About

Panos Markou is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at UVA Darden School of Business, specializing in Technology and Operations Management. His research is built on empirically understanding how firms manage and make better decisions in the face of risks that threaten to disrupt organizational processes. Specifically, his work focuses on managing the uncertainty inherent in the production of innovation and mitigating high-impact operational and financial risks. Panos emphasizes bridging academia and industry by producing research grounded in practice with the potential for large impact and relevance. He has collaborated with companies across various industries, including automotive, aviation, banking, and pharmaceuticals. Prior to joining Darden, Panos taught at the MBA, EMBA, and Executive Education programs at Cambridge Judge Business School in the UK and IE Business School in Spain. He also has several years of industry experience working at BMW’s manufacturing facility in Spartanburg, SC, the Research & Innovation Center in Munich, and Delta TechOps in Atlanta, GA. Panos holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, and an MSc and PhD in Operations Management from IE Business School. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School’s Entrepreneurship Centre.

Research topics

• Business
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Marketing
• Computer Security
• Microeconomics
• Industrial organization
• Econometrics
• Mathematics
• Operations management
• Finance
• Engineering
• Process management

Selected publications

• Incentivizing Information Exchange Within Groups: The Role of Voting Protocols in U.S. Food and Drug Administration Advisory Committees

  Management Science · 2025-10-17

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Complex and important decisions are often made with advice from a committee of experts. But how do a committee’s “rules of engagement” affect the way individuals discuss, how they vote, and ultimately the quality of their collective recommendation? Compiling verbatim transcripts from U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory committee meetings, we study how a 2007 switch from sequential to simultaneous voting procedures changed discussions, information exchange, and decision making. Consistent with past findings, we show that, compared with a sequential voting protocol, simultaneous voting led to a reduction in the likelihood of unanimous votes. Importantly, we show novel evidence that the majority of this reduction in unanimity was mediated by changes in discussion patterns—specifically, by the increased diversity of information surfaced during discussions. We also find evidence of behavioral and linguistic changes that support our theory that voting protocols changed the incentives for members to elicit more diverse information from each other: under simultaneous voting, members exhibited greater equality in talking time, directed a greater proportion of questions to each other, and adopted language that was more positive, authentic, and equal in projecting status and confidence. Finally, we show that recommendations under simultaneous voting were more likely to be accurate, as drugs recommended and approved were less likely to encounter safety-related postmarket events. In sum, voting protocols affect the incentives for individuals to engage in robust discussions, leading to marked improvements in how information is exchanged between individuals, and in the process by which groups of experts arrive at joint recommendations. This paper was accepted by Sridhar Tayur, entrepreneurship and innovation. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.03649 .

  PublisherDOI

• Plains Ventures: Investing in the Heartland

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Step-by-Step Guide to Process Analysis

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Changing Course: How Analogies Direct Pivots

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Automotive Procurement Under Opaque Prices: Theory with Evidence from the BMW Supply Chain

  Management Science · 2023 · 6 citations

  • Industrial organization
  • Business
  • Microeconomics

  Several features of automotive procurement distinguish it from the prototypical supply chain in the academic literature: pass-through pricing that reimburses suppliers for raw material costs, market frictions that prohibit cost transparency and imbue suppliers with pricing power, and contractual commitments that span multiple production periods. In this context, we formalize a procurement model by considering an automaker that buys components from an upstream supplier to assemble cars over several production periods in an environment where period demands and raw material costs are both stochastic. Our paper clarifies how information asymmetry and market factors that amplify or weaken this asymmetry affect the firms’ procurement protocol preferences. Then, using proprietary contract and supplier data from BMW, we empirically validate this model and show that it reflects BMW’s reality: the factors that should theoretically go into automotive procurement decisions do so. Our analysis also reveals that existing contracting protocols in this context are not optimal for procurement under asymmetric information, and so we propose an alternative contracting method. We calibrate our model and estimate an automaker’s performance improvement from this optimal contract over the status quo. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4880 .

  PublisherDOI

• Rival Signals and Project Selection: Insights from the Drug Development Process

  Management Science · 2023 · 35 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Security
  • Marketing

  Project selection decisions are complex because they must balance not only financial returns, project risk, and fit with strategy, but also competitive circumstances. A rival’s project development efforts provide two pieces of information: a market rivalry signal, indicating potentially heightened competition in a market, and a technological signal, indicating a possible solution to a problem in that market. We hypothesize that these signals affect a firm’s likelihood of project selection in opposite directions, and that the timing of the signals matters for selection. We examine the drug development pipelines of the top 15 pharmaceutical companies from 1999 to 2016 to examine how rival projects drive the decision to progress a drug from preclinical laboratory trials to clinical trials in humans. Early-stage rival projects provide a stronger market rivalry signal, and they are associated with a decreased likelihood of the firm selecting its own project to compete in the same market. Late-stage rival projects signal technological feasibility and are associated with an increase in the likelihood of selection. We then exploit heterogeneity in market potential (i.e., disorder prevalence/incidence) and a molecular compound’s technology (i.e., therapeutic modality) to independently manipulate the salience of the two signals. Finally, we provide evidence on how selection based on rival signals informs project success. Information from rival projects prompts the selection of more successful drugs, but only after a threshold when sufficient uncertainty has been resolved. This paper was accepted by Jayashankar Swaminathan, operations management. Supplemental Material: Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4642 .

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Voting Rules Affect Expert Committee Deliberations and Decisions on Complex Problems

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• ZS Associates: Refilling the Pipeline

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Product Development at StubHub: Don't Stop Believin'

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Process management
  PublisherDOI

• Product–Market Alignment

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Daniel Corsten

  7 shared

• Raul O. Chao

  University of Virginia

  3 shared

• Nektarios Oraiopoulos

  University of Cambridge

  3 shared

• Jie Yang

  3 shared

• Jeremy Hutchison‐Krupat

  Cambridge School

  2 shared

• Danko Turcic

  University of California, Riverside

  2 shared

• Ryan Williams

  Mitre (United States)

  2 shared

• Panos Kouvelis

  2 shared

Education

• PhD in Business Studies, Operations and Technology Management

  IE Business School

  2018

• MSc in Research Methodology in Management Science

  IE Business School

  2014

• BSc in Mechanical Engineering

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  2012