Search engines should put sponsored ads higher up the page if the product quality is higher. This is the simple but pioneering finding of research by Ying-Ju Chen of HKUST. Chen shows that to optimize their profits, search engines should not only rank adverts in descending order of quality but also make it hard—or impossible—for users to keep clicking ... Read More

Publicly-traded firms in the U.S. are legally required to disclose the material risks they face. Although the regulation was designed to protect investors, research by HKUST’s Allen H. Huang and Amy Y. Zang shows that it has unintended benefits for firms too. Working with a graduate of HKUST’s Accounting Ph.D. program, they explored how the legal language of ... Read More

Every minute, more than 3 million queries are submitted via Google’s search engine. Analyzing data on these queries, along with page results and subsequent clicks, can shed light on the kinds of information that consumers seek each day. However, search intentions may be influenced by variables such as the weather and even the TV shows aired on a certain day ... Read More

Determining the ratio of product price to the marginal cost of production, otherwise known as the markup, is a key question in economics. In terms of the overall economy, markup variation affects the dynamics of inflation, the fluctuation of output and employment over business cycles, and the transmission of macroeconomic policies. At the firm level ... Read More

Business studies that probe how one factor influences another over time are often vulnerable to a subtle kind of error. Rigorous tests are therefore needed to avoid the drawing of false conclusions, as explained in a paper by HKUST’s Jiatao Li and mainland colleagues. They show how a long-standing problem in econometrics may have compromised the results of ... Read More

In recent decades, corporate social responsibility, or CSR, has become an increasingly important aspect of firms’ operations. For companies in emerging and transitional markets, where market-based institutions are relatively weak, governments have played a key role in driving CSR. A case in point is China, where the government has pushed CSR as a way of ... Read More

In May 2016, the Chinese question-and-answer platform Zhihu launched Zhihu Live, allowing contributors to hold live talks and collect entrance fees from participants. While contributing to the knowledge available on the platform, how did this new payment-based approach affect users’ unpaid-for contributions? Using evidence generated by this “natural ... 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

Economic partnerships and other transactions have some degree of information asymmetry between the contracting parties. As such, the information environment is vital when it comes to determining relationship quality and stability. In many markets, superior private information is seen as a competitive advantage when compared to publicly available information ... Read More

In the modern world, information is readily available to inform decisions both great—on health, finance, or politics, for example—and small. However, decision-makers are not always eager to take advantage of the information at their fingertips, especially if they fear that it will be painful. Such willful ignorance can have dire consequences for individuals ... Read More