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

Avoiding disease is essential for survival. Throughout history, deadly infections have forced humans to adapt their ways. One important strategy for protecting ourselves from infection, people avoidance , was recently studied by HKUST’s Professor Jaideep Sengupta and a colleague. Their experiments—carried out before the COVID-19 pandemic—reveal how the ... Read More

An unexpected death in an apartment can cause a 20% drop in the property’s sale price and further impact those on the same floor, in the same block, and on the same estate, according to HKUST’s Utpal Bhattacharya and colleagues. Focusing on Hong Kong’s real estate market, the authors show that such “haunted houses” can have a sustained negative impact on the ... Read More

Are numbers perceived to have human-like characteristics, such as the ability to feel lonely? A study by HKUST’s Jaideep Sengupta and colleagues suggests that they are—and that consumers’ preferences are influenced by these supposed characteristics. This pioneering study, which for the first time links numerical cognition with consumer behavior, shows that ... Read More