The Department of Strategy and Management and the Department of Business and Management Science invite you to a cross-departmental faculty seminar with Thorsten Grohsjean from University of Vienna and Alex Krumer from Molde University College.
| 11:00 – 11:15 | Introduction Connecting on Sport and Research at NHH - The SCORE Initiative |
| 11:15 – 12:15 | Presentation 1 “Rumored network change: The predictive power of rumors in professional soccer” Speaker: Prof. Thorsten Grohsjean |
| 12:15 – 13:15 | Break |
| 13:15 – 14:15 | Presentation 2 “Ask not what economics can do for sports - ask what sports can do for economics” Speaker: Prof. Alex Krumer |
| 14:15 – 14:45 | Panel conversation with the speakers |
Thorsten Grohsjean is Professor of Organization at the University of Vienna. Prior to joining in January 2026, he was a member of the Department of Management & Technology at Bocconi University in Milan for more than nine years, where he served first as an assistant professor and later as a tenured associate professor. He received his PhD from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and a Diploma in Management from the University of Mannheim.
In his research, he explores how organizations shape their employees and how these imprints drive individuals’ decisions, which in turn affect organizational performance. He studies this indirect linkage across two streams:
His work has been published in general management journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal, as well as field-specific journals like the International Journal of Industrial Organization and Journal of World Business. Practitioner-oriented versions of his research have appeared in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, and Harvard Business Manager. He also serves on the editorial review boards of the Strategic Management Journal and Strategic Organization.
Alex Krumer is a professor of sports economics at the Faculty of Business Administration and Social Sciences at Molde University College in Norway. Between 2015 and 2018, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Swiss Institute for Empirical Economic Research (SEW) at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. He received his PhD in Economics at Ben Gurion University in Israel.
There are two ways to look at the relationship between economics and sport. The first is economics of sports, where economics is used “in the service” of sports industry to analyze profitability of clubs, attendance demand, competitive balance, etc. However, the aim of this presentation is to concentrate on economics in sports. Or in a paraphrase from the inaugural address of John F. Kennedy we ask not what economics can do for sports, but what sports can do for economics. That approach follows the idea that if stones falling from towers and apples from trees are useful for physics, then data from sports competitions may be useful for economics (Palacios-Huerta, 2014). The reason for such usefulness is that nature rarely creates a situation that allows a clear view of different phenomena because of the complexity of the real-world.
However, sports data allow to overcome such obstacles by providing an excellent laboratory to study human behavior in real competitive environments. The importance of “economics in sports” cannot be better expressed than the following quote from a Nobel Prize Laureate Daniel Kahneman (2008) does: “Studying sport is a great idea, because people make many decisions that matter enormously to them under standard conditions. It is actually one of the best places to do this”. In the same spirit, another Nobel Prize Laureate, Gary S. Becker, referred to soccer as an important setting that allows testing of economic behavior, such as efficient markets and social influences on behavior (Palacios-Huerta, 2014).
To summarize, in this presentation I will list the advantages of using sports data for economic research. I also provide a rich overview of economic literature that used sports data to test different fundamental economic theories as well as articles that presented divergences of economic decision making from neo-classical theories.
Please contact Mario Guajardo (mario.guajardo@nhh.no) if you are interested in meeting Alex Krumer or Jonas Hammerschmidt (jonas.hammerschmidt@nhh.no) if you are interested in meeting Thorsten Grohsjean.