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Contact: Brian Burton, dean of the College of Business and Economics, at (360) 650-3389 or Brian.Burton@wwu.edu

BELLINGHAM – Western Washington University’s College of Business and Economics has honored five faculty members for their excellence in research.

Faculty members Khim L. Sim, Z. George Zhang, Matthew R. Roelofs, and Mary D. Sass received the Dennis R. Murphy Faculty Research Award. Faculty member Earl D. Benson received the David Merrifield Faculty Research Award.

The awards recognize exemplary faculty papers that were accepted for publication by refereed journals between Sept. 1, 2009 and Aug. 13, 2010. The awards are $1,000 and funded entirely by supporters of ��������’s College of Business and Economics through the �������� Foundation.

Khim L. Sim collaborated on the study “Service Quality, Service Recovery, and Financial Performance: an Analysis of the U.S. Airline Industry,” published in Volume 18 of Advances in Management Accounting. 

Z. George Zhang collaborated on the paper “A Periodic Replacement Model Based on Cumulative Repair-Cost Limit for a System Subjected to Shocks,” published in June 2010 issue of IEEE Transactions on Reliability.

Matthew R. Roelofs collaborated on the paper “My money or yours: house money payment effects,” published in the June 2010 issue of Experimental Economics. The paper reported the results of an experiment designed to study how subjects’ decision making may be affected by the timing of participation payments or show-up fees. 

Mary D. Sass co-authored the article “Personal Values and Negotiation Outcomes: Understanding Ourselves and Others,” which will soon be published by the Journal of Collective Negotiation. The study examined the relationship between people’s professed values and their negotiation performance through a controlled experimental design study. 

Earl D. Benson co-authored the article, “Dueling Revenue Caps and Municipal Bond Yields: The Case of Houston, Texas,” published in the Summer 2010 issue of Public Budgeting and Finance. His study examined how tax limitation initiatives affect municipal interest costs. 

 “The College of Business and Economics is fortunate to have many faculty who are both outstanding teachers and excellent scholars," said Brian Burton, dean of the College of Business and Economics. “These awards recognize exemplary work in a wide range of areas which is many times a result of faculty’s collaborative efforts with fellow scholars. The papers and recipients exemplify what we are about as a college.”

For more information on the awards, contact Brian Burton at (360) 650-3389 or Brian.Burton@wwu.edu.