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The thesis discusses the entrepreneurial effort before and during disruptions. It considers that disruptions force entrepreneurs to be resilient and innovate. Therefore, this thesis is a look at three different angles. At first, the theoretical background on disruptive innovations as the most representative disruption creator is discussed. This essay focuses on the entrepreneurial practices to disrupt with a new value proposal and change the industry rules. Once the disruption is created, it continues as a constant disruption for competitors and disruptors. The second essay empirically explores the operationalization behind the acceleration process in the disruption. Precisely, what entrepreneurial practices disruptors use to speed up, with an innovative business model to overcome the process. The identification of the practices shows an evolution over the disruption process as part of their resilience. Lastly, the third essay retakes the entrepreneurial resilience concept in the frame of the covid crisis as a disruption moment to understand the social construction through media. This critical perspective possesses questions and claims for disruptive moments. The integration and sequence of these three essays analyze disruptions at theoretical, empirical, and critical views, bringing insightful practical and theoretical contributions., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2022

Employee green behavior is a key contributor to corporate greening. While organizations often focus on technical solutions, the role of employees in corporate greening activities is underestimated. Researchers have pointed at different individual as well as organizational factors’ impacts on corporate greening and employee green behavior. However, the multilevel nature of employee green behavior has often been neglected, as have the contextual factors around it. This doctoral dissertation addresses this gap in three papers applying qualitative and quantitative methods to study how employee green behavior is influenced by sustainability paradoxes and the paradoxical tensions they cause for employees and organizations. The first paper examines how sustainability paradoxes influence corporate greening. Activities directed at corporate greening render sustainability paradoxes salient; these are (not) worked through by organizational members in different ways, and have unintended consequences on the effectiveness of corporate greening measures. The second paper explores green employees’ paradoxical identity and performing tensions that arise when employees attempt to engage in green behaviors. It shows that paradoxical tensions can lead to responses of splitting, withdrawal, or, in the most severe cases, pursuing exit strategies. Finally, the third paper studies the conjoint effect of environmental self-identity, perceived supervisory support toward the environment, and perceived organizational support toward the environment on predicting employee green behavior. It shows that a stronger environmental self-identity and higher levels of supervisory support strengthen the effect of organizational support on employee green behavior. However, if environmental self-identity is weak and perceived supervisory support toward the environment is low, organizational support is found to be not related to employee green behavior. These results have implications for the management of, (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2022

Negative interest rates (NIRs) is unprecedented monetary policy that turns standard finance on its head. Since it turns standard finance at its head, the borrowers receive a reward for taking credits, and depositors have to pay for being patient and delaying their consumption. The main goal of this monetary policy is to stimulate economic growth and consumption by promoting both risk-taking and spending. Since its implementation, there is a growing body of literature studying its effectiveness. While examining its effectiveness, this literature focuses on various stakeholders touched by this monetary policy, including banks, institutional investors, and retail investors. In this thesis, we provide four experimental papers on how NIRs impact individuals’ behavior. We provide a general introduction in Chapter 1. Next, Chapter 2 investigates people’s willingness to accept NIRs by analyzing their intertemporal preferences using an online experiment. We show that people are willing to tolerate negative interest rates on their savings. We find that this tolerance strongly depends on the amount of money and time horizon. Finally, we show that it also depends on whether an individual is a regular saver or not and whether he is anchored with NIRs or positive interest rates (PIRs) first. Chapter 3 focuses on the impact of PIRs, NIRs, and procedures and costs on status quo bias in the context of savings. This status quo bias refers to the increased probability of one option being chosen when framed as status quo than when it is not framed as status quo. Using an online experiment, we find that the status quo bias is lower with NIRs than with PIRs. Next, we obtain that this status quo bias increases when one must go through procedures and pay costs to shift from the status quo to another alternative. Finally, we find that highly financially literate individuals show lower bias towards the status quo than their less financially literate counterparts. In Chapter 4, we study the i, (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2022

Globalization has strengthened the linkage across economies and financial markets around the world. Against this background, this thesis builds alternative modelling frameworks to study movements in the term structure of interest rates in a context of global interdependencies. All frameworks are based on the arbitrage-free affine term structure model with unspanned risk (Joslin, Priebsch, and Singleton, 2014) and include macro-financial variables among the risk factors. Using data from several emerging economies, our models are also used to investigate the determinants of bond risk premia in recent decades, to appraise the importance of China's business cycle on Latin American yield curve dynamics, as well as to assess the impact of the global spread of the coronavirus on the term structure dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also guide the use of the functionalities of the R-package MultiATSM, which we developed during the preparation of this thesis. Overall, our empirical results point to beyond-the-border economic forces as the primary source of domestic term structure fluctuations., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2022

In a globalized world, modelling interconnections among countries/markets is fundamental for correct inferences. The literature in dynamic multivariate modelling is often divided into data- and assumption-driven models. While the former ones fit rather well the data, the latter ones feature more intuitive economic interpretation. The purpose of the thesis is to (i) build a bridge between those two strands of the literature and (ii) offer new perspectives regarding the degrees of integration/fragmentation of a system. Starting from modelling the term structure of interest rate in the euro area, we show that a model featuring both common and idiosyncratic risk factors captures most of the observed variation in realized excess returns. Moreover, it allows to assess fragmentation risk (i.e., the risk of divergent paths of local sovereign bond yields) not only as independence (i.e., predominance of local risk factors) but also as heterogeneous exposure to common shocks. Secondly, we propose a validity test for ex ante proposed channels of interconnection, showing that not only the tightness of the interconnection matters, but also its sign. Focusing on the long-term sovereign bond market, we show that sign-adjusted models document fragmentation risk in the euro area well before the outburst of the sovereign debt crisis in late 2009, and indicate a rise in fragmentation risk during the COVID-pandemic period. Lastly, to analyse the co-movements in global house prices, we propose and implement a new method for identifying the common components among structural shocks. We show that expectation and mortgage rate shocks account for most of the observed co-movement in global house prices. Moreover, while supply and demand shocks tend to account for the observed trends, mortgage and expectation shocks account most of the boom-bust cycles observed in house prices., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2022

