David Carroll Croson Ph.D.

Dr. Croson holds a BS and MS in Energy, Environmental, and Mineral Economics from the Pennsylvania State University, attended the MBA program at Harvard Business School, and holds an AM and PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University.

His teaching interests include strategic management for both large and small companies - in particular, entrepreneurial strategies for small firms that large companies simply can't match. He has also taught on the strategic use of information as a business asset, the creation of information advantages, and technology investment strategy.

His research interests in entrepreneurship include the timing decision of when prospective entrepreneurs should quit their "day jobs" in pursuit of a new venture, compensation strategies employers can follow to maximize the value of these entrepreneurial employees while they're still employed, and the monetary tradeoffs entrepreneurs are willing to make to leave jobs that they hate. In strategy, he is examining product-design decisions, the merits of intermediate competitive positions, and the relationships among fixed costs, competition, and profitability. In the information-systems area, he has examined the value of information in decision problems and the challenges of pricing information and information goods such as software. In insurance and risk management, he has written on the design of financial instruments linked to catastrophic risks as hedges against project interruption and difficult-to-quantify risks. He has published in journals such as Economics Letters, Academy of Management Review, Risk Analysis, and Decision Support Systems.

Prior to joining the Cox School as an Associate Professor in 2005, he served as a faculty member at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of California - Berkeley, the Hong Kong Institute of Science and Technology, and Temple University. He frequently advises technology startups and was named "Mentor of the Year" by the University City Science Center.