, like receiving advice from a sales representative and the possibility of trying on items.

Social commerce is a subcategory of electronic commerce that attempts to personalize the online shopping experience. It combines social media and social interaction to influence online purchases. Companies engage customers by providing access to exchange-related activities like collaborative shopping tools and consumer reviews to help consumer decisions. Social commerce clearly influences online consumer behavior and activity, but researchers know very little about the platform design requirements and application features that will make them more user-friendly.

Designing the next generation of social commerce platforms

Professor Morad Benyoucef from the Telfer School of Management proposes an innovative approach to improve social commerce. He has received a Discovery grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. In his proposal, he stresses the importance of considering the different features of social commerce and the stages of the consumer decision-making process to achieve a plug-and-play design quality of social commerce platforms and applications. Applying such design to social commerce platforms and applications will meet the dynamic requirements of online consumers. His comprehensive framework provides a solid basis for future social commerce research, with novel assessment tools to test platform and application design.

Improving the online shopping experience for all

In practice, social commerce should enhance the consumer online shopping experience. Benyoucef’s work will guide designers to improve the usability of websites and applications and allow Canadian e-commerce companies to understand their customers and their needs. Social commerce offers companies a great opportunity to transform their electronic commerce websites into interactive communities that help promote their brands, products and services