When you see a social media ad with dozens of “likes,” do you assume it is worth your time? A new study suggests the answer is more complicated than it looks. HKUST’s Professor Song Lin and his colleague conducted a large-scale field experiment on WeChat, analyzing more than 5.5 million ad impressions across 82 ads. Their goal was to find out whether showing ... Read More

Meet Lily, a small toy seller on a major online marketplace. She relies on two key services: customer trend data to know what products to stock, and short-term loans to buy inventory before the holiday rush. But new research by HKUST’s Professor Lijian Lu and colleagues shows these services don’t always reinforce each other. Using a game-theory model of ... Read More

Most companies fear cannibalization—the risk that letting customers resell their products will eat into profits. After all, if buyers can pass along a cheaper “used” version, who would still pay full price? That logic holds for cars, books, or video games—physical goods that can be resold. But a new study by Professor Ying-Ju Chen of HKUST Business School ... Read More

In competitive societies, educational products represent significant purchase decisions for families. As noted by HKUST’s Qihui Chen and her coauthors, “Parents’ preferences when purchasing educational products for their children are primarily shaped by their values, beliefs, and observations of society.” Their research shows that the choice between ... Read More

How large should the reward be for corporate whistleblowers? This question was explored in novel research by HKUST’s Chao Tang and colleagues. Their study shows that while larger bounties do not increase the value of whistleblowing information, they do make the absence of whistleblowing a more informative signal for regulators. Some firms exaggerate their ... Read More

Cumulative innovation—building on existing ideas to create new innovations—is key to technological and economic development. Unsurprisingly, the process is geographically localized: innovations tend to be developed by innovators located nearer to their predecessors. Yet research has thus far failed to account for the strengthening of this effect in recent ... Read More

Do credit rating actions predict accounting fraud? The answer is yes, according to Allen H. Huang and Shiheng Wang of HKUST and their colleague. Their study also suggests that evidence of fraudulent accounting is strongest when it comes from issuer-paid credit rating agencies (CRAs); their investor-paid rivals are less able to detect fraud signals ... Read More

Limited information sharing between retailers and their suppliers represents a critical bottleneck in the performance of supply chains. Working with a colleague, HKUST’s Hongtao Zhang proposes a novel wholesale pricing mechanism that will benefit both retailers and manufacturers and ultimately enhance supply chain efficiency. “Advances in information ... Read More

Implementing financial sector policies that promote financial inclusion and growth is one of the key goals of developing economies. However, the outcomes are often spatially and temporally uneven. Yan Ji of HKUST and co-researchers develop an innovative model to examine the economic impacts of such policies across space and time, taking as a case study the ... Read More

Structural economic changes over time have increased the value of digital technologies. Recent advances in this area, such as analytics, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence, have led nontech firms to follow the tech industry’s lead and invest in digital technologies on a large scale. How has this increased uptake of digital technology ... Read More