Wei Cai

Wei Cai joined Columbia University in 2020. Her research interests revolve around management accounting and organizational culture. Her work broadly investigates how to measure and manage key dimensions of organizational capital, including organizational culture, leadership, managerial practices, and the systems that facilitate effective communication, coordination, and decision-making. For example, she examines how corporate leaders and managers can deliberately design and shape organizational culture, and improve organizational outcomes through innovative management control systems. She uses multiple research methods, including statistical analyses of large-scale archival data, field experiments, surveys, and novel computational approaches such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. She closely collaborates with practitioners and collects unique data that can provide important managerial implications for the design of management control systems in shaping desirable organizational outcomes.

Professor Cai’s work has been recognized with multiple awards (e.g., AAA Outstanding Dissertation Award, AAA Innovation in Research Award, IMA Emerging Scholar Award, AAA Best Early Career Award). Her research has also been featured in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes among others, and published in Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, Management Science, Review of Accounting Studies, Contemporary Accounting Research and Strategic Management Journal. Professor Cai delivered a TEDx talk, A Symphony of Inclusion.

Professor Cai received a Doctor of Business Administration (Accounting and Management) from Harvard Business School. Prior to earning her DBA, she worked as a senior financial advisor at Ernst & Young in New York.

SSRN
TEDx Talk