Based on four essays, this thesis aims at gaining a better understanding of the impact of social media influencers' (SMIs) content strategies on the perceptions, behaviors, and well-being of their followers. More specifically, with the first essay, we explore followers' consumption habits, as well as their perceptions of SMIs' partnerships and drivers of influence. In the second essay, we demonstrate the positive impact of parasocial interaction - an illusion of friendship between followers and SMIs - on attitude towards the SMI but also on purchase intentions and explain the underlying process through perceived intrinsic motivations. In the third essay, we show the limit of SMIs' influence by explaining the negative impact of frequent dissatisfaction with endorsed products on purchase intentions for future endorsed products. We also examine the role of credibility and parasocial interaction in the process. The last essay extends our knowledge on the SMIs’ influence incorporating an original psychosocial perspective. We demonstrate that maintaining SMIs’ genuineness positively impacts followers’ well-being and purchase intentions. We explain this process through upward comparison and self-esteem., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2022

Since the rapid growth of the Internet and the advent of social networks in the 2000s, the amount of available network data is quickly increasing, leading to the development of new network analysis methods. Nowadays, these network analysis methods have spread to various fields, including, among others, marketing, supply chain, finance, and biology, as essential analysis and prediction tools. This thesis focuses on the development of one of these methods, called the bag-of-paths framework. This framework has the specificity to define a family of dissimilarity measures between nodes of the network that extrapolate between an optimal exploitation of the graph structure (optimal behavior - shortest path distance) and a random exploration of the graph (random behavior - commute time distance) via a parameter that controls the desired degree of randomness/exploration. Throughout this thesis, we propose several theoretical and practical extensions of the bag-of-paths framework. Regarding the theoretical contributions, we incorporate capacity constraints on edges, marginal constraints on input and output flows, and a Poisson distribution weighting and constraining path lengths, into the bag-of-paths framework. Furthermore, we expose the applicability of this framework through graph-based semi-supervised classification tasks and a real-life fraud detection case., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2022

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008–2009 brought to light the importance of taking a macroprudential approach to financial stability in order to ensure that the financial system is resilient to periods of severe stress, which would result in a lower incidence of financial crises. The lessons learned from this exceptional event fostered international efforts to develop a comprehensive macroprudential framework promoting financial stability and the resilience of the financial system. As countries worldwide have been adopting policy instruments from this continuously expanding macroprudential toolkit over the last decade, this dissertation revolves around the assessment of the macroprudential framework. In particular, we focus on i) its effectiveness in delivering on its intended goals; ii) potential unintended consequences of macroprudential policy reforms; and iii) developing new monitoring approaches for macroprudential risks to anticipate and build resilience against the next source of shock to financial stability. Chapter 1 proposes a novel empirical setup that accounts for the simultaneous effects of macroprudential policies on the probability of financial crises and economic growth and also allows for an assessment of their net effect on the probability of a crisis. Our empirical setup is designed to account for the potential direct and indirect effects that macroprudential policies can have on banking crises. We document the empirical relevance of both effects. Chapter 2 provides an analysis of the transmission of macroprudential regulation across both financial and non-financial sectors through the lens of its impact on short- and long-term probabilities of default at the sector level. Tighter macroprudential regulations lower default risk in both financial and non-financial sectors. Higher capital requirements improve the long-run resilience of the financial sector while raising long-term default risk in non-financial sectors. A strengthening in the res, (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2022

The evolution of online investing has been astonishing over the last two decades. More than ever, retail investors have their fate in their hands. They enjoy easy access to an extremely large variety of financial products which can sometimes be highly complicated and risky. To separate the wheat from the chaff, retail investors are left with limited resources in terms of skills, time, and wealth, and some of them opt for a passive investment strategy based on low-cost financial instruments, such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This doctoral dissertation consists of three essays about passive ETFs and retail investors using both trading records and survey-based data. The first essay shows that retail investors who trade passive ETFs are more sophisticated than those who do not. The second essay shows that passive ETF retail investors show different trading behaviors than individual stock investors. They have better understanding of diversification, have a larger portfolio size, lower turnover, hold their assets for longer periods of time and are less willing to trade lottery-like stocks. The third essay shows that heavy passive ETFs investors trade more passively. The portfolio total and systematic risks are lower for passive ETF investors, while risk-adjusted performance is negative but still higher than investors who trade individual stocks only., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2022

This doctoral dissertation, within the management science discipline, aims to understand and to measure what Islamic finance can propose as an alternative funding retail offer in Belgium. From the primary findings, we try to discover what are its stakes in a capitalistic environment. The study, which is conducted with quantitative and qualitive research methods, is built on four essays that question stakeholders from the demand and the supply: retail consumers, SMEs managers, professional advisors and financial institutions. Each of these four stakeholders is at the origin of an independent but complementary essay that contributes to the general discussion. This research contributes to the managerial field by pointing out the tensions and potential drawbacks in proposing Islamic finance as a relevant retail funding solution in Belgium. We highlight the fact that on the demand side, there is not enough engagement drivers from the consumer, and on the offer side, the financial interest to offer those funding solutions is relatively limited. Finally, by capturing profit and with its engagement motivations, we show how Islamic finance can be proposed as an expression of capitalism., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2021

This doctoral dissertation, built on four essays that combine quantitative and qualitative research methods, aims to better understand the process of engagement—the process by which people continue to invest efforts—in healthy behaviors using certain technologies, such as mobile health apps. The first essay aids understanding of the barriers and incentives within the engagement process regarding healthy behaviors and explores the potential influence of technologies on engagement in healthy behaviors. The second essay shows the effectiveness of a specific design element of mobile health apps, i.e., a challenge as gamification mechanic, to further investigate both how to engage users and the underlying process of engagement in different contexts associated with health issues. The third essay further examines various user profiles, focusing on users’ current stages of change in the behavior change process, as well as the influences of the latter in the engagement process. The fourth essay aims to provide a 360-degree perspective on health apps, adding the potential negative effects of a design element—an online community of users—to the positive dimensions that are usually considered in the literature. This paper examines how online communities that potentially activate social comparisons and tie strength perceptions may impact the effectiveness of a fitness application in supporting its users’ behavioral changes. Therefore, this doctoral dissertation contributes to the literature on mobile health apps by offering a better understanding of their ability to further engage users in healthy behaviors. It underlies the user engagement process to gain insights into the effectiveness of health apps as an intervention mechanism in addressing health issues. Specifically, this research provides theoretical insights into the design elements that facilitate or hinder users’ engagement with health apps. This research also contributes from a managerial perspective by guiding field, (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2021

