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Experts
Ronald T. Wilcox
NewMarket Corporation Professor of Business Administration
Wilcox has four specific areas of expertise: marketing financial services, branding, marketing for nonprofits and public policy, and marketing.
His research, focused on the marketing of financial services and its interface with public policy, has appeared in leading marketing and finance journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Marketing Science and the Journal of Business. He is a frequent contributor to Forbes and is the author of the popular book Whatever Happened to Thrift? Why Americans Don’t Save and What to Do About It. The book was named one of the Top Five Business Books of the Year by Kiplinger. He also wrote “Private Enterprise’s Role in Increasing Savings,” a chapter of Franklin’s Thrift: The History of a Lost American Virtue.
Wilcox, a former economist for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, has served as a consultant for Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky, Timken, Johnson & Johnson and numerous other companies.
A.B., Xavier University; M.S., Ph.D., Washington University
Dennis T. Yang
Dale S. Coenen Free Enterprise Professor of Business Administration
Yang is an expert on China — its labor markets, financial systems and phenomenal growth, which have made it an economic contender. His broader research expertise includes economic development and growth, comparative economic systems, as well as labor and demographic economics in the context of emerging markets. A native of China, Yang has co-edited three books on economic reforms in China and served on the editorial boards of China Economic Review, Comparative Economic Studies, Journal of Demographic Economicsand Pacific Economic Review.
His wide-ranging research covers household behavior, education, savings and investment, wage structure, population policies, trade and labor markets, income distribution, analysis of famines, economic structural transformation and long-term growth.
He has consulted with international organizations such as the World Bank and Hong Kong Monetary Authority, as well as leading businesses such as The Conference Board and McKinsey. He is president of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies, and he was recently elected by the Ministry of Education in China to the Chang Jiang Chair Professorship.
B.A., University of California at Los Angeles; Ph.D., University of Chicago
Ayana Younge
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
A professor in the Leadership and Organizational Behavior academic area, Ayana Younge’s research lies at the intersection of emotions, social hierarchy and interpersonal processes. She studies the cultivation of positive relationships at work, exploring how favorable emotions influence relational perceptions and behaviors within organizations, as well as how social hierarchical context may play a role in shaping emotion perception. Her work on gratitude has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Younge served as the 2019–20 president of the Management Doctoral Student Association and is a member of the PhD Project and the Management Faculty of Color Association.
B.A., M.S., California State University, Los Angeles; M.S., Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Zhihao Zhang
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Drawing from research and experience from both consumer behavior and cognitive neuroscience, Zhang pursues a diverse and interdisciplinary research agenda revolving around consumer decision-making. In particular, he focuses on understanding the cognitive, computational and neuroscientific mechanisms by which memory and knowledge — of brands, products, services or social interactions — shape decisions. He has a keen interest in using neuroscience to inform real-world problems at the intersection of marketing and law.
Zhang’s work has appeared in leading academic journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Communications, Current Biology and Science Advances. His past research has been covered by major media outlets such as BBC News, the Los Angeles Times, The Hill, The Times of India and China National Radio.
Before joining Darden, Zhang was a postdoctoral scholar at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
B.S., Tsinghua University; M.Phil., Ph.D., Yale University
Sasa Zorc
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
A member of the Quantitative Analysis faculty, Zorc studies incentives in multi-agent systems, such as health care and decentralized matching markets, using search and contract theories, mechanism design and data-driven simulations.
He received his Ph.D. in decision sciences from INSEAD in Singapore, where he taught courses on probability, statistics, decision theory, econometrics, health care economics and microeconomics.
B.Sc., M.Sc., University of Zagreb; MBA, Cotrugli Business School Zagreb; M.Sc., Ph.D., INSEAD