Silvia Moyses-Scheingruber

Silvia is a PHD candidate at the University of Trier. She studied International Economics and Management at the Bocconi University in Milan and successfully completed a Master of Science in Economics and Business at the Erasmus School of Economics in Rotterdam. After graduation, she started working in management consulting.

In her dissertation, that is supervised by Prof. Dr. Joern Block, she investigates the decision-making behavior of key decision-makers in family and non-family firms within the strategic context of corporate acquisitions. After an extensive literature review, through which she identified an exact research gap, Silvia conducted interviews with M&A experts, top managers and board members of family and non-family firms in order to identify decision criteria applied during strategic corporate acquisitions that are of interest for an extensive comparative study. In her research, she is looking at assessment criteria and preferences of decision-makers in family and non-family firms during target company selection and she further investigates factors that might have an impact on the relative weighting of these criteria and decision-making outcomes.

By using Choice Based Conjoint (CBC) Analysis, she wants to simulate decision-making scenarios along carefully selected dimensions and evaluate the selection of target companies. She decided to use CBC because it is a method that realistically resembles the process of target company selection in the pre-acquisition phase. Her research has the potential to add knowledge to the field of family business and M&A research.