An HKUST researcher has developed a methodology to optimize promotions in online networks. The methodology does not only consider the likelihood of whether an individual is interested in the promotion (i.e., whom to target), but also how it impacts other individuals in the network (i.e., social influence of the target) and the time it is most effective ( ... Read More

Modern society has achieved wonders in medicine, but many people are still at risk of suffering from noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), including diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular diseases, to name just a few. NDCs also put great pressure on healthcare systems throughout the world. The good news is that simple lifestyle changes to improve your overall ... Read More

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013, is a global development program involving more than US$1 trillion of investment in infrastructure projects to connect China to markets worldwide. The initiative has clear economic advantages for host countries, especially those lagging behind in infrastructural development. However, participating in ... Read More

Moment marketing, a new sales strategy that leverages technology to synchronize online advertising with trending news and events in the real world, has taken the advertising world by storm. Facing ever fiercer competition for customers’ attention across channels, brands are increasingly turning to moment marketing to help them deliver the right message to ... Read More

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