Assistant Professor Kiera Hudson studies schadenfreude and the psychological and biological roots of power hierarchies.
Assistant Professor Sa-kiera “Kiera” Hudson has received a 2024 National Science Foundation CAREER award, the NSF’s most prestigious awards program in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education.
Hudson said she is thrilled to receive the award and will use the $850,000 grant to fund new research on schadenfreude, which is pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune.
Empathy is often hailed as the emotion to target in intergroup conflicts, as it predicts consequential behaviors that can help reduce inequality, said Hudson, who earned a PhD in the (social) psychology department at Harvard University in 2020. “In many social conflicts, people struggle to feel empathy for those not part of their social groups,” she said. But in the study of empathy, behavioral scientists have perhaps overlooked schadenfreude’s relevance to conflict among groups of people, which is why it’s crucial to learn more, she said.
“If we better understand what drives intergroup schadenfreude—and the consequences—we can better understand how to design interventions to decrease the harm it causes, particularly to marginalized groups,” she said.
How schadenfreude harms
In her new research project, Hudson, a member of the Management of Organizations Group (MORS) at Haas, will investigate how schadenfreude contributes to harm, attempting to understand the cognitive mechanisms that allow it to flourish. The project will put a strong emphasis on research and education, including training minoritized scientists, collaborating with organizations focused on equity and social justice, and disseminating research to interdisciplinary communities.
Hudson said her goal is to bring a broader understanding of people’s more “nasty, harmful behaviors,” at a particular time in history.
“Across the world, there has been an increase in rigid beliefs of who belongs to ‘us’ versus ‘them’ fueled by perceived threat and competition, leading to intensified intergroup animosity,” she said. “These are the exact conditions under which schadenfreude thrives, suggesting that we are not only in an empathy deficit as a nation, as proposed by Obama in 2006, but perhaps also in a schadenfreude surplus.”
More broadly, Hudson’s research at Haas is focused on two main areas: the psychological and biological roots of power hierarchies, and how these hierarchies intersect to influence experiences and perceptions.
Professor Nancy Wallace, a national expert on real estate finance and strategy, mortgage-related securities, and pricing models, has received the 2024 John M. Quigley Award—the highest honor of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association (AREUEA).
Prof. Nancy Wallace
The award, named for the late Berkeley Haas professor emeritus and leading urban economics scholar John M. Quigley, recognizes scholars who best represent the ways in which Quigley advanced the academic fields of real estate, urban economics, public finance, and regional science.
“The medalist must have produced a record of scholarship that opens up new avenues of inquiry, have a demonstrated record of mentorship of young scholars, have supported institutional advances within these fields, or have been particularly effective at dissemination of these fields to public and professional practices,” said Stijn Van Neiuwerburgh, outgoing president of AREUEA. “Nancy embodies all of the ideal traits of the Quigley Medal winner.”
Wallace has been at Berkeley Haas since 1986, where she is the Lisle and Roslyn Payne Chair in Real Estate Capital Markets, chair of the Haas Real Estate Group, and co-chair of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, and directs the Real Estate and Financial Markets Laboratory.She is a national leader in her field, having served as an advisor to the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury on financial crises and reform. Her research focus includes residential house price dynamics, mortgage contract design and pricing, securitization and asset backed security pricing and hedging, lease contract design and pricing, methods to underwrite energy efficiency in commercial mortgages, and valuation models for executive stock options.
On campus, Wallace received the 2021 Williamson Award, the top faculty honor at Berkeley Haas, and earned the Berkeley Faculty Service Award in 2019 for work helping the campus navigate complex financial and real estate issues.
Wallace will receive the award and discuss her scholarship as the keynote speaker for the 2024 Midyear National AREUEA conference in May.
Dean Ann Harrison was named 2023 Dean of the Year by Poets and Quants. Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small.
Berkeley Haas Dean Ann Harrison, a renowned economist lauded for keeping Berkeley Haas’ six business programs ranked among the world’s best and significantly expanding the breadth and depth of the faculty, has been named Dean of the Year by Poets & Quants.
