News by Subject Social & Behavior

Data from 2017 Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and California natural disasters highlights key collaboration gaps and better ways to save money, time and lives in future disasters After 2017's record year of billion-dollar disaster events and additional hurricanes and wildfires during 2018, a new University of Texas at Arlington study found that inconsistent non-profit resources across different jurisdictions impacted disaster recovery efforts, especially in areas that needed it the most.

Consumer brands have long used old-fashioned focus groups, interviews and surveys to best gauge consumer wants, desires and needs as part of processes that range from product development, to marketing and sales. As machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have emerged, there is an increasing interest in the ability to harness these solutions to save time and money, and to yield more reliable consumer insights.

Lav Varshney, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will lead a session on 'Blockchain and the Scientific Method' as a part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Washington D.C., on Feb. 15, 2019.

A new study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science finds that the auto insurance industry's Usage-Based Insurance (UBI) approach, which uses on-board technology to report drivers' real time driving behavior, benefits both the motorist and the insurer.

A recent study finds that the more a company's earnings diverge from its non-financial resources, the less likely it is to issue a forecast of its annual earnings. For companies that issue a forecast, the larger the disconnect between a company's earnings and its key non-financial measures, the more the company overestimates its actual performance.

Online training developed at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) increased the knowledge of health care workers about effective prevention of Ebola up to 19 percent and reduced critical errors to 2.3 percent in a small MUSC cohort. These findings, published in Health Security, suggest that the program could improve protection of health care workers from Ebola and, because it will be easily accessible via the Internet, could be especially useful in low-resource settings.

Nostalgia for events experienced by members of your own group can make you prefer domestic products over foreign ones, concludes the first systematic investigation into the effects of collective nostalgia on consumer decisions. The results could help countries bolster domestic industries without resorting to hard interventions, such as tariffs or international trade re-negotiations.

One of the more common self-improvement goals, particularly in the winter months before 'beach body' season, is to lose weight. How people attempt to achieve their goals may vary by individual, but one of the more popular approaches is enrollment in a commercial weight loss program that uses a 'buddy system' approach to weight loss. But does it work? According to some new research, it does, but possibly not in the ways most people assume.