Chinese venture capital (VC) firms suffer from imperfect information and poor legal protections when deciding whether to continue to invest in a company or cut it loose, according to HKUST researcher Yanfeng Zheng and a colleague. Analysing more than a decade’s worth of deals, the authors established that Chinese VCs are more likely to terminate investments ... Read More

Distributive bargaining is innately competitive: one party cannot benefit without the other’s losing out. To secure the best deals, good negotiation skills are crucial. Negotiators usually opt for one of two opposing communication styles—warm and friendly or tough and firm. But which has the upper hand in a distributive bargaining context? Negotiation expert ... Read More

Step-down care units (SDUs) are a cost-effective way to treat patients referred from intensive care units (ICUs), but they could be failing patients admitted from emergency departments (EDs). In an important new study, HKUST’s Lijian Lu and co-researchers examine the effectiveness of SDUs and identify stark differences in patient outcomes. ED patients ... Read More

Opaque selling is a marketing strategy adopted by industries such as retailing and travel under which firms sell end-of-the-season inventory of different products as a single opaque good and customers find out the specific products they actually get only after they have made the purchase. Opaque selling entails a “double-blind” process: customers do not know ... Read More

To defeat others in the battle for market share, firms routinely launch different loyalty programs, deeply influencing customer purchasing decisions. The widespread availability of such programs imply competing firms face the challenge of disentangling the interactive impact to make informed pricing and promotional decisions, especially in competitive ... Read More

It is well known that financial market regulation has grown stronger over the years. For example, legislation has mandated that publicly-listed firms increase their transparency by disclosing more information in their financial statements. This level of disclosure has had the effect of reducing the cost of capital, levelling the information playing field for ... Read More

“Fair value” is a gold standard in valuation, but there is no consensus on its usefulness in other areas, such as evaluating management performance. HKUST’s Mingyi Hung and her colleagues settle this dispute in important new work, contending that fair value accounting may actually be unhelpful when it comes to contracting. This finding is particularly ... Read More

For Chinese firms, gaining patents for innovations may be a promising way to gain influence in the international arena, according to HKUST’s Jiatao Li and a co-researcher. Such patents act as a powerful signal of technological quality and market potential for U.S. firms who seek to introduce such innovations at home. This research offers novel insights into ... Read More

We have entered a new phase of business dominated by digital platforms, i.e. platforms that have a modular architecture and provide interface that facilitates multilateral transactions and exchanges among users and providers of complementary products and services (i.e., complementors). This platform-centric ecosystem allows enterprise to exploit ecosystem ... Read More

Employees may advance their career by achieving internal job changes (i.e., changes in jobs within an organization) and external job changes (i.e., changes in jobs across organizational boundaries), and both changes may render different implications for the organization and the employee. To fill the gap in prior careers research, this study examines the ... Read More