Informal institutions—the shared but unwritten norms and values of a society—are a critical element of the study of international business. However, research on these institutions is theoretically and empirically challenging. For this reason, “there has been limited work on the topic, a lack of clarity on how to conceptualize and measure informal ... Read More

In an important new study, HKUST’s Guodong Lyu and colleagues show how to optimize resource allocation under stochastic demand. Improving on previous frameworks, they demonstrate that the analysis of three different classes of allocation policy can be unified from the customer perspective, through the concept of the service level. This gives rise to a ... Read More

Power can have a major influence on how we receive, provide, and respond to information. In an important contribution to marketing research, HKUST’s Linying Fan and colleagues show how feeling powerful—a fundamental psychological state—can affect consumers’ construction and reception of communications. They propose a novel psychological mechanism, “need-for ... Read More

Corporate stakeholders have long assessed companies based on indicators of financial performance. Recently, however, “softer” indicators have been added to these assessments, under the rubric of corporate social responsibility (CSR) . Today, CSR significantly influences depositors’ assessments of banks’ trustworthiness, according to HKUST’s Mingyi Hung and ... Read More

With the growth of social media and other online communities, online social interactions have become an important part of daily life. This has led to increasing concerns about online privacy in the context of e-commerce. On today’s Internet, privacy needs differ from those in traditional e-commerce due to their focus on interactions among online peers. In ... Read More

In the last decade, reforms have been implemented worldwide to improve gender diversity in corporate boardrooms. “Boardroom diversity is a key social performance issue, and boardroom reforms represent major social and governance policy initiatives,” say HKUST’s Mingyi Hung and Emily Jing Wang, working with colleagues. Their forward-thinking study sheds light ... Read More

Customers often search for information on products before making their purchase decisions. With the emergence of online review platforms, this has become quicker and easier than ever, such that companies must manage customer search to attract and retain customers. How might the common marketing strategy of bundling—where multiple goods or services are sold ... Read More

Online platforms attract hundreds of millions of users, who post regularly on many topics. However, the algorithms used to direct them to content have faced criticism. HKUST’s Jia Liu and a colleague examine the phenomenon of “popularity bias” in recommender systems, taking advantage of a quasi-experiment conducted by China’s biggest online knowledge-sharing ... Read More

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) systems make data-driven decisions in a multitude of applications and industries. Explanations of the reasoning behind these decisions are crucial to the success and acceptance of such systems, say HKUST researcher Carlos Fernández-Loría and colleagues. Rising to this challenge, the authors present and rigorously test a ... Read More

Consumers facing increased time pressure have lower levels of attention, according to HKUST scholar Kohei Kawaguchi and colleagues. The researchers explored how consumers’ attention and utility (a measure of product usefulness) are influenced by time pressure and variables such as the number of recommended products. Ultimately, they concluded that “context ... Read More