Young Hou
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Office
FOB 254Phone
Academic Area
Areas of Expertise
Education: B.A., Dartmouth College; M.A., Harvard University; Ph.D., Harvard Business School
Young Hou is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy, Ethics and Entrepreneurship area at Darden, where he teaches core Strategy and Corporate Strategy in the full-time MBA program and Strategy and Analytics in the M.S. in Business Analytics program.
His research interests include nonmarket strategy, CEO activism, self-regulation, and corporate strategy. In particular, he focuses on the dynamic interplay between firm positioning and firm resources in market and nonmarket settings. His work employs computationally scalable machine learning techniques to analyze high-dimensional data, experiments, neural networks, and interviews. He and his work have been featured in popular media outlets such as CNN.
Young Hou graduated from Harvard Business School with a Ph.D. in Business Administration in Strategy. He received his Master of Arts in Statistics from Harvard University, and earned his Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Engineering from Dartmouth College, graduating magna cum laude with high honors. Currently, he serves on the advisory board of the Better Business Bureau Center for Industry Self-Regulation. Prior to transitioning into academia, he worked as a fixed income derivatives trader with PnL responsibilities at Fidelity Investments in Boston.
Selected Publications
Poliquin, Christopher and Hou, Young. "Policymaker Responses to CEO Activism." Organization Science, forthcoming. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4606719
Hou, Young and Poliquin, Christopher. "CEO Activism and Political Mobilization." Journal of Business Ethics, (2024). Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-024-05901-x
Hou, Young and Poliquin, Christopher. "The Effects of CEO Activism: Partisan Consumer Behavior and Its Duration." Strategic Management Journal 44, no. 3 (March 2023): 672-703. Available at https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3451
Hou, Young and Yao, Dennis. "Pushed into a Crowd: Repositioning Costs, Resources, and Competition in the RTE Cereal Industry," Strategic Management Journal 43, no. 1 (January 2022): 3-29. Lead Article. Available at https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3336
Eroglu, C.; Hofer, C.; Hofer, A.; Hou, Y. “Cultural Inventories: How Dimensions of National Culture Moderate the Effect of Demand Unpredictability on Firm-Level Inventories.” International Journal of Production Economics 264, (October 2023): 108984
Selected Working Papers
Hou, Young, Lentzen, Lena, and Poliquin, Christopher. March 2025. “Beyond the Issues: Inferring CEO Ideology and Workplace Policies from CEO Activism.” Available upon request.
Hou, Young and Poliquin, Christopher. "Values and Visibility: How CEO Activism Influences Private and Public Consumer Choices." Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4718887
Hou, Young; Poliquin, Christopher; Sakakibara, Mariko; Testoni, Marco. “Using Smartphone Location Data for Strategy Research.” Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4796679
Poliquin, Christopher and Hou, Young. "The Value of Corporate Political Donations: Evidence from the Capitol Riot." Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4005515