Photo of Thomas Jungbauer
  • Faculty

Thomas Jungbauer

  • Assistant Professor
Email tj268@cornell.edu
Phone 607.255.2501
Office
401A Sage Hall
Website

Biography

Thomas Jungbauer is Assistant Professor in the Strategy & Business Economics area at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. His research deals with the role the quality and allocation of information play for firms, markets and their organization and strategy. In particular, he studies how information shapes digital platform strategy, talent management, and innovation. Jungbauer has also worked on firms branding multiple product lines. He strives to understand the management and strategy of firms, their workers and consumers in these markets, and how their actions determine market outcomes. More recently, he started investigating how the emergence and adoption of artificial intelligence transform firms and markets, and ultimately society, through the aforementioned information channel.

In his work on digital platforms, Jungbauer investigates how search platforms, such as Amazon, Booking.com and Google among many others, invoke their vast consumer data from past search and purchase behavior when curating rankings of products and services in response to consumer queries. In particular, he studies the effects of search advertising, the sale of prominent positions in product rankings, and its regulation, on the outcomes of these markets.

His work establishes that these so-called sponsored positions do not only allocate prominence, but firms may even bid more than their direct value to obtain them, in order to reveal privately held information about the appeal of their product for specific consumer groups. Jungbauer also shows that search advertising serves as a rent-extraction device for platforms, but may nevertheless benefit consumer by matching them with more attractive products. That is true, however, only if consumers understand how platforms determine product rankings, i.e., if their prominence algorithm is transparent.

His more recent work in the field aims to understand how platforms, and especially attention platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or Facebook, deal with the over-boarding influx of videos generated by Artificial Intelligence. In particular, he argues that human attention rather than production has become the bottleneck in these markets.

Jungbauer’s research on talent management spans organizational and labor economics. For example, he studies the importance of personnel-specific information held by managers for the movement of managers and workers across firms. In his work on labor market power, he shows that wage competition in high-skill sectors can lead to inefficient worker allocation when firms differ in their buyer power for labor. He also demonstrates that firms may want to delegate the task of bidding for vacant positions—either to internal or external agents—as they balance the trade-off between commitment and market power.

Jungbauer’s work on information and signaling in labor markets emphasizes how, and to what extent, job seekers can shape their skill sets and their visibility to employers. Notably, he finds that lying or strategically misrepresenting oneself can sometimes reduce inefficient investments in low-value signals. To understand market outcomes, he argues, it is essential to recognize that labor market signals combine both unobservable characteristics (like innate ability) and unobservable actions (like effort or investment).

In the field of innovation, Jungbauer explores how corporate espionage impacts firm organization and investment incentives. He also studies how the fear of self-cannibalization leads successful firms to avoid outsourcing R&D for new products. In a concurrent project, he challenges the regulator’s view that market power of integrated ecosystems should be broken up for consumer welfare reasons. In fact, he shows that products within an ecosystem developed by independent firms may suffer from underdevelopment and high prices.

His earlier research addresses optimal branding strategies for firms offering vertically differentiated product lines. Additionally, he critically reviews the literature on games under fundamental uncertainty and proposes an alternative benchmark aligned with the concept of rationalizable strategies under risk.

Professor Jungbauer received his PhD in Managerial Economics & Strategy from the departments Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences (MEDS) and Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2016. Currently he teaches Business Strategy in the 2-year resident MBA, the Executive MBA Americas and MBA/FMBA dual degree Cornell-Tsinghua programs at Johnson, while he previously taught in the Accelerated MBA and the Cornell Tech MBA programs at Cornell University and Shaping Organizational Strategy for Executives at the Ministry of Investment for the Kingdom of Saudi-Arabia (MISA). During his PhD, he co-taught Business Analytics II in the 2-year Resident MBA Program and Principles of Pricing in the Kellogg Certificate Honors Program for Undergraduates at Northwestern University.

Jungbauer has been featured on Johnson’s Teaching Honor Roll every year since he joined the school. He was also named on Poets & Quants 40 under 40 business school professors in 2018 and won the 2026 SC Johnson Curriculum development and teaching award for artificial intelligence. During his PhD at the Kellogg School of Management he received two appreciation awards for his Executive teaching.

He is eager to engage with the public on various topics related to his research and expertise, and has been featured by a multitude of media outlets such as the Associated Press, the BBC, NBC, the Chronicle of Higher Education, ABC Australia or BeFM Korea. In 2018, he engaged with Google’s proposed re-entry into the Chinese search engine market in his Op-Ed for the Washington Post.

Education

PhD Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, 2016
MS Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, 2013
MS Vienna Institute of Advanced Studies (IHS), TU Wien, 2011
BS WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, 2009

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Research

Awards

  • Johnson School Faculty Curriculum Innovation Award 2026 (2026) Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management
  • Teaching Honor Roll (2016 - 2026) Johnson School of Management, Cornell University
  • Best 40 under 40 Professors (2018) Poets & Quants
  • Teaching Appreciation Award (2016) Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
  • Award for Extraordinary Academic Achievements (2009) Republic of Austria

Faculty Academic Areas

  • Strategy and Business Economics

Expertise

  • Economics
  • Strategy
  • Marketing
  • Management
  • Innovation
  • Industrial Organization
  • Employment Relations
  • Advertising
  • Decision Making
  • Antitrust