The internal audit function has evolved over recent decades to adapt to the changing business environment. Today, the business environment is increasingly digitalised and requires organisations to adapt. Developed around three essays, this doctoral dissertation investigates how the internal audit function has evolved in a digitalised context in order to help organisations manage risks and achieve their goals. From a theoretical perspective, this doctoral thesis offers a more holistic and comprehensive view of the effects of digitalisation on the internal audit function, by gathering the perceptions of multiple stakeholders. In addition, this research considers multiple dimensions of internal audit quality and shows the positive effects of the use of data analytics and the performance of consulting activities by internal auditors on internal audit quality. This doctoral research also provides managerial contributions. First, it highlights the importance for the internal audit function to adapt its scope by developing an agile approach to audit planning. Second, it highlights that developing an advisory role for the internal audit function brings value to organisations. Third, it emphasises the need for internal audit departments to improve their digital expertise to acquire the digital knowledge necessary to audit increasingly digitalised business processes, but also to harness the potential of new technologies, especially data analytics, to perform their missions., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2021

This thesis focuses on the modelling of supply chains under uncertainty. Supply chains consist of a network of companies for purchasing raw materials, transforming these materials into intermediate and finished products, and distributing the finished products to customers. Efficient and effective supply chain management involves addressing three fundamental questions: how to buy, how to make, and how to sell? These problems are highly influenced by various uncertain factors. This thesis explores three specific topics in the context of these problems in the presence of supply chain uncertainty. In particular, this thesis provides insight into whether or when competing manufacturers would prefer individual purchasing over joint purchasing. This purchasing decision is greatly influenced by uncertainty on market demand and rival’s product technology level. Linear information structure and two point distribution are used to capture these two types of uncertainty respectively. This thesis also developes an optimization based production planning tool that helps manufacturers minimize total costs while meeting sustainability goals. This tool enables manufacturers launch extensive scenario analysis to cope with various sources of uncertainty, such as uncertainty on production capacity, emission price, demand etc. Finally, this thesis shed light on the supplier’s optimal order fulfilment sequence given that buyers have different level of reliability in terms of forecast communication, where buyers’ future reliability is estimated based on the past forecast sharing performance which is assumed to follow the normal distribution., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2021

This research aims at identifying the dynamics of dialogue on work in so-called liberated companies. The "liberation" movement of organizations promotes workers' autonomy, responsibility and "freedom". The ambassadors of this managerial technique thus promise to restore the harmony between well-being in the workplace and the performance of organizations. But beyond this seductive discourse, what about people's daily experiences? This is what this thesis aims to understand, using a research methodology that allows the researcher to meet the workers of these organizations. Through the prism of the discussion spaces at work, the thesis sheds light on the stakes and difficulties of daily life in the so-called liberated companies. It identifies, for example, the new prescriptions concerning deliberation on work, with regard to workers, in the name of "liberation". More generally, the thesis offers a critical look at contemporary managerial techniques in order to shed light on the complexities of everyday life, which are still often overlooked in managerial discourse., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2021

This Ph.D. thesis aims at assessing the benefits of horizontal cooperation in logistics and at analyzing how these benefits depend on the markets and partners characteristics. In the past recent years, researchers have presented horizontal cooperation as an efficient and unique way to reduce costs (e.g., transportation, inventory, facility, stock-out) and CO2 emissions. The literature on horizontal cooperation demonstrates a high variation in benefits related to the collaboration, regarding the markets and the partners characteristics as they impact the design of the supply chain network. These benefits are therefore difficult to predict, which can be a significant obstacle for companies considering forming a cooperation. In order to promote horizontal cooperation to companies, it was thus crucial to assess these benefits for each partner. Moreover, while horizontal cooperation has mainly been analyzed at an operational level with transportation decisions in the current literature, the present thesis examines horizontal cooperation at tactical and strategic levels, using location-inventory models to decide the number and location of facilities, the delivery network and the inventory decisions. From different sets of experiments, we present useful insights to companies wishing to collaborate. This Ph.D. thesis also provides valuable tools to select the more favorable partners and to define markets characteristics that should motivate companies to collaborate. Finally, we integrate companies’ individual expectations in our models to understand why some companies leave a collaboration and, therefore, try to improve the long-term stability of collaboration., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2021

Faced with the inherent limits of the planet and the need to reduce waste disposal, our society needs to shift towards more sustainable patterns of production and consumption. In this context, we adopt a focus on product-service systems (PSS), the integrated systems of products and services that aim to be competitive, satisfy consumer needs, and have a lower environmental impact than traditional business models. In particular, the three essays of this dissertation investigate whether and how PSS help curb obsolescence practices and how consumers respond to these systems in a business-to-consumer context. The fight against obsolescence (i.e., ‘the deliberate curtailment of product lifespan and the symbolic devaluation of durable goods’) has a leading role to play on environmental development challenges, but academic research on the topic is scarce. A conceptual paper first highlights how product-oriented PSS can reduce the probability of obsolescence occurrence and increase the life cycle (i.e., delaying time to obsolescence) of durable products. We detail the particularities of each sub-practice of product-oriented PSS (i.e., consumer education, take-back schemes and revalorization services, maintenance contracts and repair services, and upgrades), which displays equivocal relationships to the different types of obsolescence (physical, technical, after-sales, economic, psychological, and ecological) and outline a clear research agenda, delineating priorities and paths toward new ways of thinking about PSS. In the second essay, we narrow down our focus to one type of product-oriented PSS sub-practice: repair services. We examine repair within a signaling framework to determine the suitability of repairability communication as a signal of high-quality, durable goods. We employ mixed-methods research to determine how and when informing consumers about a brand promise of repairability through pre-purchase communication can influence their attitude toward the product and, (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2021

