The Center for Global Business Announces Winner of Its First Data Grant Competition

Ha Le, a second-year MBA student at Maryland Smith, writes about the PhD international research award.

The Center for Global Business (CGB) at the Robert H. Smith School of Business announced the winner of its first annual data grant competition — David M. Waguespack, associate professor of management and organization at Maryland Smith.

The new competition is funded by the center’s Title VI CIBE grant and supports the grant’s objective of creating international business teaching resources for faculty at the Smith School and other institutions across the country. Each data set awarded through this annual competition will come with a teaching note that details how the data set should be used in the classroom and contribute to the repository of similar resources that the center holds. They further serve the dual purpose of bringing international data into the classroom and illustrating important business data-driven decision-making principles.

The award enabled Waguespack to design a teaching note and a replication data subset from the EVE Corporation dataset for classroom use. Waguespack and his colleagues used the EVE Corporation dataset to examine whether political institutions influence the structure of companies. The research, published in the journal Strategy Science, is featured in Harvard Business Review, “Where a Founder is From Affects How They Structure Their Company.”

“We want to know if founders from nations where arm's length transactions typically work better (for example, can I expect fair, efficient, and transparent interactions?) will tend to create more decentralized organizations,” said Waguespack. “The main and best use of this [replicated] dataset is for an assignment or class exercise exploring whether there is a relationship between country-level institutions and firm structure.”

The researchers collected data on player-run companies in the online role-playing game, EVE Online, that has attracted more than 6.5 million players worldwide since its launch in 2003. This merged with the Varieties of Democracy, or V-Dem, a measure of democracy ratings to score founders’ home countries based on the lawfulness of public officials, property rights of citizens, how laws are enforced, and the amount of corruption in government.

Waguespack’s data set, teaching note, and other resources can be found on the center’s website in addition to more about the data grant competition.

This award was supported in part by CIBE, a Title VI grant provided by the U.S. Department of Education.