Months after the dust settled on Fyre Festival, the “luxury” music festival gone awry, and after the failed-festival’s attendees had lodged their individual multi-million dollar lawsuits, citing everything from negligence to fraud, a handful of new lawsuits were filed in conjunction with the bankruptcy filing of Fyre Festival LLC. In a quest to recover the $16 million-plus...
Commerce
New Research Shows Live Chats Can Increase Sales by Nearly 16%
Live chats between sellers and buyers can increase purchase probability of tablets by 15.9%. Sellers with low feedback scores benefit more from live chat conversations than sellers with high scores. Popular products sell even better after a live chat. Consumers are more likely to initiate a live chat conversation when the perceived risk of purchase...
People Think Marketing and Political Campaigns Use Psychology to Influence Their Behaviors
A new study has shown that whilst people think advertising and political campaigns exploit psychological research to control their unconscious behaviours, ultimately they feel the choices they make are still their own. The research, led by Dr. Magda Osman from Queen Mary University of London, asked people to volunteer everyday examples of when they feel...
Research Offers New Way to Assess an Organization’s Public Relations
Communication and marketing experts place great weight on an organization’s relationship with its public stakeholders, and a new tool allows organizations to better measure and describe the nature of these relationships. “Traditionally, these relationships are measured using questionnaires, which provide only a static snapshot of how one party viewed an organization,” says Yang Cheng, co-author...
U.S. Presidents Play Surprising Role in Driving Corporate Social Responsibility
A new study by San Francisco State University Assistant Professor of Management Nara Jeong suggests that CEOs look to the White House for leadership on social responsibility — but not the way you might expect. It turns out that corporate leaders are less likely to act on their values when they’re in agreement with the...
Plants Can Improve Your Work Life
A study out of the University of Hyogo in Awaji, Japan, details the stress-reducing benefits to office workers that even a small plant situated within easy viewing can impart. Masahiro Toyoda, Yuko Yokota, Marni Barnes, and Midori Kaneko explored the practical use of indoor plants to boost mental health among employees typically removed from exposure...
Model Beats Wall Street Analysts in Forecasting Business Financials
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...
How Can Groups Apologize Sincerely? It’s Going to Cost Them
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...
Invest in Private Companies: They Display More Reliable Accounts Than Public Ones
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...
Waiting Area Entertainment and Co-Opetition Between Brick-And-Mortar Stores Boosts Profit
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...