Agile is nowadays one of the most-used software development approaches. To gain the full benefit from adopting agile methods, software development teams can choose to adopt agile methods on a custom-basis depending on the context and defined criteria. Over the years, a vast amount of empirical studies aiming to share adoption experiences and introduce the possibility to customize agile methods has been published. Two key aspects in these studies are the goal- orientation and the social aspect. Intuitively, a team adopts agile methods because there are things it wants to achieve. Once the team identifies the right practices to achieve its goals, the adoption result highly depends on the social factors, including the individuals, their interactions and collaborations. In this thesis, we propose a socio-intentional framework for tailoring agile methods that allows practitioners to analyze agile practices and to define the right strategies for adopting them. The objective of our framework is to help practitioners decide which agile practices to adopt based on what they want to achieve and identify beforehand how team members should work together to successfully adopt them. To achieve this objective, we proceeded through four main contributions. In the first contribution, we conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to extract the motivation behind each agile method’s adoption and compared it with the precepts given in the Agile Manifesto. The results show that the Agile Manifesto is highly relevant to these motivations. We conclude that the Agile Manifesto can be used as a criterion for practice selection. In the second contribution, we made knowledge about agile practices adoption reusable in a systematic manner by building an ontology. We started by conducting another SLR to gather knowledge. Based on this, we have built and theoretically validated our ontology. Finally, we conducted a survey with agile experts for empirical validation. In the third contribution, (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2021

Ever since modern portfolio theory was introduced by Harry Markowitz in 1952, a plethora of papers have been written on the mean-variance investment problem. However, due to the non-Gaussian nature of asset returns, the mean and variance statistics are insufficient to adequately represent their full distribution, which depends on higher moments too. Higher-moment portfolio selection is however more complex; a smaller literature has been dedicated to this problem and no consensus emerges about how investors should allocate their wealth when higher moments cannot be ignored. Among the proposed alternatives, researchers have recently considered information theory, and entropy in particular, as a new framework to tackle this problem. Entropy provides an appealing criterion as it measures the amount of randomness embedded in a random variable from the shape of its density function, thus accounting for all moments. The application of information theory to portfolio selection is however nascent and much remains to explore. Therefore, in this thesis, we aim to explore the portfolio-selection problem from an information-theoretic angle, accounting for higher moments., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2020

Innovations in financial markets have been numerous lately. Within two decades, most of the trading activity has been done electronically and trading rooms have become deserted as computers have been able to make autonomous trading decisions more rapidly than in the past; information is now spreading at the speed of light; and a plethora of electronic currencies, whose reliability is based on cryptographic proofs rather than trust, have been issued. There is no shortage of examples, from market finance to corporate finance. Every field is affected by the digitalization phenomenon: online investing and online financial advice, digital currencies and paperless payments, crowdfunding, or high-frequency trading, among others. In this thesis, we provide three empirical analyses of how some of these innovations affect financial markets., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2020

Face au problème universel de l’inégalité d’accès des salariés actifs à la FPC, nous nous interrogeons sur les logiques d’action des acteurs. Les enjeux de justice en la matière se trouvent non seulement sur une proportion importante d’inégalité d’accès, mais la liberté d’action, la question du choix et les relations au travail constituent autant de questions qui touchent aux sphères de justice. Dans cette thèse, nous avons examiné les principes de justification qui ont légitimé l’engagement des acteurs dans cette pratique. Nous nous sommes intéressés également aux mécanismes institutionnels, socioéconomiques et culturels susceptibles d’influencer ces justifications. En partant d’une approche constructiviste et centrée sur les acteurs, nous avons étudié le sens de la justice en matière de FPC des salariés vietnamiens des secteurs manufacturier et universitaire. Les résultats de notre recherche montrent que l’inégalité d’accès en soi, ne constitue pas forcement un problème de justice en matière de FPC. Cette inégalité dissimule la pluralité des critères de justice des personnes concernées, (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2017

La thèse examine l’influence des contraintes institutionnelles et des dynamiques organisationnelles au sein de la « fabrique » de l’intégration professionnelle. Dans le but de comprendre l’intrication entre les différents processus en jeu, cette recherche fait dialoguer les théories néo-institutionnelles et la théorie de la régulation sociale, mettant en avant les pressions institutionnelles cadrant les organisations et les choix managériaux, mais également les réactions des acteurs de l’organisation – gestionnaires et travailleurs – par rapport aux règles imposées. Au travers d’une enquête quantitative, d’une analyse documentaire et d’études de cas, cette thèse de doctorat démontre que l’intégration professionnelle est influencée par les contraintes institutionnelles et les processus organisationnels, mais dans une certaine mesure seulement. C’est finalement le jeu des acteurs en présence qui façonne l’intégration professionnelle., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2017

Academics and practitioners acknowledge the relevance to co-create value with customers in terms of innovation and relationship management. The emergence of online platforms, communities and social networks has been widely recognized to facilitate the interactions, resources exchanges and value co-creation. However, despite their important role, these technologies are not sufficient for an effective engagement of customers yet considered as a key predictor of successful co-creation experiences. Although value co-creation has been explored by researchers from multiple fields, how to design interactive platforms to engage customers is a gap consistently identified by prior literature and the Marketing Science Institute as requiring further research. Therefore, this doctoral dissertation compiles four essays combining qualitative and quantitative methods to explore gamification as a powerful means to create, manage and maintain participants’ engagement over time. Our contributions to management and marketing disciplines are threefold. First, we unify the difference perspectives discussing value co-creation around a common theoretical framework. Second, we emphasize the dynamics underlying customer engagement and explore their evolution over time. Finally, we conceptualize gamification through a customer-centric perspective and explain how gamification mechanics operate thorough customers’ journey. In that respect, we report the benefits and potential risks related to those mechanics and provide managers with guidelines regarding how to manage gamification over time., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2017

There is no doubt that loyalty programs are still popular. But are they still effective? Marketers continue to put more and more time and money into their programs, but are they getting the kind of payoffs they expect in customer relationships and engagement? Taking this issue as a starting point, this doctoral dissertation assesses the effectiveness of loyalty programs in building customer engagement and loyalty. Specifically, the first essay shows what engagement with loyalty programs is, develops a valid scale for it and assesses its link with company engagement. In addition, this essay shows that traditionally used measures of loyalty program engagement such as card usage or point redemption do not reflect effectively customer engagement with the company. The second essay identifies what reward types and communication should be used to make members more engaged in loyalty programs. The third essay identifies the behavioural patterns that reduce the gap between program loyalty and company loyalty. In addition, this essay investigates the impact of loyalty program related communication on this gap., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2017

