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In her dissertation ‘Managing Successful and Resilient Shared-Interest Communities: The role of digitization technologies and disruptive events’ Martina Pocchiari shed light into the dynamics of shared-interest communities under the influence of changing technologies and external events. Three questions were addressed: (i) What is the impact of digitizing community activities on the participation intentions of community members?; (ii) What is the effect of negative vs. positive shocks to a community's purpose on community dynamics?; (iii) What is the effect of a brand crisis on consumer engagement and patterns of information spread in brand communities?

In her dissertation 'Behavioural and Neural Evidence for Processes Underlying Biases in Decision-Making' Catalina Ratala? provided insights into how certain, seemingly trivial, aspects that pertain to the decision at hand can have a substantial impact on the final outcome, both in social and in consumer contexts.

In his dissertation 'Integration, Decentralization and Self-Organization: Towards Better Public Transport' Rolf van Lieshout sought to improve the planning process of public transport operators by integrating planning steps that are traditionally performed sequentially. Furthermore he investigated decentralized strategies for operating public transport, with a focus on railway systems. Such strategies could be preferable over conventional centralized and schedule-based control in various scenarios. Last, he tested decentralized dispatching of both vehicles and crew in a microscopic railway simulation.

In her dissertation 'Consumers in the Age of AI: Understanding Reactions Towards Algorithms and Humans in Marketing Research' Gizem adopted a nuanced perspective on consumers’ reactions towards algorithms and humans and introduced three contextual factors that impact consumers’ reactions. Specifically, it reveals how consumers’ reactions towards algorithms and humans depends on what the outcome of the decision is, who the consumer is and on what type of complexity the decision possesses.

Congratulations to our full-time and part-time PhD candidates who have successfully defended their dissertations so far this year! Find out more about these candidates’ dissertations and defenses below: Gelly Fu, Ainara Novales, Wilco Legierse, Joydeep Paul, Mark van der Giessen, Jaime Caballero Santin, Max Renault and Jasper Heeren.

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).