Yael Grushka-Cockayne
Professor of Business Administration
Altec Styslinger Foundation Bicentennial Chair in Business Administration
Senior Associate Dean for Professional Degree Programs
Office
FOB 163Phone
Academic Area
Areas of Expertise
Education: B.Sc., Ben-Gurion University; M.Sc., London School of Economics; Ph.D., M.Res., London Business School
Professor Yael Grushka-Cockayne's research and teaching activities focus on data science, forecasting, project management and behavioral decision-making. Her research is published in numerous academic and professional journals, and she is a regular speaker at international conferences in the areas of decision analysis, project management and management science. Prof. Grushka-Cockayne is an award-winning teacher, winning the Darden Morton Leadership Faculty Award in 2011, the University of Virginia's Mead-Colley Award in 2012 and the Darden Outstanding Faculty Award in 2013 and 2022 and Faculty Diversity Award in 2013 and 2018. In 2015, she won the University of Virginia All University Teaching Award. Prof. Grushka-Cockayne teaches the core "Decision Analysis" course, an elective she designed on project management and an elective on data science. She has served as the leader of the open enrollment courses "Project Management for Executives" and "The Women's Leadership Program."
Before starting her academic career, she worked in San Francisco as a marketing director of an Israeli ERP company. As an expert in the areas of project management, Prof. Grushka-Cockayne has served as a consultant to international firms in the aerospace and pharma industries. She is a UVA Excellence in Diversity fellow and a member of INFORMS, the Decision Analysis Society, the Operational Research Society and the Project Management Institute (PMI). She is an associate editor at Management Science and Operation Research and the President-elect of the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society.
In 2014, Grushka-Cockayne was named one of "21 Thought-Leader Professors" in Data Science. Her recent "Fundamentals of Project Planning and Management" Coursera MOOC had over 100,000 enrolled, across 200 countries worldwide. Her "Data Science for Business" Harvard Online course, launched in 2021, has taught hundreds of learners around the world.
Yael Grushka-Cockayne's Ideas to Action Posts
Selected Publications
De Reyck, B., I. Fragkos, Y. Grushka-Cockayne, K.C. Lichtendahl Jr., H. Guerin, A. Kritzer, Vungle Inc. 2017. Improves Monetization Using Big-Data Analytics, Forthcoming, Interfaces.
* Finalist in the 2016 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice.
Grushka-Cockayne Y., K. C. Lichtendahl Jr., V. R. R. Jose and R. L. Winkler. 2017. Quantile Evaluation, Sensitivity to Bracketing, and Sharing Business Payoffs. Forthcoming, Operations Research.
Y. Grushka-Cockayne, V. R. R. Jose and K. C. Lichtendahl Jr. 2017. Ensembles of Overfit and Overconfident Forecasts. Management Science, 63 (4), 1110-1.
Kettunen, J., Y. Grushka-Cockayne., B. De Reyck and Z. Degraeve. 2015. The Value of New Product Development Flexibility in Competitive Environments. European Journal of Operations Research, 244 (3), 892-904.
P. E. Pfeifer., Y. Grushka-Cockayne and K. C. Lichtendahl Jr. 2014. The Promise of Prediction Contests. The American Statistician, 68 (4), 264-270.
Chao, R.O., K. C. Lichtendahl Jr. and Y. Grushka-Cockayne. 2014. Incentives in a Stage-Gate Process. Production and Operations Management, 23 (8), 1286-1298.
Jose, V. R. R., Y. Grushka-Cockayne and K. C. Lichtendahl Jr. 2014. Trimmed Opinion Pools and the Crowd's Calibration Problem. Management Science, 60 (2), 463-475.
Lichtendahl, Jr. Kenneth C., Yael Grushka-Cockayne, and Phil Pfeifer. 2013. The Wisdom of Competitive Crowds, Operations Research, 61 (6): 1383-1398.
* Finalist in the Decision Analysis Society Publication Award, 2015.
Lichtendahl, K.C. Jr., Y. Grushka-Cockayne and R. Winkler. Is It Better to Average Probabilities or Quantiles? Management Science, 59 (7), 1594-1611.
Read, D. and Y. Grushka-Cockayne. (2011). The Similarity Heuristic, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 24 (1), 23-46.
Grushka-Cockayne, Y., B. De Reyck. (2009). Towards a single European sky. Interfaces, 39 (5), 400-414.
Grushka-Cockayne, Y., B. De Reyck, Z. Degraeve. (2008). An Integrated Decision-Making Approach for Improving European Air Traffic Management. Management Science, 54 (8), 1395-1409.