Our research focuses on combining marketing research with algorithm- based recommender systems research in order to test the suitability of recommender systems in the communication strategy of a mass retailer. Personalization is very popular; however, recommendations are still rather rare in offline settings. This doctoral dissertation addresses this fact by assessing the effectiveness of a personalized communication strategy using collaborative recommendations. These recommendations take the tastes of users similar to the given customer into account. Specifically, we investigate the impact of personalized collaborative recommendations and personalized collaborative messages included in a marketing communication in the mass retail sector. Avenues for further research would be that mass retailers could imagine to communicate in real time with their customers in store using mobile devices or to construct a personalized customer relationship with the self-scanning tool in store., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2019

The objective of this thesis is to empirically examine whether the attribution of humanness to products and brands (i.e. anthropomorphism) is intrinsically interwoven with the lack of humanness ascription to people (i.e. dehumanization). In order to understand their complementarity, a series of experimental studies was designed to unveil the subtle context in which they can co-occur and to explore different cognitive mechanisms that can potentially underly these phenomena. Findings suggest that a simple advertising photo that pairs a product and a brand with a person can lead to anthropomorphism and dehumanization respectively., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2019

With the evolution of surgical techniques and especially micro-invasive surgeries, demand for blood for surgical operations is reduced. However, the demand for blood does not diminish. This is due to the dramatic growth of patients requiring blood transfusions such as leukemic, oncological patients and those following anticoagulant treatments. It is therefore imperative to ensure the availability of blood products at any time and to distribute them at the right time with the right amount (not too much to avoid the obsolescence of products nor too little to prevent shortages), inappropriate storage conditions. These health constraints are added to other economic related to storage and distribution costs that are to be optimized. As part of our research project, we are interested in organizing the logistics of blood products distribution. We focus our attention on the supply chain, particularly in the storage and distribution of blood products. Indeed, we are interested in the joint optimization of these two activities. We treat this problem in the context of centralized inventory management, driven by the blood centers. We take inspiration from Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) approaches where the supplier manages the inventory of his customers, deciding, with a commitment of service, quantities to be delivered to each customer. Also, in order to determine the contribution of optimization techniques borrowed from the industrial world for the resolution of public health problems, we allow the transfer of products between hospitals to ensure good rotation of the stocks and especially to satisfy the urgent requests. In order to deal with the problem that concerns us, we have developed several linear mathematical models considering the possibility of transfer and use of substitute products when needed. The models developed have been the subject of several experiments to validate them and to determine the impact of transfer and substitution on the resolution of the problem., Grâce à l’évolution des techniques chirurgicales et surtout des chirurgies micro-invasives, la demande en sang pour les opérations chirurgicales est réduite. Cependant, la demande en sang ne diminue pas pour autant. Cela est dû à la croissance spectaculaire des patients nécessitant des transfusions sanguines comme les patients leucémiques, oncologiques et ceux suivant des traitements anticoagulants. Il est donc impératif d’assurer la disponibilité des produits sanguins à tout moment et de pouvoir les distribuer au bon endroit, avec la bonne quantité (ni trop pour éviter de devoir jeter le surplus non utilisé avant la date de péremption, ni trop peu pour éviter toute pénurie), dans des conditions de conservation appropriées. Ces contraintes sanitaires s’ajoutent à d’autres économiques et financières liées aux coûts de stockage et de distribution qui sont à optimiser. Nous nous intéressons, dans le cadre de notre projet de recherche, à l’organisation de la logistique de distribution des produits sanguins. Nous focalisons notre attention sur la chaîne logistique, notamment les activités de stockage et de distribution des produits sanguins. En effet, nous nous intéressons à l’optimisation conjointe de ces deux activités. Nous traitons ce problème dans le contexte d’une gestion centralisée des stocks, pilotée par les centres de transfusion. Nous nous inspirons des approches Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) ou le fournisseur se charge de gérer les stocks de ses clients, décidant, moyennant un engagement de service, des quantités à livrer à chaque client. Aussi, en vue de déterminer l’apport des techniques d’optimisation empruntées au monde industriel pour la résolution des problèmes de santé public, nous autorisons le partage des stocks ou les transferts de produits entre les hôpitaux pour assurer une bonne rotation des stocks et surtout satisfaire les demandes urgentes. Afin de traiter ce problème, nous l’avons modélisé sous forme d’un programme linéaire mixte tenant compt, (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2019

Social entrepreneurship has considerably attracted the attention of scholars and different stakeholders such as educators, investors and government institutions. Social entrepreneurial ventures primarily pursue social and/or environmental objectives through commercial activities and by utilizing a wide range of resources. Over the last few years, there has been an abundance of theoretical, conceptual and empirical papers that have made social entrepreneurship navigate from a nascent stage of development to an area of rapid growth with a surge of research output. Despite this widespread and growing research attention, a substantial amount of knowledge gap revolves in our understanding of the process of social entrepreneurship. My PhD research contributes by shedding light on the multi-level nature of social entrepreneurship by examining how the social entrepreneurial process manifests at the micro-level, meso-level and macro-level. The four chapters of my dissertation draw on theory from the field of management to investigate the different dynamics of social entrepreneurship, through induction, deduction and abduction. The first chapter of my thesis draws data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2015 report and contributes by examining the external environmental factors that stimulate or impede social entrepreneurial activity at the macro-level (i.e. macro-level process). The second chapter of my thesis is a qualitative study that focuses on the structure of hybrid organizing (i.e. meso-level process). The current literature on hybrid organizing in social entrepreneurship highlights the different tensions, such as conflicting institutional logics, stakeholder value mismatch and mission-drift, evoked by this structure. In this chapter, my research investigation takes a contrary stance and explores two main advantages of hybrid organizing in social entrepreneurship. The third chapter of my thesis is a quantitative inquiry that primarily investigates crowdfunding (, (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2019

We consider a portfolio of products in which each product probabilistically transitions through various life cycle stages. The evolution through these life cycle stages is impacted by both marketing support and product launch decisions, which are bound by a financial constraint in the form of restricted working capital. In the model, the joint working capital level serves to finance the portfolio expenditures and is decided a priori by the company. We use an infinite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) to find the optimal decisions to coordinate the operations and finance depending on the composition of the portfolio. We find that the policy optimizing the product launch, marketing support and inventory decisions under a working capital constraint is independent of the correlation between demand levels of the products in the portfolio. We numerically demonstrate that the joint management of the products has a significant positive effect on the total profit, reducing the amount of working capital used per product. We also show that the optimal policy smooths aggregated demand levels as well as cash flows.

