Matteo Burato

About Me

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Strategy at Imperial College London and a Visiting Ph.D. Scholar at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. I examine how firms design non-market strategies as a competitive tool, and how these choices impact financial performance, stakeholder relationships, and societal welfare.

My work has been published in leading academic journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature Communications.

My primary interests are in behavioral and stakeholder strategy, exploring how cognitive and behavioral foundations shape firms' non-market and competitive strategies and their performance contingencies. I complement this with a focus on corporate sustainability and organizational cognition, applying cutting-edge computational methods (such as AI, machine learning, and Bayesian modeling) to large-scale data. As part of my work at Imperial, I collaborated to the creation of a novel dataset based large-scale Natural Language Processing analysis to capture corporate behavior from 75,000 sustainability reports.

My job market paper investigates how firms construct sustainability strategies from emergent "strategic archetypes". Using transformer-based AI models on over one million corporate initiatives, I demonstrate that firms create value by matching their strategic complexity to their external environment, but only up to a point where cognitive and organizational costs become prohibitive. Ultimately, firms that can dynamically adapt this complexity to policy and market shocks generate superior future financial value.