About

Oliver Hahl is an Associate Dean of Masters Programs and an Associate Professor of Organization Theory, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business. His role involves leadership in graduate education, and his academic focus includes organization theory, strategy, and entrepreneurship. His work is situated within the context of business education that emphasizes experiential learning and practical application, preparing students to excel in their respective industries. As part of the Tepper School, he contributes to the school's strategic vision of integrating business, technology, and analytics to shape the future of business education.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Economics
• Law and economics
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Demographic economics
• Epistemology
• Engineering
• Microeconomics
• Marketing
• Business
• Law
• Management
• Knowledge management

Selected publications

• Organizational Constraint or the Source of Competitive Advantage (or Both)? The Strategic Use of Authenticity by Way of Tradition

  2025-08-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Some suggest that committing to tradition can constrain firms because it undermines success, growth, and progress. To those firms who can credibly wield it, however, tradition also holds the promise of projecting authenticity to an intended audience. In this essay, the authors seek to present authenticity as a useful conceptual tool for strategy scholars. In particular, the authors suggest that theoretical insights related to organizational authenticity can be applied to foundational ideas in strategy research. Moreover, to the extent that authenticity attributions can be driven by engaging with tradition (and its associated constraints), it can be a means for organizations to communicate costly commitments to stakeholders and competitors. After establishing authenticity’s relationship to strategic commitments and how tradition can be authentically employed, the authors discuss the conditions under which authentically engaging with tradition can form the basis of a sustained competitive advantage and help firms deal with thorny strategic issues from employee engagement to governance. In doing so, the authors propose areas of research that could benefit from utilizing authenticity as a conceptual tool to make sense of how some firms outperform others and the constraints some firms face when they employ strategies highlighting their authenticity.

  PublisherDOI

• US MBA Programmes

  2025-11-14

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract The Master of Business Administration (MBA) programme in the United States is an important leadership credential, desired by US and non-US students alike who want to gain access to the depth of job opportunities in the US market. US MBA programmes attract more than 155,000 students annually, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. This chapter looks at internationalization in the US MBA programme and why the degree is attractive to international students, despite some challenges. It further discusses how the relationship between the programmes and international students is a symbiotic one, in that international perspectives in MBA programmes are worthwhile supporting and developing further, for the benefit of both domestic and international students. Using the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University as a case study for internationalization efforts, the authors share some tactics that help students navigate cultural differences and expand their knowledge of diverse perspectives as they aspire to become future business leaders.

  PublisherDOI

• Mitigating ingroup bias in regulatory firms: The role of inspector professionalism

  Strategic Management Journal · 2025-04-29 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This article adopts the lens of ingroup bias to study why regulatory firms tasked with enforcing regulatory compliance may underperform in their duties. We theorize that ingroup bias can lead regulatory agents to grant unwarranted trust to ingroup clients with whom they share salient characteristics, resulting in less stringent inspections for these clients compared to outgroup clients. We further examine how this effect is moderated by inspectors' professionalism, a human capital dimension reflecting an individual's engagement with their profession and internalization of its norms and standards. Using a difference‐in‐differences approach on micro‐data tracking 86 inspectors across 24,650 inspections of 462 vessels at a marine inspection firm, we find compelling evidence of ingroup bias and show that inspectors' professionalism mitigates its impact on regulatory enforcement stringency.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Authenticity of Purpose Claims: Firm Capacity and Job Seeker Responses to Recruitment Efforts

  Management Science · 2025-10-27 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Whereas corporate purpose involves a claim made to galvanize stakeholders, recent research on the topic has not examined it as a claim. Given the information asymmetry that many evaluators of purpose claims face, a key question concerns the conditions under which they are not simply viewed as cheap talk but are instead perceived as authentic. We argue that the difficulty and future orientation inherent to purpose claims make firm capacity a key source of authenticity and, ultimately, positive evaluations. We examine these ideas in the labor market context, where employers often present purpose claims to job seekers facing information asymmetry. First, we develop and validate a novel measure of purpose claim strength using a combination of topic modeling, dictionary-based validation, and experimental validation. Using this measure, we test our capacity hypothesis with job application field data, using firm size as a proxy for capacity. We find that high-purpose job posts receive approximately 50% more applications than low-purpose job posts when the firm has more than 1,000 employees, but only receive about a 10% increase when the firm has fewer than 50 employees. In a second study, we use vignette experiments to directly test our hypothesized mechanism. We show that, conditional on a strong purpose claim, size manipulations shape capacity perceptions, leading to greater perceived authenticity and increased application likelihood. Next, holding size constant, we show that an affiliation-based manipulation leads to similar results. Our paper helps scholars understand what gives authenticity to purpose claims and helps practitioners understand how they can more effectively communicate purpose. This paper was accepted by Lamar Pierce, organizations. Funding: This research was supported by funding from the Center for Sustainable Business at the University of Pittsburgh School of Business. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.03931 .

  PublisherDOI

• When Truth Trumps Facts: Studies on Partisan Moral Flexibility in American Politics

  American Journal of Sociology · 2024 · 7 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  This article presents results from a series of online surveys—conducted among American voters during and after the Trump administration—that show how voters from both parties provide explicit moral justification for politicians’ statements that flagrantly violate the norm of fact-grounding. Such justification is inconsistent with prevailing theory, whereby partisan voters’ tendency to mistake misinformation for fact is what drives their positive response to misinformation purveyed by partisan standard-bearers. The studies presented here provide consistent evidence of such factual flexibility. Yet they also provide consistent evidence of moral flexibility, whereby voters justify demagogic fact-flouting as an effective way of proclaiming a deeply resonant political “truth.” A key implication is that political misinformation cannot be fully eliminated by getting voters to distinguish fact from fiction; voters’ moral orientations may be such that they prefer fact-flouting. More general lessons pertain to the role of democratic norms in liberal democracies and to how moral orientations relate to perceived interests.

