Before any new product is launched, it must be tested. As customer reviews flow in, companies may find that they receive more than they bargained for. Customers may use a product in ways never anticipated by the brand, discovering novel benefits. How should brands harness the power of such serendipity? This was the question asked by HKUST professors J ... Read More

The Internet has had a huge impact on society over the past few decades, and the ever-increasing access to affordable, high-speed connectivity has led to both positive and negative outcomes. One important social aspect of this widely used technology is children becoming addicted to online gaming, social media, web browsing, and so on. Taking into account ... Read More

Listing on a U.S. stock exchange can be good for business, but U.S.-listed foreign firms pay a big price for deliberately misleading investors, according to a 2020 study by Ge, Matsumoto, Wang, and Zhang. . The authors compared the responses of U.S. stock markets to accounting irregularities—intentionally misstated financial information—disclosed by U.S ... Read More

Social media platforms enable millions of people worldwide to share stories, images, and other content. However, sharing the private information of others (peers) may have unintended and far-reaching consequences, both positive and negative. HKUST professors Kai-Lung Hui and Hong Xuand their co-researcher set out to determine how the benefits of peer ... Read More

In today’s digital era, online research plays a key part in the decision to buy a particular product or brand. The enormous amount of product information instantly available to customers on the Internet has changed the way they choose between similar offerings. Shedding light on this complex process, Assistant Professor Song Lin of HKUST’s Department of ... Read More

Selling directly to customers represents an opportunity for suppliers, but it can threaten retailers’ profits. This is known as supplier encroachment, and it occurs across a range of industries. In an innovative study, HKUST’s Professor Ying-Ju Chen and co-researchers modeled scenarios in which retailers can optimize the outcomes of supplier encroachment ... Read More

Counterparty credit risk (CCR) refers to the risk that a counterparty will not pay up as obligated in a contract. Under such circumstances, an economic loss would occur if the transaction with the counterparty has a positive economic value at the time of default. In recent years, counterparty credit risk has become a prominent risk for market participants ... Read More

For multinational enterprises (MNEs), expanding internationally into untapped markets can be costly. Promisingly, however, such expansion also offers opportunities to gain competitive advantages. Such opportunities have been neglected in international business research to date—a gap that HKUST’s Professor Jiatao Li and a colleague set out to fill. Building ... Read More

Many organizations recruit a large number of people in a short amount of time, a practice known as high volume recruitment. Organizations hire in volume for various reasons. For example, they are growing exponentially, they are opening new locations or offices, or to create economy of scale and synchronize with the school calendar, they have regular ... Read More

Social interactions play a crucial role in the markets of social goods. This paper examines the optimal selling scheme when products show such social good feature. This paper examines a monopoly firm model adopting sequential launch strategy to sell social goods to a customer group in a network. Under this strategy, not only can the firm determine prices ... Read More