Is green coffee bean extract a miracle cure for obesity? Are raspberry ketones or saffron extract magic weight loss ingredients? Regardless of the veracity of these claims, the celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz has endorsed those and many products to the viewers of The Dr. Oz Show. This has created “the Oz effect” of increased interest—and may perhaps have ... Read More

A rule designed to protect investors may encourage managerial short-termism, to the detriment of firms. This sobering finding comes from a study led by HKUST’s Yan Xiong. According to Xiong and a U.S. colleague, the American government is tying firms’ hands with the requirement to disclose managers’ pay offers. The paper shows how managers become more myopic ... Read More

Advertising is central to e-commerce. In a world of choice, ads drive consumption by informing consumers about available products. New insights into the influence of online advertising on e-shopping behavior come from a study led by Ralf van der Lans of HKUST. The team used eye-tracking experiments to probe how ad features and site design can help or hinder ... Read More

When confronted with a choice between a lettuce with a “best before” date falling in two days’ time and one in four days’ time, a supermarket customer will typically plump for the latter. This choice puts the product remaining on the shelf one step closer to a clearance sale, or even to the bin. “Waste is substantial in retailing,” note HKUST’s Qing Li and ... Read More

Sell-side financial analysts produce, acquire, and disseminate information, playing an important intermediary role in capital markets. Such analysts typically work alongside other analysts in brokerage houses. However, there is only limited understanding of how they collaborate, as most studies have treated financial analysts as isolated figures. HKUST ... Read More

Gone are the days of small-scale investment - the rise of institutional investors has changed the game completely. In 1950, only 6% of publicly traded US companies were owned by institutional investors, but fast forward to 2017 and that number has skyrocketed to 65%. The "Big Three" - BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Investors - hold a ... Read More

In today’s fast-changing e-commerce landscape, businesses are increasingly relying on two novel strategies for winning customers: referral marketing and product discounting. However, this promising pairing may have a sting in the tail, according to HKUST’s Hong Xu and Kai-Lung Hui and colleagues. Although individually effective, these two marketing tools may ... Read More

To thrive in a world in which common prosperity is as important as corporate profit-making, the private sector must find new, more sustainable ways to operate. But can private businesses really do well by doing good? One option, according to HKUST’s Abhiroop Mukherjee and colleagues, is for businesses to partner with governments to help the poor realize the ... Read More

An algorithm can be simply defined as a set of instructions for solving a problem or accomplishing a task. Within many business domains, algorithms are rapidly taking over the decision-making abilities of humans. However, full automation of business activity is only found in certain industries, such as manufacturing, where robots can work in a well ... Read More

Investors, analysts, and other stakeholders rely on a slew of materials when measuring how businesses perform. Some of those materials are issued directly by company executives, and they typically include a particularly important set of documents: management earnings forecasts. Unsurprisingly, management forecasts do not always perfectly predict actual ... Read More