Position at IIB, other positions and academic career

Jelena is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for International Business. She earned her doctorate with honors at WU Vienna with a dissertation on HQ resource allocation within MNC, for which she received the Stephan Koren Best Dissertation Award 2021 (price of the WU Vienna for the best dissertations) and was a finalist for the 2021 Peter J. Buckley and Mark Casson AIB Dissertation Award (award for the best dissertation in the field of International Business worldwide by the Academy of International Business). During her doctorate, she also finished the Regional Academy of the United Nations, where she won the award for the best student of the year, as well as the Ban Ki Moon Global Citizen Award. She graduated from the Erasmus Mundus EGEI Master’s program in Economics with studies in China, Belgium and Italy as a scholarship holder of the European Commission. Earlier she completed both of her Bachelor’s degrees (in Economics and International Relations) in Belgrade, Serbia, where she is originally from.

Before joining academia, she gained considerable industry experience as a business development manager and a strategy consultant in international companies with headquarters in Germany, Austria and the USA and she was a co-founder and a CEO the NGO Teach for Serbia, part of Teach for All global network. Before IIB, Jelena already worked at WU as a Program Manager for CEE and Emerging Markets, as well as a lecturer for CEMS Master’s program.

She is currently a visiting researcher at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research and Development of Serbia, and will be a visiting scholar at the Copenhagen Business School starting July 2024.

Research interest

Her main domains of research are decision-making and behavioral strategy in MNCs (primarily focusing on the role of AI, digitalization, and cognition in strategic decision-making), headquarters-subsidiary relations, and IB research methods (especially laboratory and field experiments). Her research has been published in highly ranked international journals, such as the Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Management Studies, and Journal of International Management. She is a Vice President - Communications & Social Media of the Research Methods Special Interest Group of the Academy of International Business.

Current research projects:

• Reliance on AI in Augmented Strategic Decision-making: Navigating Cultural and National Dynamics

• Cognitive Exhaustion and Reliance on AI Advice in Multi-Decision Settings

• Strategic Decision-preparation Capabilities in Hierarchical Problem-solving: Causes, Effects, and the Role of Generative AI

• Problems of Hypothesis Testing in International Business research

• Experimental Design in International Business Research: Challenges, Opportunities, and Pathways for Advancement