Financial analysts are important information intermediaries in capital markets. Traditional research outputs of analysts, such as buy/sell recommendations and EPS forecasts, have been the mainstream focus of market participants. In recent years, analyst forecasts of capital expenditures (capex) have become increasingly prevalent—roughly 70 percent of the US ... 閱讀更多

Innovating firms face a choice whether to patent its innovation or keep it as a trade secret. US National Science Foundation’s Business R&D and Innovation Survey in 2013 found that 41% R&D-doing firms find patents important and 67% find trade secrets important. Firms might consider that information disclosed in a patent is only imperfectly protected by the ... 閱讀更多

Moment marketing is a rich new area of contextual advertising that entails the ability to synchronize online advertising (e.g., sponsored search) in real time with relevant offline events such as TV ads. Although 81% of surveyed digital marketers have launched moment marketing campaigns mostly using TV advertising as trigger events, very little is known ... 閱讀更多

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 ... 閱讀更多

Short sellers have been known to uncover companies that engage in financial. Indeed, several activist short sellers like Muddy Waters Research and Citron Research make a name for themselves by proactively targeting fraudsters, bringing their misconducts to light, and profiting from their price decline. Not surprisingly, managers should consider the cost and ... 閱讀更多

In an earnings conference call with investors in 2008, Edward J Shoen, chief executive officer and chairman of U-Haul International, Inc., lamented that the Avis Budget Group, Inc., its main competition in one-way, do-it-yourself moving rental trucks, had failed to match U-Haul’s recent decision to raise prices. Calling the lack of response ‘unfortunate for ... 閱讀更多

We develop a flexible content-based search model that links the content preferences of search engine users to query search volume and click-through rates. Content preferences are defined over latent topics that describe the content of search queries and search result descriptions. Moreover, our model allows content preferences to vary systematically based on ... 閱讀更多

Our paper studies whether language patterns elicited by a different level of stimulus during earnings conference calls are informative about firms' earnings. Executives endure various levels of pressure when presenting a scripted managerial discussion and spontaneous answering to analysts' scrutinized questions. Such stimulus induces evasive answers ... 閱讀更多

Amid the turbulence in stock markets, retail investors continue to look for investment ideas. With thousands of publicly-traded stocks available, many retail investors often resort to their recent personal experiences when deciding on which stocks to buy or sell. In a recent paper, we find a predictable, recurring, and robust pattern between investor ... 閱讀更多