Poets & Quants Editor-in-Chief John Byrne announced the news to a global audience at a Thinkers50 virtual conference today. Byrne engaged in a sweeping conversation with Harrison that covered the impact of globalization on workers, the responsibilities of government and business in fighting climate change, the critical role of diversity on campus, and the enduring importance of the MBA.
“The MBA is a wonderful degree,” Harrison said. “It combines the rigor of statistics, data analysis, hard-core quant skills with skills like how to work with people, marketing, and how to sell,” she said. “What’s wonderful about an MBA is that it allows you to combine these different skills. Other degrees don’t offer that combination.” Haas MBA students care about making an impact, she added, “not just a great paycheck.”
Harrison has amassed an unimaginable and nearly breathtaking record of achievement. —John Byrne, Poets & Quants
In his Poets & Quants article, published today, Byrne wrote that Harrison has amassed an “unimaginable and nearly breathtaking record of achievement” during her four-and-a-half years as dean. Harrison, who has led Haas since January 2019 and was reappointed to a second term last February, said she was “deeply humbled” by the honor.
“I am so lucky to be surrounded by a tremendous community at Haas—students, staff, faculty, and alumni who are always going beyond themselves,” she said. “It’s only together that we can seek solutions to climate change, build a more inclusive society, and fuel innovation in all its forms. This is a business school that embodies excellence. I feel great pride in our past and am thrilled to have the opportunity to create impact for the future.”
Harrison is the second woman to lead Haas; Professor Laura Tyson served previously. As the former director of development policy at the World Bank and a longtime professor, Harrison has focused her research on international trade and global labor markets.
Big Changes
Since joining Haas from Wharton, Harrison has made big changes, Byrne noted. She has led a major diversity, equity, inclusion, justice & belonging (DEIJB) effort, broadening the profile of the Haas faculty, school board, and the student body. The school’s entering full-time MBA class this year is 41% women, 47% U.S. minorities, and 13% U.S. underrepresented minorities overall.
Harrison has woven sustainability content deep into the curriculum while maintaining the school’s historical focus on entrepreneurship and innovation.
“The challenges of climate change permeate all aspects of business: supply chain, economics, management, and finance,” she said. “In the latter field, we have pioneered new ways of investing. We need to hire in all these dimensions. It is a big agenda and we are making a lot of progress in a lot of different ways.”
Harrison also oversaw the launch of the first Flex online MBA cohort at any top business school. Applying learnings from the pandemic, Haas used new technology to make the MBA available to expanded groups of international students and working parents who require flexible schedules.
Under Harrison’s leadership, Haas also stepped up fundraising, raising a record total of $227 million, including $56.1 million during the last fiscal year. The school also secured the largest single gift in the school’s history—$30 million from alumnus Ned Spieker, BS 66, and his wife, Carol, BS 66—to turn the undergraduate program into a four-year program.
Figuring it out together
In the Poets & Quants article, Courtney Chandler, Chief Strategy & Operating Officer and Senior Assistant Dean at Haas, noted that Harrison “hasn’t stayed in one lane as dean.”
“She’s ambitious, and she sees the full potential of Haas within UC Berkeley and is driven to realize that potential,” she said. “She has not been that one-dimensional dean and that is incredibly impressive.”
“She’s ambitious, and she sees the full potential of Haas within UC Berkeley and is driven to realize that potential.” —Senior Assistant Dean Courtney Chandler
Harrison’s record as a highly cited scholar has also helped her lead the school’s professors, Byrne said.
“It’s hard to get faculty to buy-in to a dean’s vision, but she has been able to do that effectively,” Erika Walker, senior assistant dean for instruction, who has been at Haas for nearly 20 years, told Byrne. “She relates so well to them…. Ann is very thoughtful about where we should be going. A lot of her success stems from her ability to get the buy-in and then enlist others to figure it out together.”
Professor Catherine Wolfram (left) talks with Dean Ann Harrison (center) and Professor Ulrike Malmendier (right) at a Dean’s Speaker Series event.
During her second term, Harrison said she will continue to work with her team to build upon the school’s academic excellence as well as the student experience at Haas. One important goal is to ensure that the school’s degree programs remain the best in the world, she said.
