Alessandro Iorio is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management and Technology at Bocconi University. Alessandro won the Best Network Paper Award for his paper "Brokers in disguise: The joint effect of actual brokerage and socially perceived brokerage on network advantage" published in Administrative Science Quarterly (2022).

According to the judges, this paper "stood out in a field brimming with exciting papers because of its innovative theoretical ideas and its meticulous research design." Iorio's paper brings together two major traditions in network theory that rarely intersect: the structural, which conceives of social networks as patterns of interaction and sentiment in the real world; and the cognitive, which examines social networks not as patterns of interaction and sentiment in the world but as mental representations. Using data from a global consulting firm and an experiment, Iorio shows that individuals who occupied brokerage positions in the firm's social network achieved higher innovative performance when their colleagues perceived them to have closed networks, rather than the open networks that characterize brokerage: brokers were most innovative when they appeared in disguise. Congratulations to Alessandro Iorio for producing a paper that informs and delights in equal measure!