  PublisherDOI

• Sander van der Linden. Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity van der LindenSander. Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity. W. W. Norton & Company, 2023. 368 pp. $30, hardcover.

  Administrative Science Quarterly · 2024-10-22

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• When Truth Trumps Facts: Studies on Partisan Moral Flexibility in American Politics

  2023-10-27

  preprintOpen access

  This paper presents results from a series of online surveys—conducted among American voters during and after the (President Donald) Trump administration—that show how voters (both Republican and Democratic) provide explicit moral justification for politicians’ statements that flagrantly violate the norm of fact-grounding. Such justification is inconsistent with prevailing theory, whereby partisan voters’ tendency (due either to laziness or bias) to mistake misinformation for fact is the only factor responsible for their positive response to misinformation purveyed by partisan standard bearers. The studies presented in this paper provide consistent evidence of such factual flexibility. Yet they also provide consistent evidence of moral flexibility, whereby voters justify demagogic fact-flouting as an effective way of proclaiming a deeply resonant political “truth.” A key implication is that political misinformation cannot be fully eliminated by getting voters to distinguish fact from fiction; voters’ moral orientations may be such that they prefer fact-flouting. More general lessons pertain to the role of democratic norms in liberal democracies and to how moral orientations relate to perceived interests.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Purpose Claims and Capacity-Based Credibility: Evidence from the Labor Market

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  Organizational scholars have long recognized the importance of corporate purpose, defined as a goal beyond profit maximization, meant to galvanize workers in the firm. Increasingly, however, companies are making claims about corporate purpose to external audiences, and we have little understanding how these claims may be perceived. A key question is credibility; under what conditions are these claims believed by audiences? We argue that purpose claims can attract external stakeholders, and that the ambition and future-orientation of these claims makes firm capacity a key source of credibility. We examine these issues in the labor market context, where employers make claims of corporate purpose in recruitment efforts. In our first study, with job posting and application data from an online job board, we develop a novel measure of purpose claim language and examine its effect on application likelihood. We then examine the moderating effect of firm size, as a proxy for capacity. We find that high purpose job posts receive approximately 52% more applications than low purpose job posts when the firm has more than 1,000 employees, but only receive a 13% increase when the firm has fewer than 50 employees. In a second study, we use an online experiment to test whether differences in firm size are interpreted as differing degrees of capacity to realize purpose claims, and whether these different perceptions of capacity impact application likelihood. Our results confirm that perceptions of capacity help to explain the relationship between corporate purpose claims, firm size, and job attraction.

  PublisherDOI

• Authenticity-Based Connections as Organizational Constraints and the Paradox of Authenticity in the Market for Cuban Cigars

  Organization Science · 2022 · 14 citations

  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Economics

  We explore the organizational consequences that different authenticity claims carry for products and the firms that produce them. To do so, we build on the notion of an authenticity paradox—the idea that seeking to capture demand that is created by perceived authenticity can undermine the very authenticity that generated the demand in the first place. Using an experimental approach, we argue and show that provenance-based claims of authenticity (e.g., location of origin) constrain a firm spaciotemporally, limiting their ability to expand production in ways that might be economically rational but would undermine this authenticity claim. We further show there is no penalty (or there is a reduced penalty) when the claim is not explicitly spaciotemporal, and is instead based on an association to an iconic individual broadly connected to that place. We show how these types of connections help firms respond to the authenticity paradox by allowing them more freedom to expand production to meet the increased demand without undermining the original claims to authenticity. As a result, this paper’s key contribution is in moving beyond explaining how perceived authenticity benefits organizations and instead, explores how different claims to authenticity can constrain a firm’s ability to capture the value that it has created from authenticity. History: This paper has been accepted for the Organization Science Special Issue on Experiments in Organizational Theory. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1574 .

  PublisherDOI

• The Mechanisms and Components of Knowledge Transfer: The Virtual Special Issue on Knowledge Transfer Within Organizations

  Organization Science · 2022 · 71 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Knowledge management
  • Computer Science

  Knowledge transfer within organizations has important implications for organizational performance and competitive advantage. In this virtual special issue, we review articles on this topic published in Organization Science between 2014 and 2020 and identify 53 articles for their theoretical and empirical contributions. These articles examine knowledge transfer through five transfer mechanisms: social networks, routines, personnel mobility, organizational design, and search. We consider the intersection of each transfer mechanism with important components of knowledge transfer (characteristics of sources/recipients, characteristics of knowledge, and characteristics of contexts). We present 15 exemplar articles, each of which reflects the intersection of a mechanism and a component of knowledge transfer. We also present an overview of the methodological approaches and empirical contexts that are utilized. We conclude our article with a discussion of future research opportunities. The articles published in Organization Science have advanced understanding of both the mechanisms through which knowledge transfer occurs and the conditions under which it is most likely.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Minjae Kim

  39 shared

• Ethan Poskanzer

  University of Colorado System

  37 shared

• Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan

  11 shared

• Trevor Young‐Hyman

  University of Pittsburgh

  4 shared

• Evan Gilbertson

  University of Pittsburgh

  3 shared

• Aleksandra Kacperczyk

  London Business School

  3 shared

• Ezra W. Zuckerman

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  3 shared

• CB Bhattacharya

  University of Pittsburgh

  3 shared

Education

• PhD Management, Economic Sociology Program

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management

  2013

• MBA

  Yale School of Management

  2008

• B.S. Economics

  University of Pennsylvania Wharton School

  2002