Operations and Decision Sciences Program

Mission of the Operations and Decision Sciences Program is to build a community of responsible professionals embedded in the international academic world. It connects young and experienced researchers and aims to bridge academia and the business world. We are interested in a wide variety of operational challenges of today’s complex business and social environment and are dedicated to pursuing transformative changes and impactful solutions that combine organizational, technical aspects with behavioral dimensions.

„I am researching, working on and teaching my PhD subject at the same time”

The PhD story of Jenő Mátyás Hartyándi

Read

“The past years were full of self-development”

The PhD story of Yuling Wei

Read

Be informed!

Subscribe to our newsletter to automatically receive the latest information on postgraduate studies and admissions!

Why the Operations and Decision Sciences Program?

Corvinus’ PhD program in Operations and Decision Sciences offers you the possibility to join scientific research reflecting on practical problems embedded in today’s complex and dynamic environment.

This complexity requires to analyse problems at different levels of analysis. To achieve this, the program provides the possibility to research business networks, supply chains, but also that of their building elements, firms, and their relationships. In addition, we explore the interdependencies of these levels and add the behavioural aspects of decisions.

Complexity also pervades the objectives. First, there is a need to balance short- and longer-term business objectives. Second, traditional business objectives must be integrated with social and environmental aspects.

Additionally, new technologies, like digitalization and Industry 4.0, put classic process management and resource planning into a new perspective. Connectivity, visibility, and continuity have become key requirements.

Such a complexity drives the need to integrate different levels of decisions with behavioural aspects and facilitates to focus on often ambiguous management decisions that ultimately drive performance.

The Program provides rich opportunities for PhD students to join wide varieties of research programs, from digitalization and innovation in business networks, supply chain risk and resiliency, through business process digitalization and innovation to judgement and decision-making problems, behavioural decision science and future-oriented decision making in a system context.

These challenges require unique combinations of conceptual, analytical, and empirical approaches and offer wide variety of methodologies. The Operations and Decision Sciences PhD Program gives you the opportunity to choose among several methodological solutions from both the quantitative and qualitative fields. On the qualitative side of research methodologies:

• Interview based research with content analysis,

• Case study research,

• Participatory methods,

• Horizon scanning.

On the quantitative side the program is a knowledge hub for:

• Survey, or other database-driven analysis with multivariate statistics,
• Modelling and optimization,
• Bayesian thinking,
• Simulations,
• Mechanism design,
• Assignment and matching techniques,

• Risk analysis,
• Network analysis,
• IO methods,
• MCDM,
• Game theory,
• Cost allocation solutions.

Admissions

The application criteria as well as the general rules of the admission procedure are listed in Section 15 of the University Doctoral Regulations, which is available here.

The list of documents to be submitted is available here!

In the application for admission, applicants must specify which programme they are applying for.

Applicants must consult the Programme Director in advance (before submitting the application file) and must include a written recommendation from the Programme Director supporting the fact of the grant.

Applicants must submit their research proposal in English. The oral interview will be held in English.

The expected length of the research plan to be submitted in the application is 5 pages, excluding references. The proposed structure of the research plan is set out in Annex 2 to the Regulations of the Doctoral School.

The written examination concerns the field of management and organizational sciences, in particular knowledge of the research methodology and the subject of specialization chosen by the applicant.

The oral exam serves to assess the applicant’s motivation, professional commitment and aptitude to perform educational and research tasks.

The admission decision is based on a preliminary review of the submitted application materials and the outcome of the oral interview.

The evaluation system for the admission examination is set out in Annex 1 to the Regulations of the Doctoral School.

For the 2024/2025 academic year, we specifically welcome applications related to the following ongoing research projects:

Coopetition in the hydrogen supply chain led by Sofía De León Almaraz
Degrowth doughnut optimisation led by Alexandra Köves
Horizon scanning for postgrowth futures led by Judit Gáspár
Participatory decision processes for post-growth models led by Gabriella Kiss
Resilient supply chain – focus on critical infrastructure led by Judit Nagy
Firm competitiveness research at the Competitiveness Research Center led by Dávid Losonci
Industry 4.0 and digitalization in firms and supply chains led by Krisztina Városiné Demeter
Innovative ranking methods in network science led by Balázs Sziklai
Engineering economics in matching markets led by Péter Bíró