Political connections have been associated with various benefits to firms and shareholders around the world – from better access to banking finance, to lower tax barriers, to lax regulatory enforcement, to receipt of government contracts and support. But how do these connections affect a firm’s willingness to voluntarily disclose information? That question ... Read More

The simple assumption about feedback is that it should let employees know where they stand on job performance, yet researchers have had difficulty proving this happens in practice. One recent study, however, has been able to demonstrate how feedback can play this goal by focusing on the varieties and nuances of feedback. The study, by Yaping Gong, Mo Wang ... Read More

Online hiring is often assumed to reduce biases based on gender, age or race because such information is often not explicitly revealed by job applicants. But a new study shows that biases are alive and kicking thanks to subtle cues from applicants’ names and photos. Jason Chan and Jing Wang looked at gender bias, which is well-documented offline to be ... Read More

A key challenge in supply chain management is to match supply and demand of various products. In dealing with this challenge, substitution is a useful option of recourse for managing product inventories: when the demand for a certain type of product exceeds its supply, use another product type, often one of a higher grade in terms of quality or functionality ... Read More

Two organizations are more likely to establish a connection if they have a pre-existing relationship with a common partner or intermediary—this is known as triadic closure and has long been of interest to scholars. However, all of the research up until this point has failed to take into account the importance of the intermediary in facilitating or even ... Read More

A study on the mandatory reporting of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities in China has found that companies’ profitability declined after the rule came into effect, but so did pollution, providing a benefit to society. The study by Yi-Chun Chen, Mingyi Hung and Yongxiang Wang focused on a requirement introduced in 2008 for the Shanghai Stock ... Read More

New technologies can have teething problems such that some users give up the whole class of technology itself (and not just the brand). A case in point was 2G mobile internet services that used wireless application protocol (WAP). The performance was so unreliable that some consumers dubbed it “wait and pay” and stopped using 2G altogether. When the 3G ... Read More

Functional diversity in work teams should in theory lead to greater innovation as members bring different kinds of experiences to the table, such as marketing, engineering and R&D. But research on the diversity-innovation relationship has been mixed. Some have found team diversity to have a positive impact, others have found a negative or null effect. One ... Read More

Technological innovation plays a key role in promoting a nation’s long-term economic growth and competitive advantage. When it comes to innovation, politics is an important factor to consider, as politicians have the ability to implement policy or regulatory changes that can affect a nation’s innovation incentives. To examine the effects of politics on ... Read More

For most companies, TV remains the primary means of advertising, with commercials accounting for 40% of global advertising spending. However, increasingly, the TV industry is facing fierce competition from new media channels, as well as advances in technology that allow viewers to skip commercials all together. It is therefore imperative for the industry to ... Read More