Matthew S. Bothner
Full Professor and Deutsche Telekom Chair in Leadership and HR Development
Matt Bothner joined ESMT European School of Management and Technology in March 2011 as a full professor and the first holder of the Deutsche Telekom Chair in Leadership and HR Development. Before joining ESMT, Matt was a visiting associate professor of sociology at Cornell University as well as a fellow at the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell. Previously, he was at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he taught MBA and executive courses on corporate strategy, leading change, and organizing for innovation.
Matt received his PhD with distinction in 2000 from Columbia University’s Department of Sociology, where he also received his MPhil and MA degrees. Using network-analytic methods to capture patterns of inter-firm competition, his dissertation focused on antecedents of technology diffusion in the global personal computer industry and also examined the effects of localized scale-based competition on rates of firm sales growth. He has also studied the behavioral consequences of competitive crowding around contestants’ ranks in dynamic tournaments, focusing on the positional causes of car crashes in professional stockcar auto racing.
His current research addresses the measurement and consequences of social status in several empirical settings, including venture capital, professional sports, and higher education. In addition, he has developed computational models both to better understand factors affecting the evolution of cumulative advantage and to clarify the optimal strategies for leading tournaments for peer recognition among scientists. His research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of Sociology, and Management Science.
Matt has received several awards from the Academy of Management, including the Newman Award for the best paper based on a PhD thesis in 2001 and the Glueck Award for the best paper in business policy and strategy in 2006. He received from Chicago Booth the Faculty Excellence Award for Teaching in 2004 and in 2008 and the Hillel J. Einhorn Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2011, and has been awarded grants from the Kauffman Foundation.
ESMT European School of