Display ads generate about US$25 billion a year through sales of “impressions” – a pair of eyeballs on an online advertisement that can be a banner, video or non-text-based promotion. But these impressions are unpredictable, change over time and cannot be stored. So how can publishers maximise their profits? Ying-Ju Chen investigates the issue and proposes a ... Read More

The saying “good things come to those who wait” does not offer much comfort to consumers who are stuck in lines waiting for a product or a service (e.g., waiting at the bank or at the doctor’s office). The wait can seem to take forever – at least for some. A recent study has found that people can have different judgements on the duration of the same wait ... Read More

In the aftermath of financial crises, one might assume individuals become wary of risk. But is that because of what they have seen in the news, or do they need personal experience to act? A new study on the 2007-2009 global financial crisis shows that personal experience is indeed a driving factor and it can motivate people to not only be wary, but to ... Read More

Gift-giving is a big business – in the US annual spending on gift-giving reached $159 billion in 2017. But such expenditure may also be symptomatic of overspending. In the UK in 2015, one in 10 people reported experiencing financial difficulties because they spent too much over the Christmas season. Moreover, recipients are often not as impressed as the ... Read More

Retailers are often faced with a trade-off between setup costs, which arise when placing an order, and the associated inventory holding costs. In operations literature, something that has received a considerable amount of attention is the joint replenishment problem (JRP), which is a certain class of retailer inventory problems that arise under various ... Read More

Eurowings, the German low-cost airline, offers leisure travelers a sweet deal. Fly to many of its popular European destinations for as low as 33 euros (about $38). The only catch: Eurowings decides where you end up. It works like this: Choose a starting point among Eurowings’ German or Austrian cities and select from a handful of thematic categories — ... Read More

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