Dr. Dorit Efrat Treister (Department of Management) and Dr. Daniel Shapira (Department of Business Administration) of the
Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management GGFBM at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev with his colleague Prof. Jacob Goldenberg (IDC Herzliya) are among the select recipients of the prestigious ISF Grant.
Dr. Treister's study Buffering Waiting-Induced Aggression examines why waiting induces aggression, and how waiting-induced aggression can be reduced by altering the time perception of the people waiting. The research proposes to examine how the construal level of people waiting (their perception of things as abstract or concrete) influences their (1) perceptions of the waiting duration; (2) perceived cause of the wait; and (3) reaction to the wait. The research program suggests an intervention in hospital emergency department waiting rooms that will reduce people's construal levels, which will reduce their perception of the wait duration, and in turn, reduce their aggressive behaviors. The Grant is NIS 375,000 over a three-year period with an additional NIS 29,000 for research equipment.
The research of Dr. Shapira and Prof. Goldenberg – Influencer Marketing in User-Generated Content Networks—Revising the Common Paradigm – plans to develop a general framework in which any type of prediction model for emerging influencers (such as probability models, machine learning toolbox, or expert assessments) can be incorporated in order to rank prospective influencers, taking into account the model's predictive performance in monetary terms. The idea is to build an efficient frontier of seeding program choices where the eventual choice is determined in accordance with the manager's risk aversion. This approach likely will be attractive to small businesses in which budget constraints may prevent it from attracting existing influencers. The grant is NIS 500,000 for a two-year period, including a prize encouraging collaboration between researchers from universities and colleges in Israel.
GGFBM Dean Prof. Oded Lowengart remarked, GGFBM Dean Prof. Oded Lowengart remarked, “this is an especially rewarding occasion, having the importance of Dr. Treister's and Dr. Shapira's original research recognized by ISF's Israeli and international robust judging. This attests once more that the GGFBM is unquestionably unparalleled among Israeli management schools in its high-ranking and prolific research in vital, relevant areas."
The Israel Science Foundation (ISF) is Israel's leading organization that provides public support for basic research in Israel. The ISF is an independent non-profit organization, funded primarily by the Council of Higher Education (CHE). As basic research often becomes a powerful driver of useful applications that contribute to economic growth, to social development and to coping with future challenges, such studies vitally contribute particularly to small countries, like Israel, with limited natural resources. ISF's main mission is to promote such research through a “bottom-up" approach and to nurture entrepreneurship among the scientific research community. All grants awarded are selected on the basis of scientific excellence and vetted through a competitive peer-review process, involving thousands of scientists in Israel and abroad every year. More than 2,000 proposals are received and reviewed, out of which approximately 800 are selected for funding.
