A new study shows that two key factors can make freshly appointed CEOs more vulnerable and raise the odds they’ll get fired. The job security of a new CEO tends to suffer when the stock market reacts badly or when the previous CEO stays on as board chair, according to the study by Rice University...
For decades, luxury retailers around the world have conveyed the message that cold temperatures are a sign of status with descriptions like “icy steel Swiss watches,” “cool silk scarves” and “icy bling.” But researchers have never studied whether people truly associate cold temperatures with status and luxury. To investigate whether this association could be substantiated...
Optimizing delivery driver shifts can reduce pick-up time by 50%. Choosing restaurants closer to the drop-off location rather than where a meal was just delivered can reduce delivery time by 17%. Order bundling has an average cost improvement of less than half a percent. The food delivery business, popularized by mobile online services such as...
Shoppers who win retail discounts through scratch-off tickets or other games of chance are more likely to make a purchase, and spend more money, than customers offered standard discounts that apply to everyone, according to a new study led by the University of Connecticut. Games of chance are potential goldmines for both brick-and-mortar stores and...
Researchers from the University of San Diego and University of Arizona published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing, which examines the rise of deal collectives that exploit ill-designed deals that give away more than companies intended. The study is titled “Let’s Make a “Deal”: How Deal Collectives Co-Produce Unintended Value from Sales Promotions” and...
Artificial intelligence can increase sales by four times more than inexperienced workers. If a customer is told about the use of artificial intelligence before purchasing, sales drop by nearly 80%. The majority of the problem in using artificial intelligence is customer pushback. Chatbots, which use artificial intelligence to simulate human conversation through voice commands or...
Job sharing offers a route to increase the number of women in senior leadership roles in higher education. Research from Lancaster University Management School, published in a special issue of Social Sciences, shows the potential for job sharing to provide new routes into senior management positions and to increase female presence in the upper echelons of...
Conventional wisdom indicates that market discipline and transparency ensures that financial data of public firms are more reliable for potential investors than financial reports from private companies. Contrary to this widely-held belief, new research from the NYU Stern School of Business, University of Bolzano and Bocconi University finds that when comparing European public firms against...
Hermès’ revenues are on the rise again. The Paris-based luxury brand revealed this week that for the first half of the year, revenues were up 15 percent from the same 6-month period last year to $3.63 billion, while net profit (i.e., dollars earned after subtracting operating expenses, interest, taxes and preferred stock dividends) rose to...
For decades, Walmart solidly held the reins as the largest retailer in the world. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based multinational retail corporation’s competition trailed far behind and it could afford to focus almost exclusively on its roots as a big-box retail chain, selling low-priced staples, such as laundry detergent, paper towels, bottled water, groceries, and even apparel...
