Competitive projects

Project Principal Investigator: Ignasi Martí
Research unit: Institute for Social Innovation (IIS)
Funding body: ISSFacilityServices
Funding: €15,000 + €15,000
Duration: 12 months

Se trata de una iniciativa centrada en la realización de un ciclo de conferencias con título “Connecting through the Workplace”, que tiene como objetivo crear un foro de opinión, debate y análisis sobre los principales retos, tendencias y estrategias que debe afrontar la empresa del s. XXI para incrementar su sostenibilidad y competitividad a largo plazo.

El lema “Connecting Through the Workplace” sirve como relato transversal para analizar cómo las organizaciones y las empresas innovadoras deberían integrar cuatro ámbitos clave para la gestión y el impacto en las personas y los workplaces del futuro, que son:

La conexión con el entorno (liderazgo de impacto y propósito)
La conexión con los grupos de interés y la cadena de valor (co-creación, innovación y economía circular)
La conexión con las personas: los “workplace” como entornos que potencian la diversidad y talento inclusivo
La conexión con el talento del futuro y cómo deberían ser los workplaces del s. XXI

El proyecto incluye la realización de una conferencia y publicación posterior de un breve artículo con las principales conclusiones para cada una de las cuatro temáticas. El proyecto estaba previsto para el año 2020, con tres conferencias presenciales programadas para el curso 2019/20 y una última ya dentro del 2020/21. Sin embargo, en primavera de 2020 se reformuló la propuesta inicial para aplazar el calendario de todas las sesiones al curso 2020/21, y realizar todos los eventos en formato virtual.

Más información

Dentro del curso 2019/20 también se realizaron los dos eventos de presentación del estudio anterior obre RSE y gestión de personas, vinculado a la misma colaboración con ISS y de la que surge este nuevo proyecto como continuidad:

La influencia de la RSE en la gestión de personas: buenas prácticas

Autores: Carlos Cortés, Ignasi Carreras

Septiembre, 2019

Más información y acceso al estudio y resumen

Eventos: 19/09/2019 en Esade Madrid y 20/09/2019 en Esade Barcelona

Principal Investigator: Annachiara Longoni
Research group: Business Network Dynamics (BUNED
Funding body: GENERACION DE CONOCIMIENTO 2019 – MICIU (Ministerio)
Funding: €48,642
Duration: 48 months

Other participants: Cristina Gimenez, Vicenta Sierra, Frank Wiengarten

The CrowdWork project aims to empirically investigate the implications of crowdsourced workforce in the last mile delivery industry for organizational efficiency (from the organizational perspective) and occupational health and safety (from the workers perspect ive).

Industries such as crowdsourced last mile delivery are built on the principle of matching supply and demand through digital labor platforms.

Workers in charge of the last mile delivery (i.e., drivers) receive their orders through the digital platform and are only paid on demand when a delivery is performed.

This model breaks the traditional employee-employer relationships to create a more flexible workforce. Digital labor platforms present employers with new opportunities to vastly reduce labor costs and increase flexibility. For sure, these work arrangements allowed the expansion of new digital businesses and the gig economy.

However, there is a growing concern that these new non-standard forms of employment adversely affect workers by creating precarious work. Such precarious work might result in social and economic insecurities, psychological and physiological stress and working conditions negatively affecting worker health and safety.

We propose that from the operational perspective it is possible to identify configurations of best practices that might overcome possible trade- offs of crowdsourced work between efficiency and occupational health and safety. By best practice configurations we refer to human resource management practices, such as training, worker involvement and teamwork; and process design, such as process formalization.

These practices combined to precarious work forms of crowdsourced work might prevent possible negative effects on worker occu pational health and safety and maintaining efficiency in the operational setting. In such research direction it is positioned the CrowdWork project, which ultimately aims to define best practice configurations of crowdsourced work to overcome possible trade-offs between organizational efficiency and worker health and safety.

From a theoretical perspective, this means, firstly, to demonstrate the trade-offs between organizational efficiency and worker health and safety in crowdsourced work environments, such as the last mile delivery industry. Secondly, we aim also to identify possible mitigation strategies for such trade-offs as combining crowdsourced work with human resource management practices and process design respectful of the workers.

From a practical perspective, this means to provide guidelines for crowdsource last-mile delivery companies, as well as digital businesses in general, about work organization design at the operational level (which is about human resource management practices and process design to combine with crowdsourced workforce); and also stimulate governments and institutions to develop regulations considering such aspects of workforce arrangement.