Harrison earned her BA from UC Berkeley in economics and history, and her PhD from Princeton University. She held previous professorships in UC Berkeley’s College of Agricultural and Resource Economics, as well as at Columbia University and the Wharton School, where she was the William H. Wurster Professor of Management.
An avid hiker, Harrison told Poets & Quants that returning to UC Berkeley and California has allowed her to use time off to explore the state’s cliff-lined beaches, redwood forest, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, “a paradise for those who love the outdoors.”
Harrison is the 13th dean and the third woman to be named Dean of the Year by Poets & Quants, which covers business school education.
Professor Emeritus Pablo Spiller (right) accepted the 2023 Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Award in August at the SIOE’s annual conference in Frankfurt, Germany.
The award is given biennially to a researcher who has made “sustained significant academic contributions to institutional and organizational economics.” It is named for Indiana University political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Berkeley Haas Professor Oliver Williamson.
Professor Emeritus Pablo Spiller
Spiller is the Jeffrey A. Jacobs Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Business & Technology at the Haas School, as well as a UC Berkeley professor of graduate studies.
Spiller’s research lies at the intersection of economics, politics, and the law, and spans political economy, industrial organization, the economics of regulation and antitrust, and regulatory issues in developing countries. One research stream analyzed the hazards inherent to public contracting, and how it differs from private contracting. Spiller applied the approach to such areas as utility regulation, the organization of bureaucracies, and the inner workings of public companies.
In addition to his academic work, Spiller has consulted for the World Bank, the InterAmerican Bank, the UNDP and multiple governments and private companies throughout the world on the design and implementation of appropriate regulatory policies, contract design and implementation. He has also testified in numerous international arbitrations involving contract, regulatory and investment disputes. He is the former President of the International Society for New Institutional Economics (now SIOE).
Spiller served as the Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor of the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization for 19 years, and held multiple Editorial appointments at a variety of academic journals. On special leave from Berkeley, he served as a Special Advisor to the Bureau of Economics of the US Federal Trade Commission.
Professor Jennifer Chatman has won a lifetime achievement award for “research on culture that has changed the field of organizational behavior,” according to an announcement from the Academy of Management’s Organizational Behavior Division.
Professor Jennifer Chatman
Chatman, the Paul J. Cortese Distinguished Professor of Management and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Berkeley Haas, will receive the award at the OB@AOM conference in Boston next month.
Chatman has “pioneered new theoretical and conceptual approaches to the topic and continues to do so. She also has been a strong mentor to many doctoral students over the years. Finally, beyond her own work and the work of her students, she has contributed to the field as an editor…and editorial board member at almost all of our top journals,” according to the announcement.
In the early 1990s, Chatman co-created the field’s leading quantitative research tool, the Organizational Culture Profile, with Charles O’Reilly, MBA 71, PhD 75, and Dave Caldwell. It illustrated how organizational culture can be quantified, has defined the agenda for the scientific study of culture for decades, and remains the most robust and reliable measure of organizational culture to date.
In nominating Chatman, colleagues noted that she “owns the topic” of culture research and is a “household name” in the field. They also noted that her achievements span beyond being purely scholarly: “For more than 30 years, Jenny has been one of those rare scholars who are triple threats. They are able to be world class scholars over time even as they are leaders in our profession and their host institution,” describing her as “an icon in the field of organizational behavior, as a scholar, as an instructor, and as a mentor. Her career stretches long, well over 30 years, and during that time her work has been nothing short of pathbreaking” and the “ultimate exemplar of a completely involved modern OB researcher, educator, and contributor to the larger world of work and working.”
Chatman will continue to expand her leadership when she steps into the role of interim dean this fall, filling from October-December while Dean Ann Harrison is on sabbatical.
The award is given biennially to a scholar who has made a seminal contribution to the development of the field of regulatory studies.
“As an American, it’s a great honor to have my work on regulation, much of which has focused on Europe, be recognized by an association of European scholars,” said Vogel.
