20 Faculty Teams Awarded Smith Internal Research Grants

The Robert H. Smith School of Business is pleased to announce the 2025 recipients of the Smith Internal Research Grants (SIRG). The SIRG program is designed to foster innovative, high-impact research across disciplines. This year, 20 faculty-led teams have been awarded funding to support innovative research projects across a wide range of topics, including AI-human collaboration, digital platforms, labor market dynamics, corporate communication, early entrepreneurship, and online learning.

“We’re proud to support such a diverse and timely set of research initiatives,” said Rebecca Hann, Associate Dean for Research. “These projects reflect the creative and rigorous work being done by Smith faculty, and we look forward to the insights and impact they’ll produce.”

Congratulations to the following faculty and research teams:

• Serguey Braguinsky (with Takuya Hiraiwa) – "Engineering Talent Allocation into Academia and Industry and Its Impact on Innovation During Japan’s Industrialization"
• Gilad Chen (with Kevin Clark and Nelly Arbel Groissman) – "Enhancing Early Entrepreneurial Success"
• Wedad Elmaghraby  (with Ashish Kabra and Kunpeng Zhang) – "Dynamic Forecasting of Freelance Job Success: Empirical Insights from Conversational Analytics"
• Ali Faraji-Rad (with Ying Hu) – "Companion AI and Loneliness"
• Il-Horn Hann (with Weihong Zhao) – "Do Humans Bow to Agentic AI? Comparing Human and AI Interactions in Bargaining Games"
• Alex He – "AI Adoption in Asset Management: Capital Allocation and Transition Dynamics"
• Reuben Hurst (with Justin Frake, Max Kagan, and James White) – "Political Partisan Segregation in the United States Labor Market"
• Eaman Jahani (with Siva Viswanathan) – "Balancing Exploration and Exploitation in LLMs: Design Choices for Creative Outputs"
• Amna Kirmani (with Rosellina Ferraro, In Hye Kang, and Andy Li) – "Avoiding Activism: Companies’ Articulated Neutrality on Socio-political Issues"
• David Kirsch (with Michael Hoffmeyer and Evan Starr) – "Smith Survey of Searching Entrepreneurs (SSoSE)"
• Rebecca Ratner (with Jordan Etkin, Joey Reiff, and Mier Shao) – "Effects of Proportional vs. Nominal Goal Framing on Motivation"
• Lauren Rhue (with Il-Horn Hann and Bertrand Stoffel) – "How Far Is Fair? Measuring Legal Boundaries in AI-Generated Content"
• Michael Trusov (with Yogesh Joshi) – "Assessing Innovation Impact Using AI and Product Reviews"
• Tunay Tunca (with Xiaojia Guo and Jiaxuan Sun) – "Optimizing Human-AI Collaboration: Expert Interpretation of AI Results and Approaches for Accuracy and Efficiency"
• Vijaya Venkataramani (with Yanran Lu) – "Overcoming the Innovation Bottleneck: Managerial Constraints and Employee Strategies for Creative Idea Acceptance"
• Wen Wang – "Enhancing Video-Based Online Learning: A Large-Scale Randomized Field Experiment on Cognitive Load Optimization"
• Michel Wedel and P.K. Kannan (with Zipei Lu) – "Visual Competition in E-Commerce: Predicting Consumer Attention Through AI"
• Michel Wedel (with Seoungwoo Lee and Jie Zhang) – "The Impact of AI Adoption on Mobile App Performance"
• Liu Yang (with Renhao Jiang) – "The Impact of Remote Work on Local Businesses"
• Mark Zakota (with Rebecca Hann and Jingyu Zhang) – "AI and Human Capital Disclosure: Strategic Signaling in Professional Networks"