In today’s fast-changing e-commerce landscape, businesses are increasingly relying on two novel strategies for winning customers: referral marketing and product discounting. However, this promising pairing may have a sting in the tail, according to HKUST’s Hong Xu and Kai-Lung Hui and colleagues. Although individually effective, these two marketing tools may ... Read More

In today’s fast-changing e-commerce landscape, businesses are increasingly relying on two novel strategies for winning customers: referral marketing and product discounting. However, this promising pairing may have a sting in the tail, according to HKUST’s Hong Xu and Kai-Lung Hui and colleagues. Although individually effective, these two marketing tools may ... Read More

In May 2016, the Chinese question-and-answer platform Zhihu launched Zhihu Live, allowing contributors to hold live talks and collect entrance fees from participants. While contributing to the knowledge available on the platform, how did this new payment-based approach affect users’ unpaid-for contributions? Using evidence generated by this “natural ... Read More

HKUST’s Center for Business and Social Analytics (CBSA) generates quality insights from massive amounts of social data. Chair Professor HUI Kai-Lung, CBSA Director; Associate Professor Allen HUANG, CBSA Associate Director; and Dr LIM Hyungsoo, Postdoctoral Fellow at CBSA British mathematician Clive Humby famously coined the phrase “Data is the new oil” ... Read More

For retailers seeking to stand out in the cutthroat world of e-commerce, discounts can offer a powerful advertising tool. Across the Web, businesses compete for customers’ attention by announcing the most exclusive deals and hottest “flash” sales. However, big discounts do not always translate into big profits. According to HKUST professors Kai-Lung Hui and ... Read More

A few years ago, a data breach compromised the information of more than 100 million Target customers and cost the company US$148 million. Target had outsourced its security to a managed security service (MSS) provider called FireEye, but then failed to take action after FireEye alerted it to the breach. In a timely study, HKUST professors Kai-Lung Hui and ... Read More

Social media platforms enable millions of people worldwide to share stories, images, and other content. However, sharing the private information of others (peers) may have unintended and far-reaching consequences, both positive and negative. HKUST professors Kai-Lung Hui and Hong Xuand their co-researcher set out to determine how the benefits of peer ... Read More

How much should we discount our products or services? Many online sellers offer deep discounts to attract consumers. This is especially the case in online markets where the sellers are often less known to consumers. The question is whether such a promotional tactic helps the sales. It defeats the sellers’ advertising or promotional purposes if the discounts ... Read More

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published an ingenious paper sketching the idea and architecture to implement a peer-to-peer digital cash system called Bitcoin. The system was launched in 2009 and, since then, has kick-started a wave of digital innovations related to blockchain. The meaning of blockchain is literal – it refers to a way of storing data in a ... Read More

When a big fish in the IT sector swallows a relative minnow, it can often seem that too much has been paid and too little gained by the buyer. But, given the major players didn’t become major players by making economically dumb decisions, are there some less obvious benefits to these transactions? In their study, Professor Hui Kai Lung from HKUST Business ... Read More