Vogel, who holds the Soloman P. Lee Chair Emeritus in Business Ethics, has focused his career on subjects ranging from regulating health, safety, and environmental risks in Europe and the United States to global challenges in responsible business. He has examined the differences between environmental policy in the United States compared to that of the European Union. In his book, “The Politics of Precaution: Regulating, Health, Safety and Environmental Risks in Europe and the United States” (Princeton University Press, 2012), he decribed how the U.S. and the E.U. “flip-flopped their position in risk regulation: Whereas before the 1990s the US had often the stricter standards, nowadays EU standards are stricter in many instances,” said Professor Eva Ruffing of Germany’s Osnabrück University, in a speech presenting the award.
Vogel is the author of eight other books, including “California Greenin’: How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader” (Princeton University Press, 2018). Other books include: ; “Global Challenges in Responsible Business” (Cambridge University Press, 2010); and “The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility” (Brookings, 2005).
Vogel has taught both Ethics & Responsibility in Business at Haas and Public and Private Global Business Regulation at UC Berkeley. Since 1982, he has served as editor of Berkeley Haas’ management journal, The California Management Review. He has taught classes and lectured on environment management in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
Associate Professor Ricardo Perez-Truglia and Assistant Professor Anastassia Fedyk were selected from more than 1,500 nominations from business schools around the world. Berkeley Haas was one of just four schools with two faculty members on the list.
Ricardo Perez-Truglia
Perez-Truglia, a behavioral economist who has been at Haas since 2020, grew up in the Ciudadela neighborhood near Buenos Aires, Argentina. He conducts economics research on various topics including behavioral economics, public economics, labor economics, and political economy. Currently, he is working on “a new project to understand how employers become aware of gender pay gaps among their employees and how they respond to such information.
“Ricardo is one of the most impactful professors I have learned from in my educational career,” wrote student Lauren Gamboa, MBA 25, in her nomination. “He takes complex economic concepts and breaks down the core elements and key intuitions for application into our everyday professional and personal lives. He has influenced how I evaluate potential projects and my overall learning process.”
Asked what he loves most about teaching, Perez-Truglia says, “I have a lot of fun during my lectures. By the end, I may be exhausted, but the experience is incredibly rewarding.” He adds, “I hope that when my students think about price elasticity, they can hear an Argentinean accent in their minds.”
Anastassia Fedyk
Fedyk’s research lies at the intersection of behavioral finance and innovation, employing big data techniques to better understand such important and timely topics as how artificial intelligence affects modern firms. In her teaching, she has been recognized for taking the lead on bringing more sustainability content into the core finance curriculum.
“Anastassia Fedyk has been the best Professor of my Executive MBA program,” wrote Oleksandr Krotenko, MBA 23, in his nomination. “The students truly love her because they feel how deeply she cares about their growth by always transforming even what might seem like less appealing subjects into life-learning experiences.”
When she is not teaching, Fedyk is co-leader of Economists for Ukraine, a group she founded in response to the Russian invasion of her native home. It informs policy on sanctions against Russia, spearheads plans for the reconstruction of Ukraine, supports Ukraine’s education sector, and organizes humanitarian aid on the ground.
“I am grateful for my Ukrainian heritage,” Fedyk told Poets&Quants. “Over the last year and a half, I have been incredibly proud to come from such a beautiful and resilient place.”
Associate Professor Ned Augenblick, a behavioral economist who studies the ways in which people systematically stray from rational thinking, has received the 2023 Williamson Award—the highest faculty honor at the Haas School of Business.
Ned Augenblick
The award is bestowed on the faculty member who best exemplifies the school’s highest values, including excellence in research, teaching, and service to the school. It is named for long-time faculty member and Nobel Laureate Oliver Williamson, who died in 2020.
Augenblick, the 7th recipient of the award, received multiple nominations from faculty colleagues who cited his contributions as a “super citizen” of the school. His leadership was particularly appreciated in helping to bring new faculty to Haas and his work on school culture.
At Haas since 2010, Augenblick holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University and teaches strategy and game theory in the MBA programs. His research employs theoretical models and experimental data to study deviations from rational thinking in a wide range of settings, from the voting booth to the stock market.
MBA students gather behind stage at the Greek Saturday before commencement. (Photo: Natasha Payes)
Exuberant grads tossed beach balls and danced salsa in the aisles of the Greek Theatre at Saturday’s commencement ceremony for the Berkeley Haas Full-time and Evening and Weekend MBA Class of 2022.
