Where to eat? It’s a question you’ve probably pondered when visiting somewhere unfamiliar. Though it’s fun to explore a strange suburb, town or city, when you’re hungry you’d rather minimise the chance of paying exorbitant prices for an unpleasant experience. Can economics help? We’ve combined economic theory with data from online restaurant ratings to identify...
On June 18, the government of Canada declared a national climate emergency. The next day, the same government approved the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion (TMX), which will be able to move almost 600,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta to the Port of Burnaby in British Columbia. If this seems like a contradiction, you...
The Stonewall riots were a six-night series of protests that began in the early morning of June 28, 1969, and centered around the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City. Four days earlier, on June 24, 1969, the police, led by Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, raided the Stonewall Inn and began arresting bar...
Since 1972, social scientists have studied the General Social Survey to chart the complexities of social change in the United States. The survey, which is conducted every couple years, asks respondents their attitudes on topics ranging from race relations to drug use. In 2008, the survey started including a question on sexual identity. As sociologists...
Suppose you’re at a nice restaurant celebrating your anniversary. When a customer at a nearby table complains that it’s taking too long to get his meal, you and your spouse overhear the server’s brusque response. Would the server’s behavior prompt you to leave a smaller tip for your own meal? When people witness poor customer...
The Academy of Management Journal has just published a paper titled Collective emotions in institutional creation work, which has been produced at Aalto University School of Business in collaboration with the University of Birmingham. The paper addresses the often overlooked issue of how communities rebuild long after the NGOs have moved onto the next disaster. Steffen...
The green industry in the United States is comprised of production and wholesale nurseries and wholesale/retail distribution centers, as well as related marketing interests. While the green industry traditionally has been among the fastest growing business sectors in the U.S. national economy, recently some of its segments have become stagnant or have declined in economic...
Researchers from the University of Southern California, University of Houston, and Uber Technologies, Inc. published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing, which finds that in order to create viral ads, brands should arouse strong emotion, place brand mentions at the end of the video, keep ads to a moderate length of 1.0 to 1.5...
Although artificial intelligence (AI) often comes to mind when we think of the future of work, there is also a vibrant conversation about the structure of work and where work is going to be completed. The gig economy refers to a work context that consists primarily of short-term independent freelance workers contracting with organizations or...
At the end of May, it happened again. A mass shooter killed 12 people, this time at a municipal center in Virginia Beach. Employees had been forbidden to carry guns at work, and some lamented that this policy had prevented “good guys” from taking out the shooter. This trope – “the good guy with a...
