With the rise of search engines such as Google, it is becoming increasingly important to determine how consumers use these tools to find products, services, or information. Companies that understand their customers’ search behaviour can better tailor the content of their websites and pay for the right advertising on search engines. To help firms make best ... Read More

An earnings announcement – a public statement of a company’s profitability, usually issued on a quarterly basis – provides useful information to assess peer firms’ expected cash flows, as well as the uncertainty regarding their expected cash flows. While there is a large body of research on whether there are intra-industry information transfers around ... Read More

Matching supply with demand is an important way to secure profits for businesses in many industries. However, supply–demand mismatch is common, because decisions about supplies are often made before demand is fully characterized. To address this problem, HKUST’s Xuan Wang and collaborators modeled how resource flexibility can be leveraged to reduce supply ... Read More

Price-fixing cartels are pervasive. However, antitrust enforcement around the world has been recently picking up speed. Higher fines and new tools such as leniency programs for cartel whistleblowers have led to unprecedented antitrust enforcement actions against the collusion and led to crumbling cartels. Theoretically, the breakdown of collusive activities ... Read More

As unfairness in business transactions widely exists nowadays, consumers are increasingly worried about fairness. This kind of concern of fairness drives them to compare their payoffs with the sellers’ profits, and where a transaction is deemed inequitable, consumers may refuse to accept it. At the same time, such concern of price fairness also impacts a ... Read More

Supply chains are an integral part of business and form the network between a company and its suppliers to produce and distribute products to consumers. A supply chain also often contains various forms of information asymmetry (where one party has more information than the other) that drive business transactions. A manufacturer usually has less information ... Read More

Consumer demographics, product attributes, and purchase history has long been at the heart of marketing communications. That said, with the rise of big data and real-time consumer information, more attention has been paid recently to context-based marketing, in which consumers are shown different types of advertisements depending on environmental factors and ... Read More

The posterior price-matching is a mechanism where a firm reimburses the price difference to a customer who has purchased a product before a markdown. Thus, it is unlikely for a monopolist seller to mark down in a market where consumers are homogeneous (i.e., no room for price discrimination) and there is no inventory to reduce. The purpose of this paper is ... Read More

Currency carry trading is an investment strategy whereby traders invest in high-interest rate currencies and fund in low-interest rate ones. Historically, this trade has generated substantial returns. Typical analysis of the trade has focused predominantly on currencies that yield high interest rate differentials, as the Australian dollar on the long side ... Read More

Shopkeepers and store managers should base decisions on whether to discount or destroy leftover perishable goods on consumer behavior, an innovative new study has found. While marking down prices can provide welcome revenue for foodstuffs that would otherwise go to waste, this can also result in “intertemporal cannibalization”—a reduction in full-price sales ... Read More