It was a moment of unfettered joy, as speakers rallied the graduates for the challenges ahead.
“The world right now has lots of huge unsolved problems—from political polarization to climate change to artificial general intelligence to augmented humanity to disease to inequality—so you have lots of big problems to choose from,” commencement speaker Jagdeep Singh, EWMBA 90, told about 600 graduates, who gathered under blue skies and sunshine. “Pick one that you have passion for, that you can’t help but want to spend all your time day and night on even if others think it’s too idealistic, too big, or too unsolvable. You’re Berkeley MBAs now. You don’t need to settle.”
Jagdeep Singh, EWMBA 90, speaks at MBA commencement. Photo: Jim Block
Dean Ann Harrison welcomed Singh, an entrepreneur who in 2010 co-founded battery technology company QuantumScape. She acknowledged how special it was to be together for the first in-person MBA commencement in two years.
“This felt like the best closure for a two-year process that has been life changing,” said Ignacio Solis, MBA 22, an international student from Chile.
Harrison praised the students for their resilience during their program, noting that those experiences will serve them well throughout their careers. “Because of who you are—your fierce intelligence and your deep understanding of the forces that drive business– you will have power,” she said. “Power is not always about how many people report to you or whether you have the CEO’s ear or whether you are the CEO. Power is the ability to make a difference—one day at a time; one project at a time; one function at a time.”
Evening & Weekend grads: “Pause and savor”
Noting how many life events happened for the EWMBA class during the program, Harrison said that 32% of the class was promoted, 41% of the students changed jobs, 13% got married, and 30 babies were born.
MBA students at the Greek Theatre. Photo: Natasha Payes
Evening & Weekend program student speaker Paulina Lee, a marketing director at Procter & Gamble, told graduates to stop and consider how much they’ve changed at Haas.
“What Haas has afforded us is the opportunity to redefine ourselves, to explore the edges of our comfort zone, and that’s why as we end this chapter and start our new paths to our own definitions of success we are faced with so many different emotions,” she said. “Joy, anxiety relief, excitement to move on to the next thing, get on with it, but perhaps we shouldn’t. At least not right away.”
Lee asked students to pause for a moment and savor, after spending the last three years on a sprint. “The first ask (from me) is to pause, really pause, and see the space that school used to take up and protect it,” she said. “Now that you have become the person you are today, reevaluate, sit down with yourself and honestly seek to understand who you have become.”
Full-time MBA: The opportunity to “fail and learn”
The 2022 full-time MBA class is the most diverse ever, Harrison told the graduates, including 39% women, 50% U.S. minorities, 8% veterans, and 10% first-generation college students.
“For two years we had the opportunity to try and fail and learn and try,” Kokei Otosi, MBA 22. Photo: Jim Block
Full-time MBA student speaker Kokei Otosi, who will join IBM as a senior consultant in August, opened her speech by thanking her classmates. She also expressed thanks for the time that the MBA program gave her to explore.
“What I know now is that the MBA is a sandbox,” said Otosi, a Bay Area native-turned-New Yorker whose parents are Nigerian immigrants. “When you leave you may still not know what you want to do, but for two years we had the opportunity to try and fail and learn and try. We may not get that kind of freedom again.”
Throughout the ceremony, speakers paid tribute to classmate Nadeem Farooqi, who died in fall 2020.
Otosi said the shock and grief the class experienced over his death was palpable. “Nadeem, we cannot believe you aren’t here with us celebrating today, but we haven’t forgotten you,” she said. “We miss you.”
Honors for both MBA programs
Dean Ann Harrison congratulates an MBA student. Photo: Jim Block
Harrison asked all students with GPAs in the top 10% of their classes to stand and be honored for their achievements.
