Research Speakers Offer Insights and Share Findings

The Whitman School’s EEE department hosted an impressive list of outstanding guest speakers who presented their recent ongoing studies.

Jeff McMullen, editor-in-chief of Journal of Business Venturing and professor of entrepreneurship at Kelley School of Business, Indiana University – Bloomington presented a study, “Should we persist or abandon? Team pressure and self-regulation in entrepreneurial escalation of commitment,” that discusses how social pressure from an entrepreneur’s team can influence the likelihood of escalation.

Roy Thurik, professor of economics and entrepreneurship at the Erasmus School of Economics in the Netherlands, presented, “Genes and Entrepreneurship: A discovery in the world of behavior and biology,” that examines a promising new approach for economic and management sciences using genome-wide association study (GWAS) design.

Laura Huang, associate professor in the organization behavior unit at Harvard Business School, presented “Collective folly and individual wisdom: How decision framing impacts entrepreneurial investment decisions,” and discussed how the lines between investors—whether acting as an individual or institutional investor—have begun to blur, and who investors are impacts how they employ these criteria.

Other speakers include Sanjay Sharma (dean and professor of Grossman School of Business, University of Vermont), Isabella Hatak (professor at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland), Moren Lévesque (professor at York University, Canada), April Franco (associate professor at the University of Toronto), Larry Plummer (associate professor at Ivey Business School, Canada), Rob Nason (assistant professor at Concordia University, Canada), Andrew Boysen (assistant professor at UNC-Chapel Hill), Laura Huber-Rosendhal (Max Planck Institute, Germany), Wei Yang (University of Texas-Austin), Tim Michaelis (NC State) and Sissi Li (Texas A&M).