Winning 80 per cent of the prize: Paper and Teaching Awards at the Christmas party

2023-12-21

The last gifts of 2023 could be cheaper. At least for some online retailers. Hannes M. Petrowsky, one of the four research prize winners from the Faculty of Management and Technology at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, has analysed "26 million real eBay negotiations". His findings are also encouraging for 2024: "Those who offer 80 per cent of the desired price have the best chance of winning."

The young scientist also received the most votes for his four-minute presentation. It was funny, full of content and inspiring. This momentum was possible because Professor David Loschelder, Vice Dean and this year's presenter of the faculty's Christmas party, kicked things off. The psychology professor gave an entertaining presentation of the eight research and teaching awards for 2023. For Loschelder - as he recited his own poem - it is clear "... So it remains, in research and teaching, the Faculty M+T, purest seduction and more ..." Big applause followed. The atmosphere in lecture theatre 3 was immediate.

The journal articles and papers submitted for the award of the research trip were impressive in terms of their high impact factor alone, which reached an average of 6.99. David Loschelder said simply: "I am impressed."

In addition to the eBay study, the work of Sophie Bornhöft and Mario Schuster captivated the auditorium. According to them, the Fridays for Future protests have an impact on the stock market. Bornhöft found: "There are significant reactions of the stock market to climate strikes." However, this only demonstrably happens when the demonstrations attract public attention. "Then investors also react to the activism." The two other research prizes went to Dr Markus Zimmer from Information Systems and Tanja Zwerger from Engineering.

Teaching is a top priority at Leuphana and the M&T faculty. This is also reflected in the teaching quality of the young academics. Four teaching awards underline this commitment. Benedikt Haus received praise for his lecture plus exercise in engineering mathematics because, among other things, he responds very quickly to the students' wishes and processes their needs didactically.

Jennifer Matthiesen and Tino Paulsen have been recognised for their expertise in "Decomposing Neural Networks". Matthiesen was connected online from Sweden for her presentation due to a cancelled night train. In her teaching, Verena Meyer bridged the gap between the challenges of our time - the Grand Challenges - and the need for regional follow-up projects. "If you want to create effective student projects, you have to find practical, regional follow-up projects," she explained. Finally, Dr Meikel Soliman took the audience into the world of crime novels to explain a statistical method in psychology. In his lecture on "Inferential Statistics", Soliman convincingly demonstrated the contribution that surveys of small groups can make to larger cumulative population samples. The audience had understood this idea - at least that's what the roaring applause suggested.