‘Freemium’, a pricing strategy whereby a firm offers a basic product or service at no cost to the user, has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Having led to the rapid rise of companies such as Skype and Dropbox, countless startups have also adopted freemium as their business model. After all, there are obvious reasons why freemium is ... Read More

Whether transported by air, sea, or land, perishable goods must reach their destinations on time. The sooner they arrive, the fresher they will be. But speed comes at a price. To keep shipping costs down while meeting customers’ diverse expectations of quality, most suppliers (“shippers”) today use multiple transportation service providers (“carriers”) for ... Read More

The diversity of social ties and its influence on creativity has long been a key focal area for scholars. Social ties are simply interpersonal connections that provide access to resources, while creativity can be described as the formulation of new or useful ideas. Previous studies on social ties and its association with creativity have largely taken an ... Read More

In general, people lived longer than expected in the last century, largely as a result of economic development and improvements in healthcare. Nevertheless, changes in life expectancy can be rather volatile, with negative shocks occurring from economic recessions, epidemics, natural disasters, wars, and social and political disturbances. In the United States ... Read More

Few people leave home without their smartphones or other mobile devices, which now dominate almost every aspect of our personal lives — including shopping. We already know that purchase behavior differs between mobile- and PC-based shopping, but the exciting potential to optimise recommendation systems for mobile channels has been largely untapped—until now ... Read More

“Save from 30% to 50% today!” Range offers like this—advertising flexible price options within a fixed range—are a popular marketing strategy. Surprisingly, however, we know little about how customers react to such offers. Shedding light on this underexplored topic, HKUST’s Prof. Linying (Sophie) Fan and her colleagues propose and test a novel theory: the ... Read More

Recently, the amount of outward foreign direct investment from emerging economies has been growing at a rapid pace, with numerous state-owned enterprises (SOEs) being part of the process. State ownership affects not only the resources a company can access and its motivations, it also impacts its opaqueness, i.e., the unavailability of credible, firm-level ... Read More

The success of an organization is largely dependent on the effectiveness of the leadership process, rendering the study of leadership essential. Virtuous leader behavior in form of benevolent leadership, referring to leaders’ individualized, holistic concern for both subordinates’ work and non-work domains, has long been considered to have beneficial impacts ... Read More

A wide variety of industries have production lines that produce multiple outputs at the same time. In some cases, these outputs serve different purposes, such as chemical processes, oil refining, and so on. Production outputs can also serve the same basic purpose, where quality levels may differ as a result of quantity being more important than quality ... Read More

Deciding to leave a job and actually leaving it are not the same thing. Whether the intention to quit translates into real turnover behavior—known as the turnover intention–behavior link—is strongly affected by cultural values, find HKUST researcher Kin Fai Ellick Wong and a colleague. Their research answers a question that has long plagued organizations: if ... Read More