Young Hou
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
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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 corporate strategy, public policy, competition, and industry regulation. In particular, he studies how firms create and sustain competitive advantage through strategic positioning, nonmarket actions, and interactions with regulatory institutions. His work examines topics including CEO activism, corporate political activity, vertical integration, and consumer behavior using computationally scalable machine learning techniques, experiments, neural networks, and interviews.
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
Hou, Young, and Poliquin, Christopher. “Values and Visibility: How CEO Activism Influences Private and Public Consumer Choices.” Strategic Management Journal, Articles in Advance, 1–29. Available at https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.70067.
Hou, Young; Poliquin, Christopher; Sakakibara, Mariko, and Testoni, Marco. “Using Smartphone Location Data for Strategy Research.” Strategy Science, 10, no.4 (December 2025): 281-299. Lead Article. Available at https://doi.org/10.1287/stsc.2024.0317.
Poliquin, Christopher, and Hou, Young. "Policymaker Responses to CEO Activism." Organization Science, 36, no. 6 (December 2025): 2416–2434. Available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18282.
Hou, Young, and Poliquin, Christopher. "CEO Activism and Political Mobilization." Journal of Business Ethics 200 (December 2025): 269–285. 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, Cuneyt; Hofer, Christian; Hofer, Adriana, and Hou, Young. “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; Harris, Jared, and Lenox, Michael. “Is Where You Sit, Where You Stand? Exploring Social Positioning and Strategic Differentiation.” Available upon request.
Hou, Young; Lentzen, Lena, and Poliquin, Christopher. March 2025. “Beyond the Issues: Inferring CEO Ideology and Workplace Policies from CEO Activism.” Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5288123.
Antolin, Ana; Yao, Dennis, and Hou, Young. “Pulling Apart or Pulling Together: Product Positioning, Firm-Level Action, and Industry Self-Regulation.” Available upon request.
Hou, Young, and Poliquin, Christopher. “Information Intermediaries and Sociopolitical Involvement.” Available upon request.
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.