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

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

Agriculture is central to the economies of developing countries. Central to agriculture, in turn, are smallholder farmers, who traditionally sold their produce locally. Today, however, they have access to far larger, more distant markets, thanks to the Internet and the electronic platforms it has enabled. The problem for farmers, according to HKUST’s Ying-Ju ... Read More

The interest rate charged on business loans, known as the discount rate, affects stock prices. This is particularly important, given the fast rate increases by the Federal Reserve this year. However, traditional methods of calculating its impact are not sophisticated enough, according to HKUST’s Zhanhui Chen. To address this limitation, the researcher ... Read More

Financial analysts are crucial information intermediaries in capital markets. Their consensus earnings estimates are widely used to assess firm performance. Given the market influence of financial analysts, managers have an incentive to issue earnings guidance to help analysts update their earnings expectations. Firms commonly issue earnings guidance at the ... Read More

Dynamic capability refers to an organization’s ability to purposefully create, extend, or modify its resource base. Within this framework, core competencies must be used to modify short-term competitive positions with the aim of building a longer-term competitive advantage. In the context of multinational enterprises (MNEs) that produce or deliver services ... Read More

Concerns about data privacy on the Internet are growing exponentially, in line with the advancement of Internet technologies such as data mining and personalized marketing. Against this backdrop, Weiyin Hong and James Y. L. Thong of HKUST, working with a colleague, provide a timely and comprehensive review of the factors influencing online data privacy ... Read More