At the 2021 WU Awards ceremony, over 330 members of the WU community were honored for their innovative thinking and their far-sighted and future-oriented work. Students, teachers, and researchers have all distinguished themselves with valuable contributions to the further development of academia, the economy, and society.

WU is one of Europe’s leading business and economics universities. This is confirmed not only by WU’s triple accreditation awarded by EQUIS, AACSB, and AMBA but also by top placements in international rankings for WU programs and numerous awards and distinctions. The members of the WU community deliver excellence on a daily basis – in their teaching and research. Once a year, WU presents the WU Awards to turn the spotlight on the outstanding achievements of its students, teachers, and researchers. The award winners, many of them recipients of multiple awards, have distinguished themselves through their academic curiosity, their novel approaches to teaching and knowledge transfer, and their innovative research.

Talenta: Our award for excellent theses by WU students

Together with the WU Anniversary Fund of the City of Vienna, WU presents the Talenta Awards to the authors of the year’s three best bachelor’s and master's theses. The promising theses written by our (young) researchers are highly socially relevant. They address a wide range of topics, from open data and resilience in times of crisis to the European legal system and a model for forecasting oil price developments.

Award-winning master’s theses:

• Christoph von Aufschnaiter (WU Master’s Program in Export and Internationalization Management): “CEO Compensation Leverage and its effect on Firm Performance and Investment Decisions”

• Maria Kattavenos (WU Master’s Program in Business Law): “Die Forumswahl im Zuständigkeitsbereich der Europäischen Staatsanwaltschaft”

• Constantin Budin (WU Master’s Program in Strategy, Innovation, and Management Control): “Forecasting Oil Price Using Web-based Sentiment Analysis – a Test and Economic Analysis”

Award-winning bachelor’s theses:

• Dominik Loibner (WU Bachelor’s Program in Business, Economics and Social Sciences): “Crisis-Resilience of Community Housing in First Republic ‘Red Vienna’”

• Thomas Weber (WU Bachelor’s Program in Business, Economics and Social Sciences): “Open Dataset Archive (ODArchive) – Scalable Dataset Crawling with Efficient Archiving and the Investigation of Changes Between Versions.”

• Nicole Grausam (WU Bachelor’s Program in Business, Economics and Social Sciences): “Relative Performance Evaluation for CEOs: Compensation Practices in Large Oil & Gas and Chemical Firms”

Award-winning teaching: The Excellent and Innovative Teaching Awards

For the Excellent Teaching Award, WU students nominate the teachers who have particularly inspired and motivated them with their enthusiasm for sharing their expertise during the previous academic year. With 4,700 nominations submitted by over 3,500 students, participation figures hit a new all-time high this time. This confirms just how important this award is and shows how much WU’s students care about the continuous development and improvement of WU’s teaching.

Recipients of the 2021 Excellent Teaching Award:

• Anthony Copnall: Foreign Language Business Communication

• Tatiana Karpukhina: Marketing

• Clemens Kerschbaum: Information Systems and Operations Management

• Robert Kert: Public Law and Tax Law

• Stefan Mayr: Socioeconomics

• Ilse Pachlinger: Management

• Alyssa Schneebaum: Economics

• Martin Spitzer: Private Law

• Katharina van Bakel-Auer: Finance, Accounting and Statistics

• Markus Wabnegg: Strategy and Innovation

Particularly novel and creative course designs are recognized with the Innovative Teaching Award. This year’s awards focused on seamless learning formats and the design of learning settings.

Recipients of the 2021 Innovative Teaching Award:

• Tatiana Karpukhina: Marketing Research Methods

• Miya Komori-Glatz: English Business Communication

• Rudolf Dömötör & Christian Rammel: Sustainability Challenge

• Verena Madner & Stefan Mayr: International and European Law, Institutions and Governance

• Kathrin Schwaiger: The internationalization of … oh, there’s a white mouse – The use of resources in a behavioral economics context

• Alexander Mohr & Can Tihanyi: Models of Internationalization

• Monika Koller & Eva Marckhgott: Special Topics – Marketing Insights im Dialog mit der Praxis

A spotlight on research excellence

As a research institution employing over 1,600 academics, WU Vienna makes outstanding contributions to help solve the economic, social, and ecological challenges of our time, on both regional and global levels. Over 250 research papers were selected to receive an award in recognition of their trailblazing methods and results.

WU especially honored the authors of 15 publications that appeared in internationally renowned journals (on WU’s Star Journal List). In cooperation with the City of Vienna, the Best Paper Award was presented to five additional outstanding academic papers.

Recipients of the Star Journals Award:

• Nadia Abou Nabout in the International Journal of Research in Marketing: „The Risk of Programmatic Advertising: Effects of Website Quality on Advertising Effectiveness.”

• Harald Amberger in Accounting Review: „Repatriation Taxes, Internal Agency Conflicts, and Subsidiary-level Investment Efficiency.”

• Rosalia Bitterl & Martin Schreier in the Journal of Marketing Research (JMR): „Making the world a better place: How crowdfunding increases consumer demand for social-good products.”

• Isabella Grabner in Accounting Review: „How Calibration Committees Can Mitigate Performance Evaluation Bias: An Analysis of Implicit Incentives.”

• Isabella Grabner in Accounting, Organizations and Society: „Tone from the top in risk management: A complementarity perspective on how control systems influence risk awareness.”

• Isabella Grabner in Accounting, Organizations and Society: „The effect of horizontal pay dispersion on the effectiveness of performance-based incentives.”

• Otto Janschek in Accounting, Organizations and Society: „Culture and management control interdependence: An analysis of control choices that complement the delegation of authority in Western cultural regions.”

• Gabriela Kovacova & Birgit Rudloff in Operations Research: „Time consistency of the mean-risk problem.”

• Mia Raynard in the Academy of Management Journal: „From Grace to Violence: Stigmatizing the Medical Profession in China.”

• Thomas Reutterer & Nadine Schröder in the International Journal of Research in Marketing: „Leveraging purchase regularity for predicting customer behavior the easy way.”

• Christian Schumacher in Strategic Management Journal: „Biased interpretation of performance feedback: The role of CEO overconfidence.”

• Gerhard Speckbacher & Markus Wabnegg in Accounting, Organizations and Society: „Incentivizing innovation: The role of knowledge exchange and distal search behavior.”

• Martin Schreier in the Journal of Marketing Research (JMR): „Customization in Luxury Brands: Can Valentino Get Personal?”

• Rüdiger Weber in the Journal of Financial Economics: „Implied Volatility Duration: A Measure for the Timing of Uncertainty Resolution.”

• Josef Zechner in Review of Financial Studies: „Debt maturity and the dynamics of Leverage.”

Recipients of the 2021 Best Paper Award:

• Camilla Damian, Rüdiger Frey & Kevin Kurt: „How safe are European safe bonds? An analysis from the perspective of modern credit risk models.”

• Mia Raynard: „Reinventing the State-Owned Enterprise?”

• Armon Rezai: „The risk of policy tipping and stranded carbon assets.”

• Clive L. Spash: „A tale of three paradigms: Realising the revolutionary potential of ecological economics.”

• Christian Wagner & Josef Zechner: „Low-Risk Anomalies?”

For a list of all award winners in all categories and further information about the WU Awards, you can download the following brochure: