Cash transfer programs (CTPs) have spread in the last decade to help fight extreme poverty in different parts of the world. However, these programs face challenges related to both exclusion errors, where households below the poverty line do not receive the intended support, and inclusion errors, where cash reaches households that do not require assistance. A ... Read More

Accounting fraud imposes significant costs on firms and their stakeholders in the forms of higher costs of capital, inefficient resource allocation, regulatory sanctions, and investment losses. Not surprisingly, stakeholders, regulators, and researchers are interested in fraud detection. Credit rating agencies are one of the most important information ... Read More

Do you see lights in bank office buildings in Central are usually on all night even during weekends and long lines at taxi stands near bank offices around midnight? In US, Banks’ “protected-weekend” policies restrict junior bankers from working during weekends. How are they actually affected? Prof. Okat from Finance used taxi rides from bank addresses in New ... Read More

Every day, we learn about others’ decisions from various sources. We perceive some of these decisions as choices of the more-preferred alternative and others as rejections of the less-preferred alternative. In which case are we more likely to follow another’s decision? We find that people are more likely to conform to another’s decision if it is perceived as ... Read More

Climate change and weather risk affect economy and livelihood over large scales, especially for agricultural production which depends on weather conditions. For example, United States Department of Agriculture estimates that 70-90\% of agricultural production loss can be attributed to adverse weather. In practice, weather index insurance can be employed to ... Read More

CSR has been a foreign concept for Chinese firms. It was first introduced into the Chinese Corporate Law in 2006. Yet, many companies lack of adequate knowledge of CSR and also the institutional support such as NGOs were also underdeveloped. At the early stage, how did companies engage in CSR activities? We find that small and medium sized companies ... Read More

Consumption of live streaming or entertainment content such as video games, movies, concerts, and sports events often lasts a nontrivial time period. Where are the engaging moments of contents to consumers during the period of experience? How to capture and quantify such moments? What are the business implications of such engaging moments? Live chats ... Read More

A core component of Spotify’s value proposal is personalization: They want to ensure that the content you receive is tailored to you based on the music you love. In this study, we partnered with Spotify to help them decide what would be the best algorithmic DJ to deploy for each user. Our solution consisted of using machine learning on data from a massive ... Read More

Organizations often face the strategic dilemma of choosing between exploration—such as diversifying into new products or markets—and exploiting their existing opportunities. Our research suggests that the subjective experience of losses can influence the willingness to explore. Participants in our experiments chose from options that yielded different payoffs ... Read More

Return insurance is an innovative return policy recently emerging on major Chinese shopping platforms, such as Taobao.com and JD.com. It is underwritten by an insurer and can be purchased by either a retailer or a consumer. Under such insurance, the insurer partially compensates consumers for their hassle costs associated with product return. We analyze the ... Read More