If resources are everywhere, why collaboration is not? This is especially an important question for SMEs since they have to face challenges for their survival with their limited resources. Globalization and increasing competition force smaller companies to search new ways to survive. This dissertation tries to provide elements of solution by developing three essays around the business network approach. The first essay enters the black box of business network by providing insights around international collaborations and its benefits for young internationalizing companies. The second essay builds on the international entrepreneurship literature by describing collaborations as a way for smaller companies to speed up their internationalization process. Finally, the third essay deals with the determinants of international collaboration adoption. This essay also examines the role of institutions within the business network approach of internationalization. Interviews with key public institutes and entrepreneurs suggest that collaboration has a pivotal role to play in SME internationalization, as long as the contextual factors are considered, which in turn, reduces the risks of partnerships. Through phone surveys, the study shows that network variables allow understanding why some SMEs are able to internationalize more early and rapidly than others., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2016

In-process promotions focus on promotional activities during marketing events such as auctions, crowdfunding, or fund-raising. Firms can observe consumers’ responses to these promotions and use this information to adjust future promotions sent during the same events. The authors study the impact of promotions on market outcomes and focus on one use of such promotions: messages sent during online auctions, in which the outcome is the final auction price. They propose that the effect of these messages can be understood by observing their aggregate impact on final auction prices and by examining how messages affect behaviors at the bid level, namely, new-bidder entry and jump bidding. These bid-level behaviors can, when summed at the auction level, affect auction prices. Besides examining the messages’ impact on bidder behavior, the authors study the auctioneer’s strategy in issuing these messages. They distinguish between informative messages, which focus on product attributes, and persuasive messages, which try to motivate the message recipients to bid. They test hypotheses derived from their framework using data from online auctions of Air France airline tickets. The authors also conduct “what-if” simulations to help auctioneers identify the optimal number of messages to send during an auction.

Critical Management Studies (CMS) is often dated from the publication of an edited volume bearing that name (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992). In the two decades that have followed, CMS has been remarkably successful in establishing itself not just as a ‘term’ but as a recognizable tradition or approach. The emerging status of CMS as an overall approach has been both encouraged and marked by a growing range of handbooks, readers and textbooks. Yet the literature is dominated by writings from the UK and Scandinavia in particular, and the tendency is to treat this literature as constituting CMS. However, the meaning, practice, constraints and context of CMS vary considerably between different countries, cultures and language communities. This volume surveys fourteen various countries and regions where CMS has acquired some following and seeks to explore the different ways in which CMS is understood and the different contexts within which it operates, as well as its possible future development.

Information systems become more accessible as a service offered to anybody, anywhere, at any time, via almost any device and computing platform. The continuous growth and the heterogeneity of these devices induce diverse user experiences depending on the device and challenge designers to creating methods and tools for engineering usable, yet accessible, information systems. Instead of repeating a similar development life cycle, design patterns concentrate design solutions with embedded usability and accessibility. Once a pattern is selected, the developer is responsible for adequately program the pattern code, which is a tedious and error-prone task. In order to address these challenges, this paper presents UIPLML (User Interface Pattern Language Markup Language), a XML-compliant markup language for defining user interface patterns for multiple contexts of use, e.g., for different users carrying out a task on different devices in different environments. A meta-model with new expressiveness enables multi-facet pattern matching. To validate it, four UIPLML pattern databases have been created: a base of 237 entries for multi-platform systems, a base of 42 entries for context-aware interfaces, a base of 10 entries for culturally-aware interfaces, and a base of 52 entries for accessibility. The master/detail pattern is in particular supported by a software for generative pattern-based approach where application parameters and contextual data govern automated user interface XML creation which, in turns, generates code for multi-platform information systems.

Les patrons de conceptions (pattern en anglais) sont un outil qui a fait ses preuves à la fois dans la communauté IHM et en génie logiciel pour l’ingénierie des systèmes interactifs. Cependant, tel que documenté aujourd’hui, la grande majorité des patrons de conception des interfaces utilisateurs ne supportent pas le développement et l’adaptation des interfaces dites multi-contextes d'utilisation (multiplateformes, caractéristiques et expériences des utilisateurs et multi-environnement logiciel). L’utilisabilité n’est pas aussi prise en compte explicitement. Cette faiblesse rend aussi difficile la tâche des développeurs et gestionnaires des systèmes d’information de choisir le modèle de conception adéquat pour un cas particulier d’utilisation. Cet article introduit le langage UIPLML (User Interface Pattern Langue Markup Language) qui exploite un format standardisé basée sur le XML qui permet d’apporter une solution satisfaisante à l’ensemble de ces faiblesses. Ce langage utilise le concept de patron génératif qui va au-delà de la simple documentation des patrons ; il propose d’intégrer dans la description des patrons, la stratégie de génération de code et d’adaptation de l’interface. Pour illustrer ce langage UIPLML, une application est présentée en utilisant le patron de conception : Master/Détails pattern. L’exemple décrit, en plus d’une définition complète, ce pattern incluant l’utilisabilité et la génération d’un fichier XML pour faciliter son implémentation dans le contexte des multiplateformes

Several papers have already highlighted that retail investors tend to favor stocks listed in countries that share a common language. We confirm previous results but unlike precedent papers we provide evidence that the difference of languages within the same country matters to understand foreign investing. We study the common language effect by distinguishing the two language groups that compose the Belgian population. We investigate whether the language difference between the French- and Dutch-speakers induces differences in their investment behavior. Our results support our hypothesis by showing that French(Dutch) stocks are more traded by the French(Dutch)-speaking investors. We provide evidence that the common language effect remains significant after controlling for the gender, age, level of education and financial literacy. More importantly, we show that investors with a higher level of education tend to be less affected by the common language effect. In addition, we show that the common language effect is reduced for firms not included in a national stock index. Presumably due to international coverage, French (Dutch) stocks listed in a national stock index tend to attract more investors whose native language is not French (Dutch). Finally we find that the preference for stocks listed in countries that share the same language doesn't seem to be information-driven. The French(Dutch)-speaking investors are not able to generate significantly positive net profits on these stocks and are rather suspected to display a behavioral bias.

