Mendoza marketing professor wins research award

Shankar Ganesan, the John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C., Professor of Business and chair of the Marketing Department at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, is the winner of the 2018 Louis W. Stern Award.

The Stern Award recognizes an outstanding article published in a highly respected, refereed journal that has made a significant contribution to the literature on marketing and channels of distribution. The honor was established by Louis W. and Rhona L. Stern in 1999 through the American Marketing Association Foundation and is given by the AMA’s Interorganizational Special Interest Group.

Ganesan along with his co-authors — Steven P. Brown of the University of Houston, Babu John Mariadoss of Washington State University and Hillbun (Dixon) Ho of University of Technology Sydney — received the award for their research article “Buffering and Amplifying Effects of Relationship Commitment in Business-to-Business Relationships,” which was published in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2010. The paper examines the buffering and amplifying effects of relationship commitment on organizational buyers' intentions to switch suppliers when a relationship is strained by the incumbent's own misbehavior. 

A three-judge panel evaluated articles based on the quality of their contribution to theory and practice, originality, technical competence in the execution of the research and impact on the field of channels of distribution.

The award committee unanimously agreed that Ganesan’s paper was an outstanding example of novel and well-executed research that has made a significant contribution to the field of inter-organizational relationship research.

 The Stern Award will be conferred at the Summer Educators Conference in August during the awards luncheon.

Ganesan's research interests focus on the areas of inter-organizational relationships, customer relationship management, buyer-seller negotiations, service failure and recovery, product recalls and new product innovation. He currently teaches customer management in the Notre Dame MBA program. He earned a bachelor in engineering from Visvesvaraya Regional College of Engineering in Nagpur, India; his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, India; and his doctoral degree from the University of Florida.