TOM Conference
IESE Barcelona - June 8-10, 2026
The TOM Society Annual Meeting brings together scholars devoted to formal modeling in organization theory for several days of in-depth discussion, presentation, and community-building. It was established alongside the founding of the society by Jerker Denrell and Thorbjørn Knudsen, with intellectual guidance from James G. March, and held its inaugural session at the University of Oxford in 2010.
Sessions typically address canonical modelling traditions used in organizational research, including bandit problems, NK landscapes, garbage can models, models of search and exploration, learning and adaptation, information aggregation, and social influence. Participants present work in progress, discuss technical and methodological issues, and engage with invited speakers from adjacent fields whose methods inform organizational modelling.
The meeting is hosted each year by a member of the community at their home university, rotating across leading institutions in Europe and North America. Past meetings have been held in Oxford (the inaugural 2010 gathering), New York, Odense, Venice, Boston, Rome, Fontainebleau, Frankfurt, and Paris, among others. The 2026 meeting will take place in Barcelona at IESE Business School.
Beyond the exchange of ideas, the annual meeting serves the society’s longer-term aims set out in its manifesto: building a shared inventory of canonical models, developing common standards for reporting modeling results, mentoring younger scholars, and strengthening the institutional foundations of organizational modeling.
MONDAY, JUNE 8, 2026
14:00–14:15 Welcome
14:15–15:15 Oral 1
Organizational search under ambiguous feedback: How inconsistent performance signals reshape the two-step model
- Oana Vuculescu, Aarhus University
15:15–16:15 Oral 2
When and how complementors destabilize a dominant ecosystem: Mechanics behind the Fall of Intel and its ecosystem
- Jeho Lee, Seoul National University; David Chung, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign; Sanghyun Park, National University of Singpore
16:15–16:45 Coffee Break
16:45–17:45 Oral 3
Emergent Directedness in Social Contagion
- Douglas Guilbeault, Stanford University; Fabian Tschofenig, Stanford University
19:30–21:00 Poster Session 1 & Buffet Dinner
TUESDAY, JUNE 9, 2026
9:00–10:00 Oral 4
The disjunction effect does not violate the Law of Total Probability
- Gael Le Mens, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
10:00–11:00 Oral 5
Value Capture Landscapes
- Axel Zeijen, ETH Zurich
11:00–11:30 Coffee Break
11:30–12:30 Oral 6
Divergent learning trajectories in balancing execution and planning
- Jason Friedman, MIT Sloan; Hazhir Rahmandad, MIT Sloan
12:30–14:30 Poster Session 2 & Lunch
14:30–15:30 Oral 7
Organizational Routines as Information Loops in a Distributed Memory: A revisitation of March’s 1991 paper on exploration and exploitation
- Guido Fioretti, University of Bologna; Muhammad A., University of Bologna
15:45–17:15 Panel
AI, Modelling, and Theorising
- Kariyushi Rao, Frankfurt School of Finance and Management
17:15–20:30 Social Event
20:30 onwards Conference Gala Dinner
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10, 2026
9:00–10:00 Oral 8
Concealed Cynicism in Mission-Driven Organizations
- Cathy DiGennaro, MIT Sloan School of Management
10:00–11:00 Oral 9
Sequential Attention to Goals as an Organizational Truce
- Scott Ganz, UC Riverside
11:00–11:30 Coffee Break
11:30–12:30 Oral 10
Screening Under Reputation
- Kannan Srikanth, Ohio State University; Tingxiao Fu, OSU; Thorbjorn Knudsen, FS
12:30–14:15 Poster Session 3 & Lunch
14:15–15:30 Panel
Applications of Cultural Evolution to Organisations
- Francisco Brahm, London Business School; Chengwei Liu, Imperial College; Helena Miton, Stanford GSB
15:30–16:00 Closing
Contact Information
IESE Business School Barcelona