The general theme covered in this dissertation is “Testing the impact of fiscal, financial, and political variables on European bond spreads”. We argue that deteriorations in fiscal and political variables during bad economic conditions and increased volatility in stock markets have been major drivers of the rise in bond spreads in various European countries. This allows us, to some extent, to apply an innovative approach when analyzing these internal factors. To the best of our knowledge, there are no existing research in the literature on European bond spreads, that apply a non-linear threshold method to explain how the impact of a change in government debt and in political risk on bond spread, depends on the level of government debt, real GDP growth, political risk, stock market volatility, and membership to the euro area. Moreover, in the literature analyzing the drivers of bond spreads, political risk variables usually considered are international political risks rather than country-specific political risks, that capture the deterioration of the domestic political situation. In the first chapter, we propose a framework that captures the impact of public debt ratios during periods of bad economic conditions. We used a fixed effect panel approach to show that deterioration of public debts are significant during bad economic conditions, in contrast to periods of normal economic conditions in euro area countries. In the second chapter, we extend the analysis by considering the state of financial systems and economic conditions. This allows us to determine endogenously and exogenously the threshold levels of public debt and volatility index. In the third chapter, we further extend our analysis to consider country-specific political risk variables. In particular, we devote much effort to determine the drivers of bond spreads in various European groups using the dynamic panel threshold methodology., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2016

This research aims to understand the decision-making process within international meta-organizations. Constituting an evolution in the design of organizations, they can account for the existence of community organizations working together to achieve a common goal. While scholars are showing a growing interest for those organizations, there has been little research on their decision-making process. Bearing this in mind, the purpose of this research has been to develop a better understanding of decision-making processes and implementation of decision by member organizations. To this end, we have studied the consultation process organized by the World Anti-doping Agency between 2011 and 2013. This process has led to the modification of the World anti-doping Code. Through a diachronic methodology, we have studied secondary date and identified 5 types of decision-making processes and discussed the implication of actors during the latter. Trough semi-structured interviews with National Anti-doping Agencies’ leaders we have also emphasized the factors that led to the implementation of the Code., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2016

Timber transportation is a major activity in the forest industry and leads to challenging operational research problems. In this paper, we study a log-truck scheduling problem that aims at designing the weekly schedule for the transportation of timber from harvest to demand points. In this problem, drivers start and end their working day at home and have a limited working time per day. The quantity available in harvest points is typically several truckloads and full truckloads are thus supposed. To model this problem, we propose an integer program which does not consider the order in which forests are visited by a driver, simplifying its solution. The log-truck scheduling problem we are analyzing has been inspired by the case of a Belgian forest company. The results of our model on this industrial case are given, showing significant improvement compared to the actual schedule used by the company.

This thesis looks at the experience, by consumers, of multifunctionnal servicescapes. In a context of hypermodernity and collaborative consumption, we investigate the emergence of coworking spaces through an ethnographic approach and three case-studies. We look at how such places are produced and consumed, whereas offering hubs in which to work and live simultaneously. That is, this research highlights that coworking spaces can meld various functions of the space, from work-related experiences to cultural or ludic, single or communal, regular or occasional activities. Thanks to interviews and observational sessions, we show that flexibility and multifunctionnality of the space are key drivers of creativity. We also show that coworking spaces are built by users themselves through various mechanisms of temporary and collective appropriation, and through participatory management. Thus, the way people utilize coworking spaces suggests a new understanding of the serviscape experience as well as a new structural dimension of it: the lived-in experience (habiter)., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2016

Timber transportation is a major activity in the forest industry and leads to challenging operational research problems. In this work, we study a log-truck scheduling problem inspired by a real case from a Belgian forest company. It aims at designing the weekly schedule for the transportation of timber from harvest to demand points. In this problem, drivers start and end their working day at home and have a limited working time per day. The quantity available in harvest points is typically several truckloads and full truckloads are thus supposed. The cost function is proportional to the total number of working days (by all drivers), and time windows at the harvest and demand points are not included. The characteristics of the case allow us to propose an integer optimization model which is easy to implement and solve. In particular, the model does not include the order in which forests are visited by a driver. While the log-truck scheduling problem is often related to pickup and delivery problems in the literature, the order of the nodes in the route do not have to be included in our modeling, as truck flow balancing is sufficient. When applying our approach to the inspiring case, our model shows to be efficient, finding good solutions (optimality gap of few percent) in a reasonable time (few minutes). The results reveal a significant improvement compared to the actual schedule used by the company.

The express carriers offer overnight, door-to-door delivery of shipments, within regions as large as the US, Europe or the Middle East. For ensuring the reliability and efficiency of their service, they need to determine a set of feasible routes that enable the transportation of shipments from their origins to their destinations, a problem known as the Express Shipment Service Network Design (ESSND) problem. For reaching economies of scale, the express integrators first consolidate the shipments by moving them from their origin to hubs, where the shipments are sorted by destination, and then they are transported from the hubs to the destinations. Most of the existing approaches for solving multi-hub version of this problem rely on a fixed hub assignment, i.e. the allocation shipments to hubs is an input of the problem. In this research, we develop an optimization model for addressing the ESSND for the next day deliveries within a region, with multiple hubs and with flexible hub assignment. The flexible hub assignment incorporates the hub allocation decision of the shipment to the network design model. We provide a reformulation that improves the LP relaxation and reduces the number of variables and constraints compared to existing models in the literature, and that includes complex route structures. Our model is tested using extensive numerical experiments to show the value added in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, based on instances in the European region.

This database aims to provide researchers and policymakers with a set of country-level data in the area of wages, working time and collective disputes. It looks at both the systems that are currently in place (such as legislation or collective bargaining agreements) and some outcomes (such as the level of collectively agreed pay or working time). Short, qualitative descriptions have been added to the data to facilitate a better understanding. The database covers all 28 EU Member States and Norway and provides time series from 2000–2015. It will be updated every second year. Process of data generation and validation For the system-related variables, Eurofound drew up a questionnaire which was discussed with some members of Eurofound's network of European correspondents in a workshop in Amsterdam in November 2015. National experts from the full network subsequently completed the questionnaire. On the basis of ICTWSS data, correspondents were asked to validate the figures provided and to give reasons in cases where they opted to use different data. An internal revision took place at Eurofound, involving further queries to correspondents, before the process for the data generation in version 1.0 was completed. The data will be reviewed and validated in future years, with updates planned for every second year.

