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U.S. Presidents Play Surprising Role in Driving Corporate Social Responsibility
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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...

You Did What with My Donation? When Donors Feel Betrayed by Charities
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You Did What with My Donation? When Donors Feel Betrayed by Charities

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....

Boosting the Impact of Consumer Research in the World
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Boosting the Impact of Consumer Research in the World

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...

Groups Work Better When Stakes Are Gradually Increased
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Groups Work Better When Stakes Are Gradually Increased

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...

Tech Startups Gravitate Toward Cities with Strong Social Networks
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Tech Startups Gravitate Toward Cities with Strong Social Networks

The presence of technology startups can drive economic growth for their home cities. So how can cities better appeal to entrepreneurs? A new study from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin shows the connections they can offer matter more than big money. The research shows that today’s successful tech...