De Reyck, B., Y. Grushka-Cockayne, R. Leus. (2007). A New Challenge in Project Scheduling: The Incorporation of Activity Failures. Journal of Economics and Management, LII (3), 411-434.
De Reyck, B., Y. Grushka-Cockayne, M. Lockett, S. R. Calderini, M. Moura, A. Sloper. (2005). The Impact of Project Portfolio Management on Information Technology Projects.International Journal of Project Management, 23 (7), 524-537.
Working Papers
Guo X., Y. Grushka-Cockayne and K. C. Lichtendahl Jr. Forecasting Life Cycles With Exponential Smoothing.
Lichtendahl Jr., K. C., Y. Grushka-Cockayne, V. R. R. Jose and R. L. Winkler. Bayesian Ensembles of Binary-Event Forecasts. Under review.
Grushka-Cockayne Y., K. C. Lichtendahl Jr., V. R. R. Jose and R. L. Winkler. 2015. Quantile Evaluation, Sensitivity to Bracketing, and Sharing Business Payoffs. Under Review.
Work in progress
Baucells M., Grushka-Cockayne Y. and Hwang W. Project Management and Mental Accounting.
Guo X., Y. Grushka-Cockayne, K. C. Lichtendahl Jr. and De Reyck, B. Machine Learning Techniques For Airport Passenger Flow Management.
Grushka-Cockayne Y., K. C. Lichtendahl Jr. and D. Read. Failure to Replicate Hyperbolic Discounting in Large-Scale Studies.
Kassam-Adams, S., Mehedi A.R., Grushka-Cockayne Y., Lichtendahl Jr., K. C., Greenfield, J. Innovation Interlocks.
Guo X., Y. Grushka-Cockayne and K. C. Lichtendahl Jr. Exponential Smoothing Model with a Turning Point.
Case Studies
Advancing knowledge through research that shapes business, Darden professors are recognized thought leaders in their fields. They are not only master case method teachers, they also author many of the cases used in Darden classrooms and around the world.
Yael Grushka-Cockayne's cases are available in the Darden Business Publishing website.
R Package
projmanr, Greenawald B., Y. Grushka-Cockayne. 2017.
trimTrees, Y. Grushka-Cockayne, V. R. R. Jose, K. C. Lichtendahl Jr. and H. Zeng. 2014.
Book Chapters And Other Publications
Grushka-Cockayne Y., S. Erat and J. Wooten. 2017. New Product Development and Project Management Decisions, in Donohue K., E. Katok and S. Leider. Eds. Handbook of Behavioral Operations. Wiley and Son.
Grushka-Cockayne Y., V. Holzmann, H. Weisz and D. Zitter. 2015. A New Hybrid Approach for Selecting a Project Management Methodology. Proceedings of the PMI North American Congress.
Grushka-Cockayne, Y. and K. C. Lichtendahl Jr., How Vungle Lets Its Customers Innovate? Case in Point, The Washington Post, September 20, 2015.
De Reyck, B., Y. Grushka-Cockayne, I. Fragkos, J. Harrison and D. Read. 2015. Optimism Bias Study Recommended Adjustments to Optimism Bias Uplifts, UK Department for Transport.
Grushka-Cockayne, Y., The planning fallacy' can derail a project's best intentions. Case in Point, The Washington Post, March 8, 2015. 3
Eubanks, D. L., D. Read and Y. Grushka-Cockayne. 2015. Biases as a Constraint on Planning Performance, in M. Mumford and M. Frese, Eds. The Psychology of Planning in Organizations.Routledge, New York .
Grushka-Cockayne, Y. and K. C. Lichtendahl Jr., Is it better to trust the best expert, or the average of a group of experts? Case in Point, The Washington Post, November 16, 2013.
Grushka-Cockayne, Y., D. Read and B. De Reyck. Planning for the Planning Fallacy: Causes and Solutions for Unrealistic Project Expectations. Proceedings of the PMI Research and Education Conference 2012, Limerick, Ireland.
Kettunen, J., Y. Grushka-Cockayne, B. De Reyck, Z. Degraeve, A. Salo. 2008. Management of new product development: the impact of competition and market characteristics. Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Project Management and Scheduling, Istanbul, Turkey.
Laseter, T., K. C. Lichtendahl Jr. and Y. Grushka-Cockayne. Cleaning the Crystal Ball,strategy+business, 2010.
Grushka-Cockayne, Y. 2007. Book review: Kaliszewski, Ignacy. 2006. Soft Computing for Complex Multiple Criteria Decision Making. Interfaces, 37(6), 588-59.