News

As of 1st April 2022, Professor Kirsten Rohde of ESE succeeded Professor Enrico Pennings of ESE as ERIM's Associate Director. As of 1st September 2022, Kirsten will also succeed Enrico as Dean of Research at ESE. In a series of interviews, Enrico shares his experience at ERIM and thoughts on ERIM 2.0 and ESE’s research strategy; Professor Pursey Heugens of RSM expresses his thanks to Enrico; and Kirsten shares her motivation for taking over the role and her vision for the future of ESE and ERIM.

In his dissertation 'Co-creating Safety and Security: Essays on bridging disparate needs and requirements to foster safety and security', Mark van der Giessen aimed to advance our understanding of how various actors with their disparate needs and requirements can collaboratively foster safety and security. Safety and security contexts are diverse, ranging from the widespread daily policing practices involving local governments, law enforcement and community groups, to highly extreme and complex local responses to grand challenges, such as the professionals, volunteers and local communities responding to a refugee crisis. Regardless of the specific context however, practitioners and management scholars do not yet have the tools and knowledge to address how the actors involved, engaging from different backgrounds and with their own needs and requirements, may collaboratively foster safety and security.

In his dissertation 'Online Grocery Operations in Omni-channel Retailing: Opportunities and Challenges', Joydeep Paul explored capacity sharing strategies between the vehicles of store replenishment and online fulfilment in buy-online-pick-up-in-store omni-channel model. Through an extensive numerical study, he shows that significant savings in distribution costs can be achieved by sharing capacity of vehicles across two channels. Alongside the planning aspects, he also studied the interaction between the online and store channel in an omni-channel setting.

In his dissertation 'The Timing and Pricing of Initial Public Offerings, Evidence from the Low Countries', Wilco Legierse investigated which factors determine the influx of newcomers. In addition, he investigated the causes of a persistent phenomenon with respect to the pricing of stock IPOs: underpricing.

In her dissertation 'Thriving with Digitized Products: How firms leverage their generative capacity via experimentation, learning, and collaboration' Ainara explored how firms leverage the generative capacity of their digitized products to generate value from their digitized products’ potentials (i.e., affordances).

In his dissertation ‘Information Transmission in Finance: Essays on Commodity Markets, Sustainable Investing, and Social Networks’ Romulo Alves presented three empirical papers about information transmission in financial markets and the corporate world. The goal is to contribute to our understanding of how asset prices and corporate decisions are shaped by information flows across different markets and firms.

In her dissertation Anna studied various aspects of interorganizational governance in projects, using example of construction projects in particular and focusing on how contracts and collaboration can effectively align diverging interests of multiple parties. This dissertation is one of the few examples of the purchasing and supply management research in the complex construction projects. It brings not only valuable theoretical and practical insights on this phenomenon, but hopefully also demonstrates the potential and the need for more investigations of project settings in this scientific discipline. This work also offers advice to practitioners about the adoption and design of multi-party PBCs, effective approach to contract revisions within ongoing projects, as well as the design and implementation of collaborative strategies.

In his dissertation Anirudh identified various new transportation planning problems that arise in truck platooning. He developed methods to plan platoons and show that simple platoons with two trucks, with each truck being part of a single platoon in its journey, already capture most of the platooning benefits. He extended these methods to study the effect of platooning on strategic network design. In addition, this dissertation looks at how truck drivers perceive platooning technology. They foresee that platooning will eventually become a reality but believe it will have a negative impact on the quality of their work and their job satisfaction.

The outstanding achievements of researchers at ERIM were recognised in its annual awards on 24 November. Six awards were presented for work that contributes to new knowledge and societal impact in international business and management through dissertations and articles across a range of subject areas. New knowledge that was recognised in the ERIM Awards focused on neural representations of consumer experience; social identity and information exchange; collaboration across boundaries; disaster relief logistics; and bringing the principles of open science forward to younger generations.

Sebastian Speer was awarded a doctorate with the distinction cum laude for his dissertation: The (Dis)Honest and (Un)Fair Brain: Investigating the Neural Underpinnings of Moral Decisions.
In his dissertation Sebastian provided three contributions to better understand the neurocognitive underpinnings of individual differences in moral decision-making. First, it provides reconciliation of a long-standing debate in the literature on the role of cognitive control in (dis)honesty. Second, he contributed by identifying stable neural markers that can be used to predict individual differences in (dis)honesty. Lastly, Sebastian provided a behavioral paradigm that can be used to inconspicuously measure voluntary, spontaneous and repeated cheating on a trial-by-trial basis in the MRI scanner or while recording EEG.