Here are the EWMBA program honors:
Outstanding Academic Achievement Award: Laura Jacobson
Defining Leadership Principles awards:
Question the Status Quo: Eleanor Boli
Confidence Without Attitude: Cheick Diarra
Students Always: Steve Odell
Beyond Yourself: Nana Lei
The Berkeley Leader Award: Nana Lei and Frances Ho
Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching, weekend MBA program: Ricardo Perez-Truglia, for macroeconomics
Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching, evening MBA program: Professor Max Aufhammer, for data and decisions
Cheit Award for Graduate Student Instructor: Kimberlyn George
Photo: Jim Block
FTMBA program honors:
Outstanding Academic Achievement Award: Jon Christopher Thompson
Question the Status Quo: Aliza Gazek
Confidence Without Attitude: Casey Dunajick-DeKnight
Students Always: Mathilde De La Calle
Beyond Yourself: Kevin Hu
Cheit Award for Graduate Student Instructor: Griffin Grail-Binghman
Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching: Associate Professor Ned Augenblick for Strategic Leadership
PhD commencement
Earlier this month, seven Phd candidates participated in a hooding ceremony.
PhD graduates, left to right: Alexey Sinyashin, Daniel Stein, Shoshana Jarvis, Kristin Donnelly, Łukasz Langer, Young Yoon, Petr Martynov
The PhD program at Haas stands out among all six academic programs, Harrison told the graduates. “It is our smallest, but it’s also the program nearest and dearest to the hearts of our faculty, all of whom are PhDs and are deeply committed to training the researchers and professors of the future,” she said. “This is a core part of my mission, and of all of our faculty’s mission.”
Graduating students included Kristin Donnelly, Shoshana Jarvis, Łukasz Langer, Petr Martynov, Alexey Sinyashin, Daniel Stein, and Young Yoon. The Cheit award for excellence in teaching in the PhD program went to Professor Panos Patatoukas of the Haas Accounting Group.
Clockwise from top left: Ross Levine, Panos Patatoukas, Nancy Wallace, Dan Mulhern, Guo Xu, and Jenny Herbert Creek.
Six faculty members and five Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) have been honored at 2021 commencements for excellence in teaching.
Students in each degree program choose faculty each year to receive the Cheit Award, named after Dean Emeritus Earl F. Cheit, who made teaching excellence one of his top priorities.
This year’s winners include:
Evening & Weekend MBA program: Assoc. Prof. Panos Patatoukas (evening cohort), who teaches financial information analysis, and Prof. Ross Levine(weekend cohort), who teaches macroeconomics
Undergraduate program: Dan Mulhern, who teaches leadership in the Management of Operations Group as a continuing lecturer and distinguished teaching fellow
PhD program: Asst. Prof. Guo Xu of the Business & Public Policy group
Master of Financial Engineering (MFE): Prof. Nancy Wallace, chair of the real estate group
Graduate student instructors (GSIs): Atusa Sadeghi (EWMBA); Devan Courtois (FTMBA); and Sooji Kim (undergraduate); and Maxine Sauzet and Nick Sanders (MFE)
Henry Chesbrough, faculty director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation, was honored with a medal from the Industrial Research Institute (IRI) this month for his standout work in innovation management.
Chesbrough, an adjunct professor who is widely recognized as the father of open innovation, accepted the medal at the IRI’s May 10 annual meeting. The IRI, which represents 200 industrial and service companies interested in effectively managing technological innovation, has awarded the medal since 1946 to top leaders in industrial research.
Chesbrough said his own research has benefited greatly from the IRI and close observation of several of its member companies that have implemented open innovation.
The open innovation concept, which Chesbrough introduced in 2003, argues that companies need to tear down the walls between their R&D organizations and outside companies and innovators. Chesbrough believes that businesses cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license R&D processes and inventions such as patents from other companies.
“As the pace of change quickens across industries, organizations are looking at open innovation not just as a tool for solving unique technology challenges, but for expanding it to include a wider variety of participants and making a significant impact on corporate business models,” Chesbrough said.
The recipient of multiple awards for his research, Chesbrough in 2015 was named to the Thinkers50 global ranking of management pioneers. The Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers, published every two years, has been described by the Financial Times and others as the “Oscars of management thinking.”
“As an American, it’s a great honor to have my work on regulation, much of which has focused on Europe, be recognized by an association of European scholars,” said Vogel.
Berkeley Haas professors Ricardo Perez-Truglia and Anastassia Fedyk have been named to 
