Terry faculty tracking bots on X, new leadership at the MIS Department, and real estate research helping to maximize your home sale price.

February 2024

Carolina Salge stands in front of a projected circuit board pattern

A new way to think about bots

Automated social media accounts — bots — spread information faster and further than human social media users. Whether that’s a threat to civil society or a boon depends on how well we understand what they can do. Terry MIS professors Carolina Salge and Elena Karahanna have won multiple international best paper awards for their work explaining bots’ impact on the information ecosystem.

Local knowledge yields quicker, bigger sales

If you want to sell your home for top dollar, you need a real estate agent who knows your neighborhood. New research from real estate professor Darren Hayunga shows agents with deep local knowledge sell houses for higher prices.

Gerald Kane stands in front of a book shelf

Digital transformation scholar takes the lead at MIS

With the rapid pace of technological change, Gerald Kane aims to give MIS graduates the most significant tool an academic program can provide — the ability to evolve over their careers.

David Lowery talks with DJ and Music Business grad David Osborne

Moving the needle

David Osborne went from music educator to music entrepreneur on a dare. Through “word-of-mouth wildfire,” the demand for his DJ business and related spinoffs has grown from one gig, to 10, to hundreds.

Headshots of Chris Allen (BBA ’92), Tonya Davies (BBA ’95), Laura Picott (BBA ’11, AB ’11) and KB Yabuku (MBA ’10)

Terry Trailblazers return to campus on Feb. 7

The 2024 class of Terry Trailblazers — Chris Allen, Tonya Davies, Laura Picott and KB Yabuku — comes to campus on Feb. 7 to share lessons in leadership and service with students and faculty.

Customers as assets?

Marketing professor Neil Bendle has written The Customer Asset: Understanding and Managing its Value, a book about how marketers measure the ROI for marketing, customer service and other investments in customer management.

Photo of Kyle Huemme on top of the UGA ropes course

MIS faculty recognized on the international stage

MIS faculty were honored for their research contributions by the Association for Information Systems at the International Conference on Information Systems in Hyderabad, India.

IN THE NEWS

The UGA Entrepreneurship Program helps students launch more than a dozen businesses a year. Robert Pinckney, the Milton Anthony (Tony) Greene Director of Entrepreneurship and senior lecturer at Terry, told Atlanta News First how the program’s flagship business accelerator helped Terry finance and real estate senior Jack TerHaar launch his business Detail Dawgs. “We help them figure out where their market is, what their market is,” Pinckney said. “We focus a lot on customer discovery, which is actually reaching out and talking to people about your product or service, if they would buy it, how much they would pay for it, if it is economically viable.”

Between December and February, Dean Ben Ayers delivered the Georgia Economic Outlook forecast in eight cities across the state. Ayers told a gathering in Savannah, “the economy will slow but not bust.” He put the state’s odds of recession at one in three. Despite inflation and higher interest rates, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Ayers is bullish about Georgia’s pipeline of new economic development projects — nearly 800 announced in the last two years — and sustained growth in the “prime, working-age ” population that will strengthen the state’s labor force.