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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.

In his dissertation ‘Cost Allocation in Collaborative Transportation’ Mathijs van Zon considered a centralised horizontal collaboration between logistic service providers that is governed by a third party. He focused on how to determine a stable allocation of the overall cost or profit among the logistic service providers. Second, Mathijs focused on a centralised horizontal collaboration that is not governed by a third party. He studied this setting both analytically and numerically for collaborations in transportation, and provided insights into the value of the quality of an algorithm in collaborations.

In his dissertation Sebastian examined how changes to the information landscape affect the quality of information reported by companies, its dissemination in capital markets, and investors’ processing of the information. In particular, Sebastian investigated experimentally how public scrutiny of companies, changes to the structure of transaction fees, and the framing of company disclosure affect capital market communications.

In his dissertation Cristian Stet put forward a series of four studies which scrutinise the flexibility of power markets in relation to the growing supply from variable renewable sources. The dissertation teaches us that supply from variable renewable sources affects the flexibility needs of a power market by changing the probability distribution function of power prices and altering the relation between forward and spot power prices, reducing the power price forward premium.

In his dissertation Viktor Koritarov dealed with the integration of Regulatory Focus Theory and Framing Theory into the standard Situational Crisis Communication Theory model (SCCT). Three related papers, using experimental design, deconstruct the basic principles of the SCCT model and show that they can be rearranged into a more effective contingency model.

In his dissertation Mohammad Ansarin detailed the influence of growing D-RES on the equity and economic efficiency of electricity tariffs. Newer time-based pricing schemes are necessary to prevent high (and probably undesirable) inefficiency and inequity within and between household populations. Installing smart meters is a prerequisite for these tariffs. Using extra meters at the generation resource simplify paying for D-RES generation, but the improvements for inequity are comparatively small.