Analytical Crisis and Reputation Management

Crises are a relentless feature of modern life. While natural disasters or terrorist attacks are most likely to capture the imagination of the reading and viewing public, crisis management has a much wider scope. Examples range from product recalls and failures, to environmental crises, break-downs of critical infra-structure to legal and reputational crisis. While routine day-to-day management has been supported by a steadily systematized body of knowledge based on rigorous analysis, crisis and reputation management remains largely anecdotal and ad hoc. This research group is dedicated to developing rigorous modeling frameworks and performing statistical analyses of large data sets. We are also interested in exploring the utility of laboratory experiments for this domain of study.

Currently, we are most interested in applying approaches from the theory of complex networks, non-cooperative game theory, operations research, computational linguistics, and statistical time-series analysis. The group is organized around two core research areas. The first deals with crisis management with an emphasis on operations research and knowledge networks. Group members are interested in understanding why some organizations are better able to deal with the unanticipated events typical of crisis situations than others. The second project focuses on reputational crises typical of businesses. Such crises can emanate from the business practices of company or industry or can be initiated or worsened by media coverage and campaigns by political activists.

Group Coordinator

Daniel Diermeier, Kellogg School of Management (MEDS Department) and NICO (Co-Director)
Email: d-diermeier@kellogg.northwestern.edu
Homepage
Research Interests: the study of political institutions and their consequences for policy choice, structural estimation, behavioral models, and complex social systems.

Group Members - Faculty:

Luis Amaral
Email: amaral@northwestern.edu
Homepage Research Interests: Complex networks in nature; system-level modeling of biological processes

Clark Caywood
Email: c-caywood@northwestern.edu
Homepage
Research Interests: crisis management, communications management, marketing and public relations.

Timothy J. Feddersen
Email: tfed@kellogg.northwestern.edu
Homepage
Research Interests: political economy with a specific interest in democratic institutions and their adaptation to online settings.

Wallace Hopp
Email: hopp@northwestern.edu
Homepage
Research Interests: knowledge management; manufacturing management; product innovation; social networks; stochastic optimization.

Seyed Iravani
Email: s-iravani@northwestern.edu
Homepage
Research Interests: Design and control of manufacturing, and service operations systems. Supply chain management, social networks.

Stefan Kaufman
Email: kaufmann@northwestern.edu
Homepage
Research Interests: Semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, Japanese linguistics.

Victoria H. Medvec
Email: vhm@kellogg.northwestern.edu
Homepage
Research Interests: judgment and decision making, with a particular emphasis on how people feel about the decisions they have made; independent decision making and interdependent decisions within the context of negotiations.

Group Members - Post-Doctoral Fellows:

Saikat Ray-Majumder
Email: saikat@gravity.phys.uwm.edu
Homepage
Research Interests: Application of modern computational and technical tools to understand the underlying aspects of complicated physical problems.

Roderick Schwaab
Email: riswaab@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Bei Yu
Email: beiyu@uiuc.edu
Homepage

Group Members - Doctoral Students

Yao Cheng
Email: yao-cheng@northwestern.edu
Homepage
Research Interests: Models and algorithms for optimization, stochastic programming, and logistics; their applications in transportation, economics, etc.

Jean-Francois Godbout
Email: godbout@kellogg.northwestern.edu
Research Interests: American politics, congress, and elections.

Sam Seaver
Email: samseaver@northwestern.edu
Research Interests: Social networks and collective decision making.

Mathieu Trepanier
Email: m-trepanier@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Group Members - Research Assistants

David Choi
Email: david-choi@northwestern.edu

Cary Frydman
Email: cfrydman@caltech.edu

Peter Park
Email: j-park@northwestern.edu

Craig Parker
Email: c-parker2006@northwestern.edu

Whitney Roland
Email: w-roland@northwestern.edu