CEO and academic mismatch

How do CEOs and academics differ in how they view academic research? We survey a sample of CEOs and business-school academics to measure their views on each other and on academic research. We explore differences between these two groups with an experimental beauty contest game (EBC) and by asking how much they value and trust different business disciplines, data types, and academic methodologies. We observe, in the EBC, that both CEOs and academics similarly hold relatively lower expectations about the reasoning abilities of CEOs than academics. While CEOs and academics both tend to trust company-specific data and simpler, more scientific methodologies, the groups differ in the value they place on disciplines that address CEOs’ duties and business specific methodologies. Together, our results shed new light on the disconnect between academic research and practitioners and indicate areas where that gap can be improved.