Yale School of Management
Alex Tyulyupo
Postdoctoral Associate studying organizational behavior, categories, and entrepreneurship.
Before entering a market, founders have to work out who they are up against. I study that act of reconnaissance: how actors construct their competitive landscape before they ever compete in it.
My research examines organizational reconnaissance, the tacit search process through which actors construct an understanding of their competitive environment before entering it.
Working at the intersection of organizational categorization, organizational learning, and entrepreneurship, I study how founders identify competitors, how that identification builds the dimensions of the performance landscape, and how perceptions of competition reshape ventures as they develop.
My empirical work is built around a behavioral simulation platform I designed. It presents a database of real companies, lets participants search by category or keyword, and records the full search trajectory for both observational studies and randomized experiments.
Research Interests
How I Got Here
Before my PhD, I worked as a freelance researcher at a large technology company, helping build a new online education platform for programmers. The task sounded simple: use job-board data to describe the field's specializations.
But the first question turned out to be the hard one: what counts as a specialization at all? The boundaries I drew would shape which skills people chose to learn, where they applied, and how they labeled themselves.
I did not have the vocabulary for it then, but that was my introduction to the questions I now study. Categories are not neutral descriptions of a market. They are instruments that structure how people search it.