Frederik Witte, a 4th year Ph.D. candidate here at EMLYON
just won the J. M. Veciana Best Paper Award for a Junior Researcher. The award was delivered during RENT Conference's gala dinner.
Frederik's paper is entitled “Investing effort under ambiguity: Experimental evidence explaining entrepreneurs’ work hours”. The abstract is as follows:
Entrepreneurs invest in ideas to self-insure their residual income. It’s a decision under ambiguity, involving unknown probabilities and unknown outcomes. This paper focuses on the impact of idea creation on effort investment over time, independent of unknown outcomes. The experiment tests ambiguity-based effort investment (i.e., time performing an effort task), before and after feedback, in two conditions: situations where effort is invested working on the experimenter’s idea and situations where the decision maker invests effort working on his own idea. Results show significant differences. Participants working on their own ideas invest less effort; their accuracy is lower as well. But only those who work on their own ideas invest more effort after negative feedback. The theory of cognitive dissonance explains the effect.
Congratulations, Fred!