Principal Investigator: Santiago Forte
Research unit: Group for Research in Economics and Finance (GREF)
Funding body: Generación de conocimiento 2019 – MICIU (Ministerio)
Funding: €29,161
Duration: 36 months
Other participants: Marco Menner, Carlo Sala, Lidija Lovreta Research

The present project comprises four main objectives. The first is to analyse and compare the informational content of equity options and (credit default swaps) CDS regarding future volatilities. For our analysis, we will distinguish between: 1. Equity volatility versus firm asset volatility; 2. Cross-section versus time-series; and 3. Short-run versus long-run. The second objective is to analyse the long-memory properties of equity and firm asset volatility at the firm-level, and its impact on volatility forecasting. The third objective is to expand our knowledge on the design and calibration of structural credit risk models. In particular, we will adopt a model-free approach to derive simple closed-form expressions for the pricing of credit sensitive claims like risky bonds, CDS contracts, and forward CDS contracts (i.e., CDS contracts signed today, but initiated at a future date). Our result will also allow for the time decomposition of credit spreads. Additionally, we will explore in detail the theoretical and empirical properties of the CreditGrades model. The fourth and last objective is to investigate the information content on risk provided by the volatility surface of the option market. Specifically, we will employ different estimation techniques and test the validity of the obtained results using classical backtesting techniques as well as we aim to create new ones. As a key common denominator, all techniques we aim to implement will produce forward-looking profit/loss density estimations. This will be achieved either under the statistical (physical) measure, or under the pricing (risk-neutral) measure. One focus will thereby be on estimation and hedging of downside risk.

Principal Investigator: Katharina Schmid
Research group: Leadership Development Research Center (GLEAD)
Funding body: Ajuts a l'activitat de recerca PDI 2020 - URL
Funding: €10,000
Duration: 12 months

A key societal challenge in Spain, as in many parts of the world, entails preventing discrimination and social exclusion of minority and disadvantaged groups in society, as well as curbing extremism. Recent political trends in Spain reflect a surge in extr eme attitudes and discriminatory behaviour towards minority groups, especially immigrants. To address this challenge, this research project will use a highly innovative design that bridges cutting edge insights from the fields of psychology, political science, sociology and behavioural economics, and that triangulates three unique quantitative data collection methods (i.e., a general population survey, an implicit association test, and a series of experiments). Two key factors central to understanding discrimination, social exclusion and far-right attitudes are 1) understanding the antecedents and drivers thereof, and 2) identifying strategies to prevent, minimize or overcome this. In addressing both thes e factors, the project will focus on the role of perceived threat as antecedent of, and on intergroup contact as a strategy to prevent discrimination, social exclusion and far-right attitudes, respectively.

The project will focus on a central antecedent of discrimination and far-right attitudes, identity threat, as well as a key strategy to prevent such negative attitudes, intergroup contact; it will also examine previously unexplored conditional factors that explain the complex interplay between contact and threat. The project will focus centrally on attitudes toward immigrants but will also consider attitudes towards other disadvantaged and/or minority groups that are prominent in the current far-right discourse in Spain (e.g., attitudes toward women’s rights, Muslims). In so doing, the results of this project will offer applied recommendations to policy makers and other key stakeholders seeking to prevent discrimination, social exclusion and far-right extremism in Spain.

Principal Investigator: Bart de Langhe
Research group: Research Group on Judgements and Decisions in the Marketplace (JUICE) – Institute for Data-Driven Decisions (Esade D3)
Funding body: Ajuts a l'activitat de recerca PDI 2020 - URL
Funding: €10,000
Duration: 12 months

Executives make decisions in an environment characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The decision s they make often have large stakes, and there is little diagnostic feedback about whether the decisions they made were good or bad . I am requesting funding for two studies that examine the psychology of executive decision-making. The first aims to examine how executives develop a sense of understanding, and how that sense of understanding relates to their true understanding. In other words, what makes an executive believe that s/he made a good or a bad decision? And how does that belief relate to the objective quality of decision -making? I hypothesize that exogenous trends, that are not under control of the executive, create an illusory sense of understanding of how the world works. This is because executives come to believe that their actions are responsible for the trend they observe. This illusory understanding can lead executives to make objectively worse decisions. The second study builds on an article I published in Harvard Business Review in September 2019, entitled "The Dangers of Categorical Thinking." The article describes four negative consequences of simplifying complex/continuous environments by dividing it into discrete buckets. For instance, when marketers divide their customer base into a smaller group of segments, they simplify their environment. This facilitates decision-making, but it also implies loss of information, which may harm decision-making. The predictions we make in Harvard Business Review are based on existing research in cognitive science, but have not been empirically examined yet in the context of segmentation and targeting decisions. Segmentation and targeting is at the heart of marketing. There has been much research examining quantitative/statistical aspects of it, but no research has examined it through a psychological/behavioral lens. That's the goal of the second study I am asking funding for.

INTERNATIONAL

NATIONAL

Competitive projects

INTERNATIONAL

NATIONAL

Change language