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Jean-Philippe Bonardi is a French and Swiss Professor of Business Economics and Strategic Management, known for his work on nonmarket strategies (or how firms interact strategically with public policy-makers and external stakeholders). He is the current Dean of HEC Lausanne, the faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Biography
Jean-Philippe Bonardi was born in Nice, France (May 20, 1970). He graduated from HEC Paris (France), in 1993, obtained a master in economics from the University of Aix-Marseille III in 1994, and earned his PhD at HEC Paris in 2001. From 2000 to 2008, he was an Assistant and Associate Professor in the ‘Business, Economics and Public Policy’ department of the Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario (Canada). He then moved as a Full Professor to HEC Lausanne in 2008, where he held various positions such as PhD program director (2008-2009), Chairman of the strategy department (2009-2012), Vice-Dean in charge of external and international affairs (2012-2015), and then Dean since 2015.

He held various visiting research and teaching positions such as at the Haas School of Business of the University of Berkeley (US), the Freeman School of Business of Tulane University (US), or the University of New South Wales (Australia).

Bonardi also served in the editorial boards of several international academic journals. In particular, he and was Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Review, one of the highest impact factor journals in management, between 2008 and 2011.

Deanship
As the Dean of HEC Lausanne, Bonardi managed the effort that led to the achievement, for the first time in the school’s history, of the 5-year EQUIS accreditation delivered by EFMD. He also made HEC Lausanne one of the founding members of the QTEM network (Quantitative Methods for Economics and Management), an international network of international schools allowing students to do their master program in highly quantitative management topics and in three countries.

Bonardi is also one of the founders of the E4S Center (‘Enterprise for Society’) created jointly by the University of Lausanne (through HEC Lausanne), the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EFPL) and IMD (the Institute for Management Development). The E4S Center was launched in January 2020. The purpose of the E4S Center is to study the structures of the coming industrial revolution, to prepare students for it, and to support the start-up and corporations that will make this industrial revolution.

Research on firms' nonmarket strategies
Bonardi’s research is particularly known for its contribution to the field of firms’ nonmarket strategies, i.e. the strategies developed by firms to influence public policies (public politics) and handle external stakeholders such as social activists (private politics).

When dealing with a regulation or a public policy, firms enter the domain of ‘public politics’. In that context, and following prior research in Public Choice or Institutional Economics, Bonardi and colleagues suggested to conceptualize firms’ political relationships as a market. Firms are located on the demand side of this political market (as they demand some change or oppose a change in public policy), and compete or ally there with other firms or various potential interest groups (e.g. consumer groups, environmental activists, etc.). On the supply side of political markets, one can find politicians, who are assumed to seek re-election, or regulators and administration trying to maximize legitimacy. Different political market structures can emerge from the dynamic between suppliers and demanders of public policy, making it more or less difficult to pass a new regulation (or to oppose it). These political market dynamics will thus have a significant impact on the success of firms’ nonmarket strategies.

In general, as suggested by George Stigler, firms and industries are considered to have a strong impact on public policies because they are organized and thus face lower collective action problems. However, Bonardi, in a paper with Gerry Keim, suggests that this argument holds only when voters are ignorant about the issues at stake. From a rational perspective, voters are assumed to be rationally ignorant for most political issues as they face high costs of getting informed and relatively low benefits (since their vote is unlikely to have much influence). However, this proposition no longer holds when various interest groups or environmental activists focus on an issue, actively use the media to diffuse information and move voters out of their rational ignorance. In doing so, these interest groups transform regular issues into ‘election issues’, in which voters are now informed, or even biased, and will monitor closely responses by firms and how public policy-makers will proceed. Bonardi and Keim show that firms are put at a disadvantage there, and are thus unlikely to obtain their preferred public policy.

In a meta-analysis, Bonardi and colleagues showed that firms’ ability to impact public policy decisions is relatively weak, except for firms in regulated markets.

In order to explain this surprisingly weak result, Bonardi studied more closely how firms participate in policy-making processes. In particular, he showed that lobbying or campaign contribution expenses are not necessarily the most important way by which firms attempt to influence policies. Bonardi suggested that, in order to impact policy discussions and influence policy-makers, firms have to engage some of their economic assets and even sometimes freeze these assets. For instance, firms can promise to keep employment high in their plants in exchange for more favorable policies, or commit to develop cleaner technologies in order to support the political program of policy-makers. Looking at political influence this way introduces many new questions and tradeoffs for firms, as it becomes clear that efficiency on the nonmarket side might have a negative impact on these firms’ market strategies. Bonardi argues that this might explain the lower performance of firms’ political activities, as not enough market assets can be allocated to effectively influence the policy-making process.

Bonardi also studied private politics, i.e. situations in which social or environmental activists challenge firms through boycotts or negative media campaigns. With various colleagues, Bonardi showed that companies are often targeted less for what they do wrong, but rather for what they can generate in terms of visibility in the public. Bonardi also studied, using game theory tools, the conditions under which firms decide to respond to private politics by fighting back, and whether they instead decide to give in and self-regulate.