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

Corporate managers tend to view labor unions as presenting substantial operational threats, as strikes can disrupt production and lead to stockouts. Therefore, managers make decisions to mitigate such risks, and they use various strategies including providing pessimistic disclosures to preserve their bargaining power against labor unions. One important way ... Read More

With exponential growth in e-commerce sales, many retailers are increasing their use of online channels and social media for marketing and customer service operations. For example, Amazon and JD have launched livestreaming channels to promote their products via live video. However, the selling formats chosen by online retailers may differ. Shedding light on ... Read More

What should firms do with their patent rights when inventors jump ship? This key managerial question was recently addressed in an elegant study by HKUST’s Yanfeng Zheng and a colleague. With critical implications for firms deciding whether to maintain intellectual property after inventors leave, the authors established and empirically tested a framework ... Read More

Agriculture plays a critical role in emerging economies worldwide. Unfortunately, however, farmers in such regions remain trapped in poverty, due in large part to information asymmetry in agricultural supply chains. Governments and farming cooperatives are in urgent need of strategies to redress this imbalance and improve farmers’ welfare and profitability ... Read More

With the increasing digitization of economic and social transactions and the rapid growth of user-generated data, unprecedentedly large amounts of textual data are being generated, such as customer reviews on e-commerce platforms and discussions in online communities. However, to obtain real insights from such data, effective computational methods that ... Read More

The “short-termism” induced by executive pay schemes is a major problem for firms and investors. Allen H. Huang of HKUST, together with overseas colleagues, provides important new insights into the negative consequences of executive myopia. The researchers examined the share repurchasing and mergers-and-acquisitions (M&A) behavior of firms whose CEOs have ... Read More