Report by Xavier Martin
One session of the CentER 25 Conference was devoted to four Business tracks: Accounting, Information
Management, Marketing, and Strategy & Organization. The first alumnus speaker was Martijn de Jong,
who graduated in 2006 with a CentER Ph.D. in Marketing and by 2011 became a Full Professor at
Erasmus University. Martijn started the workshop by providing detailed advice about an academic
career: from the importance of pre-doctoral training and the qualities of CentER’s faculty and program
that attracted him to Tilburg, to developing a coherent dissertation and skill set, to post-graduation
career opportunities and tradeoffs. In his words, a successful academic career “requires careful
planning, entrepreneurial spirit, and some luck”. Discussant Rik Pieters started with an insightful and
entertaining reminder of the logic and history of the development of CentER, which thoroughly
redesigned systems and incentives for research – something from which graduate students and faculty
benefit to this day. He then commented on the importance and sophistication of Martijn’s research,
linking stated and revealed preference measurement, concluding with an optimistic note about those
who carry the CentER spirit of strong thinking and practical skills.
The second alumnus speaker was Freek Vermeulen, who graduated in 1999 with a CentER Ph.D. in
Organization & Strategy and is now a tenured faculty member at London Business School. His talk
emphasized what research is good for: To theorize and demonstrate empirically relationships that may
be counter-intuitive or apparently paradoxical, but that force us to rethink practice – for example, by
illuminating tradeoffs between quality management and innovation, or between short-term savings and
long-term growth. He also discussed his efforts to reach out to practitioners on this basis. In her
comments, TiSEM’s Professor Tal Simons spoke of the importance of a committed research agenda and
mindset.
The third alumnus was Jan Bouwens, who graduated in 1998 and is now a Professor of Accounting at
Tilburg University. Jan described research opportunities in two areas: governance, where understanding
the internal controls and external regulation of auditing firms is important given past accounting
scandals; and various application of relational contracting such as in target setting and business
organization. Jan also commented on the progress of the CentER graduate track in accounting, which
has also become one of Europe’s best. His colleagues Jeroen Suijs commented on the importance of
precision in measurement and in reporting the practical magnitude of research results.
Finally, Professor Mike Papazoglou stated that Information Management research encompasses
multiple disciplines around technology and organization. He provided a high-level review of major
research themes including networked enterprises, smart applications such as in healthcare, open
innovation and governance.
Fittingly, the audience discussion highlighted some of the commonalities between the research practices
and themes emphasized by the various speakers, and with the research on decision-making by Dan
Levinthal, who received an Honorary Doctorate during the Dies that followed the CentER 25th
Anniversary conference.
Report by Harry Huizinga
One session of the CentER 25 Conference was devoted to Economics and Finance. The first speaker was
Jean-Jacques Herings who graduated with a PhD from CentER in 1995 is currently is Professor of
Economics at Maastricht University. Jean-Jacques gave a presentation entitled ‘A Personal Theory on
Theory’. Jean-Jacques told the audience that during his PhD studies he greatly benefited from courses
offered by the NAKE educational network. The list of professors who then taught NAKE courses is very
impressive and includes several Nobel laureates such as Joseph Stiglitz. Jean-Jacques also mentioned
some of his recent research contained in a working paper entitled ‘Equilibrium and Matching under
Price Controls’. As a promising area of future research, he mentioned research on networks.
The second speaker was Michael Kosfeld who obtained his PhD at CentER in 1995 and currently is
Professor of Economics at Goethe University. The title of his talk was ‘What is a Good Experiment’.
Along the way, he advised current PhD students ‘to work at least 60 hours a week, because you will
never have that much time again for your research in the future’. This echoes advice Michael received
himself as a PhD student from Professor Eric van Damme. Other pieces of good advice to PhD students
are ‘be creative and question everything, talk to the best people in your field, and if you have a great
contribution, try to convince others’. He further told the audience that ‘a good experiment answers one
question but raises many new ‘, quoting Professor Reinhard Selten.
Ralph Koijen, who received his CentER PhD in 2008 and now is Professor of Finance at London Business
School, was the third speaker. He presented a preliminary version of his new paper entitled ‘An
Equilibrium Model of Institutional Demand and Asset Prices’. The paper derives asset demand functions
starting from heterogeneous preferences among institutional investors. The model of the paper can be
used to understand the role of institutions in asset market liquidity, volatility and predictability.
The fourth and final speaker was Charles Noussair who is the Arie Kapteyn Professor of Economics at
Tilburg University. At the time of the Conference, Charles in addition was the Director of Graduate
Studies. He indicated that currently there are about 37 Research Master students and 50 active, regular
PhD students enrolled at CentER. In addition, CentER offers a PhD program for professionals and it runs
the CentER honors program. He also presented a summary of his research contained in the co-authored
paper entitled ‘Cooperation in a Dynamic Fishing Game: A Framed Field Experiment’. The paper
appropriately reported a field experiment, given that Professor John List of the University of Chicago
was to receive an honorary doctorate from Tilburg University for his ground breaking field experiments
later in the day. The experiment reported by Charles involves the behavior of fishers in a trout-fishing
facility located near Tilburg to measure whether these fishers are cooperating or not, given that the
number of fish that are released into the common pond depends on how many fish these fishermen
individually caught previously.