This paper presents Cloud Menus, a split adaptive menu for small screens where the predicted menu items are arranged in a circular tag cloud with a location consistent with their corresponding position in the static menu and a font size depending on their prediction level. This layout results from a 3-step design process: (i) defining an initial design space on Bertin’s 8 visual variables and 4 quality properties, (ii) identifying the most preferred layout based on agreement rate, and (iii) implementing it into Cloud Menus, a new widget for Android with circular layout. An empirical study suggests that cloud menus reduce item selection time and error rate when prediction is correct without penalizing it when prediction is incorrect, compared to two baselines: a non-adaptive static menu and an adaptive linear menu. From this study, design guidelines for cloud menus are elaborated.

The thesis studies how the transformation of the office influences the construction of an organisation’s identity. More specifically, this research focuses on the introduction of an activity-based workspace, and investigates how the transition towards this new work environment alters the ways of being and of working, and workers’ perceptions of their organisation’s identity. In order to address this question, this thesis is based on a qualitative empirical research in which data were collected through semi-structured interviews, documentary analysis, and observation. Thanks to this empirical design, this thesis shows that the transition towards an activity-based workspace challenges an organisation’s identity, and might result in a fragmentation of the organisational identity among workers, depending on their work identity., La thèse étudie comment la transformation du bureau influence la construction de l'identité d'une organisation. Plus spécifiquement, cette recherche s'intéresse à l'introduction d'un espace de travail basé sur l'activité et investigue comment la transition vers ce nouvel espace de travail altère les façons d'être et de travailler, ainsi que les perceptions qu'ont les travailleurs de l'identité de leur organisation. Afin de répondre à cette question, cette thèse est basée sur une recherche empirique qualitative au cours de laquelle les données ont été collectées au travers d'entretiens semi-directifs, d'analyse documentaire, et d'observation. Grâce à ce design empirique, la thèse montre que la transition vers un espace de travail basé sur l'activité met à l'épreuve l'identité d'une organisation, et est susceptible de résulter en une fragmentation de l'identité organisationnelle au sein des travailleurs et ce, selon leur identité professionnelle., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2018

The increasing globalization of the world’s economies creates linkages among economic agents that can amplify financial crisis when it occurs. The 2008 global financial crisis exposed the need to deepen our understanding of the channels through which financial risks propagate across countries. Moreover, preventing the occurrence of future crises requires new surveillance indicators that incorporate interactions between actors of the global economy. This thesis examines the transmission of financial risk by leveraging recent econometric techniques which explicitly accounts for the linkages among economic agents. It consists of three essays organized around two principal axes. The first essay proposes an original framework to analyze the relative importance of multiple transmission channels of risk across countries. It also derives indicators for global financial risk monitoring. The remaining two essays study the time-varying nature of transmission channels and their implications for empirical analysis. They take respectively the microeconomic and macroeconomic perspectives., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2018

Racial discrimination in the sharing economy is a topic drawing increasing attention. The short-term rental company Airbnb implemented several initiatives aiming to limit discrimination on its platform. Yet, it did not solve the issue and the users’ social responsibility involved in the peer-to-peer service adds complexity to the case. Recent studies assessed racial discrimination in the sharing economy, and more particularly on Airbnb. This thesis analyses discrimination based on host’s ethnicity in Airbnb’s services with data from 2 online experiments in the aim to understand who discriminates, why do people discriminate and what service triggers discriminatory outcomes. Data analysis provided cross-cultural insights between Norway and Belgium. Right-wingers and individuals with a high level of perceived outgroup threat appeared to discriminate against the outgroup host. Oppositely, left-wingers and individuals with a low level of perceived outgroup threat appeared to discriminate in favor the outgroup host. Results showed that people discriminate based on their self-connection with the apartment. In the home swap service context, the self-other overlap was also a basis for discrimination. Finally, three nudges to tackle racial discrimination on Airbnb are suggested: encouraging mutual reviews, rating the accuracy of accommodation’s pictures, and increasing information about the host. Further research is needed to assess their power in reducing implicit bias in the decision process., Master [120] en sciences de gestion, Université catholique de Louvain, 2018

How can firms maintain their innovation performance in the technology-driven industries? This dissertation proceeds in answering this question along three essays. In the first essay, our review of the literature highlighted that firms’ internal knowledge base as well as their external technology sourcing are key determinants of innovation performance, but the link between both antecedents remains underexplored. Yet, recognizing and exploiting external technology requires valuable internal technology capabilities. The dissertation analyzes this link, using the patent portfolio as indicating firms’ internal knowledge base and acquisitions as well as strategic alliances as key modes of external technology sourcing. In the second essay, we examine and find that the acquisition is more used than the alliance when focal firms’ patent portfolio is highly linked to fundamental science. In contrast, the alliance is more used when competitors perceived this portfolio as of high-quality. Finally, there is no differentiated impact when the portfolio is composed of diversified technology. In the meantime, technology-driven firms increasingly face a global competition. In the third essay, I examine and find that, in the international context, target firms’ ability to preempt a technology and their international patenting activities signal their technological value to potential acquirers pushing them to purchase a higher level of equity and control the target’s technology., (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2018

Analyse de l'impact d'un programme de formation en entrepreneuriat

In this article, we investigate what drives large companies (non-financial corporations and financial institutions) worldwide to run venture capital (VC) programs, specifically targeting Fortune Global 500 companies. Such a decision involves trade-offs between expected strategic and financial benefits and costs of managing and financing a portfolio of ventures, which are influenced by the institutions and regulations that affect innovation-oriented entrepreneurship. We determine that companies are more likely to run a program if they are based in countries in which the market for early-stage investments is well-developed and innovation-related resources are more widely available. Moreover, companies based in countries with costly personal bankruptcy regulations are less likely to run a VC program, which is consistent with the prediction that these regulations discourage entrepreneurial initiatives. These findings emphasize the importance of favorable local conditions for an affiliated VC program. We observe no evidence, however, that unfavorable local conditions affect the degree of internationalization of programs, suggesting that running international programs entails significant extra costs. Finally, no significant difference emerges between U.S.-based and Western European-based companies.