Ph.D. Student Spotlight

Yunxiang Bai

Yunxiang Bai is a Ph.D. candidate in strategic management, completing his dissertation under the supervision of Francisco Polidoro. Originally from China, Bai holds an LL.B. from Tsinghua University and an M.S. in biostatistics from the University of Minnesota. His research examines how the criteria used to evaluate technological innovations change, which firms drive that change, and what happens to competitive dynamics as a result. In the pharmaceutical industry, regulators use clinical trial endpoints to decide which therapies reach patients. When approved drugs fail to help patients as expected, the criteria themselves come into question. Bai studies which firms are able to propose new evaluation criteria in the wake of such failures, and what distinguishes them from firms that cannot. In his job market paper, he assembles a novel dataset of over 200,000 clinical trials and FDA regulatory documents to examine how business capabilities interact with these breakdowns to enable criteria change. His dissertation develops a theory of “evaluative evolution.” Bai will be on the 2026-2027 academic job market; more information may be found at https://yunxiangbai.com.