News by Subject Social & Behavior

Chatbots, which use artificial intelligence to simulate human conversation through voice commands or text chats, incur almost zero marginal costs and can outsell some human employees by four times, so why aren't they used more often? According to new research, the main contributor is customer pushback.

Organizations endorsing a win-at-all-costs environment may find this management style good for the bottom-line, but it could come a price. Teamwork and civility between co-workers are severely compromised which can lead to major issues down the road (remember Enron?).

CATONSVILLE, MD, September 16, 2019- According to new research published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, companies can improve sales performance when they adjust sales commissions for the sale of more popular items. Further, the researchers found that when companies provide incentives to the sales force, that is more cost-effective than offering consumers discount pricing. The research centered on automotive sales at the dealership level.

There are more than 60 million business pages on Facebook and that number is from 2017. With those pages come scores of positive and negative posts generated by Facebook users. What researchers have seen is companies have very little control over what customers post, and negative posts can severely damage brands.

The brains of potential investors are wired to pay closer attention to entrepreneurs who pitch with passion, according to new research from Case Western Reserve University.

Software companies are more likely to base their operations in locations where skilled potential recruits already work -- rather than staff moving to new areas for fresh opportunities.

Conventional wisdom in the startup community is that with the right incentives, the venture can meet and exceed expectations, and a major component of this is how you structure your contracts for founders and early employees. New research has found that when it comes to those contracts, it may be less about incentive, and more about identifying the right people to incentivize.

Research by Lancaster University Management School and Open University Business School shows women face discrimination and occupy fewer places in the higher reaches of the veterinary profession, even as they begin to outnumber men in the field.

Time is money. Especially for rideshare drivers with companies like Uber and Lyft. New research in the INFORMS journal Operations Research looks at a new model for rideshare companies focusing on maximizing the availability of rideshares by optimally routing empty cars.

Eighteen people die every day waiting for transplants, and a new patient is added to the organ transplant list every 10 minutes. Much of the problem surrounds the lack of registered donors. New research in the INFORMS journal Management Science provides incentives that could lead to a solution and ultimately save lives.