BizStudies | HKUST Business School

LI, Yixuan GONG, Yaping BURMEISTER, Anne WANG, Mo ALTERMAN, Valeria ALONSO, Alexander ROBINSON, Samuel

Age Diversity in the Workplace: Building on Organizational Performance

Despite the world’s aging population, there is limited understanding of the relationship between age diversity and organizational performance. As a result, researchers are increasingly interested in the impact of age composition within the workplace. In a timely study, Yaping Gong of HKUST and colleagues set out to explore the impact of age on corporate ... Read More

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BITTERLY, T. Bradford BROOKS, Alison Wood

Having a Laugh in the Workplace

Having a good sense of humour can be beneficial in many scenarios, whether in your personal life or at work. However, when defining a strong leader, most people would not consider humour as being a crucial attribute. An article by Brad Bitterly and Alison Wood Brooks aimed to dig deeper into this topic, understanding that humour, when used responsibly, can ... Read More

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CHEN, Yanzhen RUI, Huaxia WHINSTON, Andrew B.

Building a “Brand” Online: Career Success in the Age of Social Media

As social media become more pervasive, forming an ever larger part of our everyday lives, it is only natural that they should begin to impact our careers. In the first study of its kind, HKUST’s Yanzhen Chen and colleagues set out to discover whether creating a personal “brand” on social media can improve executives’ performance in the job market. “We ... Read More

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ZHENG, Rui SHOU, Biying CHEN, Ying-Ju

Perfecting Pricing Strategies

Peers and trend-setters have a powerful say in what products we decide to buy, particularly on online social media platforms. Naturally, this means that firms must consider the influence of network connections on purchase behaviors when designing pricing strategies. In doing so, they must consider when consumers decide to buy a new product—some consumers ... Read More

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WANG, Danqing ZHU, Zhitao CHEN, Shuo LUO, Xiaowei Rose

Political Officials and FDI Inflow

HKUST’s Danqing Wang and co-researchers claim that political term, which they define as “the tenure of an official at a certain level on the career ladder,” can influence the incentives of newly appointed government officials and their efforts to achieve the state’s foreign direct investment (FDI) goals. In a novel study that sheds light on intra-country FDI ... Read More

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ANG, James S. HSU, Charles TANG, Di WU, Chaopeng

Could Social Media Empower Small Investors in Corporate Governance?

Social media posts about potential mergers and acquisitions (M&As) can significantly predict the likelihood of M&A success, say HKUST researcher Charles Hsu and colleagues. Social media message boards give China’s 50 million small investors a voice, which they are using to express their opinions on acquisition activity. This study establishes an influential ... Read More

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CHEN, Zhanhui COOPER, Ilan EHLING, Paul XIOUROS, Costas

Acknowledging the Role of Risk Aversion in Business Cycles

Real business cycle (RBC) models describe how firms make investment and labour decisions. They assume that technological shocks and changes in productivity are the primary drivers of macroeconomic fluctuations. However, these models generally fall short of explaining how choices made within firms—which might modify external shocks—might affect macroeconomic ... Read More

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DOU, Winston Wei JI, Yan

Competition, Profitability, and Discount Rates

Lowering prices and offering discounts might be a sure-fire way for firms to attract consumers, but these tactics also cause huge fluctuations in competition intensity, with potentially serious implications for asset prices and returns. Surprisingly, however, this key issue has been neglected in asset pricing research. In a pioneering study, HKUST’s ... Read More

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ZHANG, Yang CHEN, Ying-Ju

Finding the Best Price

Social networks are a good example of the complexity of human relationships, where a person’s daily life decisions are regularly affected by the choices of their friends. This challenges extensive research on the economics of networks, in which individual activities have global impacts on the activities of others. In short, the externalities of network ... Read More

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ZHOU, Jieyu GE, Lipeng Gary LI, J. T. CHANDRASHEKAR, Subramanya Prasad

Entrepreneurs and Expropriation in China

In China, start-ups with high-profile leaders are at risk of becoming victims of government expropriation, HKUST’s Jiatao Li and colleagues have found. This effect is particularly pronounced in areas where income inequality is high, and the legal system is underdeveloped. However, the authors find that entrepreneurs can protect themselves by establishing ... Read More

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