Global Brand, Local Flexibility: How Social Norms Can Help Guide Companies

Whether a French luxury brand displays the same handbags in the display windows of its stores around the world, or whether global fast-food chains adapt their product ranges to country-specific preferences and conditions, is a challenging management decision for companies that typically operate a large number of branches. A research team of business scholars has now investigated how these companies can find effective solutions when navigating the tension between flexibility and standardization. The findings were recently presented in the European Journal of Operational Research.

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Menstruation, motherhood and the menopause: “Women work – and so do their bodies”

Psychologist Theresa Tschauko is conducting research into how different stages of women’s health affect their work behaviour as member of the research group Organizational Behavior & Human Resource Management. The conclusion of her work to date is that women carry on working – even when it hurts.

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When the state taxes itself: Ann-Catherine Pointecker studies the taxation of public bodies

How should public bodies be treated for tax purposes when they compete with private companies? At the University of Klagenfurt, Ann-Catherine Pointecker is conducting research on the taxation of bodies governed by public law from an international comparative perspective and analysing the need for reform in Austria.

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“We seek to aggregate the behaviour of individuals in order to predict the behaviour of organisations or networks.”

With the publication of “The Oxford Handbook of Agent-Based Computational Management Science” in February 2026, Friederike Wall, Shu-Heng Chen, and Stephan Leitner present the first comprehensive handbook on agent-based modelling in management science. In this interview, Wall and Leitner explain how they model individual behaviour through agents and how this approach enables them to explain and anticipate the behaviour of entire systems.

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