dr. M.N. (Magdalena) Cholakova

Magdalena Cholakova is an Associate Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship in the Department of Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University.

The research lines she is currently pursuing include:

• Entrepreneurial learning and early-stage idea validation. She studies this topic by using experiments with entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial populations, as well as by collecting longitudinal qualitative data from early-stage companies. She also develops conceptual work on the role of different types of counterfactual reasoning in supporting effective entrepreneurial behavior.

• Institutional complexity and strategic renewal. She focuses on the capacity of individuals within existing organizations to cope with change and pursue successful core innovations. She has addressed this topic by tapping into the microfoundations (cognitive and affective) of institutional complexity, studying how individuals' cognitive complexity affects the extent to which they perceive and respond to conflicting institutional logics differently. Similarly, she has also studied how individuals' ability to engage in both exploration and exploitation behavior can influence the organization's ambidexterity and performance. Her work here is both conceptual and qualitative.

• Effective decision making heuristics under Knightian uncertainty. She studies this topic in the context of angel investing (using verbal protocol analysis techniques) and crowdfunding (using quasi-experimental techniques).

• Crowdfunding and the role of pecuniary and non pecuniary incentives in investment decisions. Her work here is based on quasi-experimental techniques.

Magdalena holds a PhD in Business Administration and Management from Bocconi University, a MPhil in Organizational Behavior from Trinity College Dublin and a MSc in Statistics from Trinity College Dublin. Her research has been published in the Journal of Management, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practrice Journal, International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior, and the Entrepreneurship Research Journal.

Research Interests: Entrepreneurial Learning, Idea Validation, Cognition, Judgment under Uncertainty; Institutional Logics, Angel and Crowdfund Investing.