Commerce

Knowing a company’s true sales can help determine its value. Investors, for instance, often employ financial analysts to predict a company’s upcoming earnings using various public data, computational tools, and their own intuition. Now MIT researchers have developed an automated model that significantly outperforms humans in predicting business sales using very limited, “noisy” data. In...

A research team led by Professor OHTSUBO Yohsuke of Kobe University’s Graduate School of Humanities has been investigating how group apologies are perceived. Their results revealed that apologies that are costly for the apologizing organization are deemed to be more genuine. This was similar to previous findings by Professor Ohtsubo et al. when they looked...

Institutional investors tend to put their money largely in public companies, persuaded that market discipline makes their accounts more reliable than private ones’ and most financial literature confirms their beliefs. A new study by scholars from University of Bolzano, Bocconi University, and Stern School of Business concludes on the contrary that, if you circumscribe the...

Shoppers’ decisions are increasingly shaped by their experience and the desire for better service.  Brick-and-mortar stores that work together to provide waiting area entertainment options can obtain higher profits than they would by providing their own entertainment. With the popularity of online shopping, it’s no secret brick-and-mortar stores are fighting to stay relevant. Waiting area...

When people learn that a charitable contribution they earmarked for a specific project was used for another cause, they feel betrayed – and often punish the charity, new research from Washington State University indicates. Those donors were less likely to give money to the charity in the future or do volunteer work for the organization....

Researchers from the University of Southern California, Columbia, London Business School, George Washington University, University of Colorado-Boulder, and University of California Irvine published a provocative new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines the relatively narrow impact of consumer research and suggests ways to change that situation. The study, forthcoming in the March 2020 issue of...

A gradual approach to increasing the stakes of group coordination projects can improve overall team performance, according to a new research paper featuring faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York. “What drives successful group coordination is important because team coordination is ubiquitous in many work settings, such as in medical professions, in law...