News by Subject Business & Economics

California leads the nation in the adoption of rooftop solar systems, but information on which communities do, and do not, benefit from these installations has been limited. The adoption of distributed solar -- rooftop installations as opposed to industrial-scale operations like solar farms -- is closely correlated with socioeconomic status and health, environmental and demographic indicators. The study, published online August 20, 2019 in Energy Policy, is the first peer-reviewed analysis of distributed solar adoption in disadvantaged communities.

The study shows reaching a goal expressed in round numbers results in higher levels of customer satisfaction. That was particularly true when the final goal was still distant. Hitting intermediate targets expressed as round numbers increased customers' feeling of progress at low levels of achievement.

In a large survey in sub-Saharan Africa, adults who said they had paid a bribe for healthcare in the past year were more than four times as likely to report difficulty in obtaining care than those who had not paid bribes. Amber Hsiao and colleagues at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, report these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on Aug. 21, 2019.

In India, children that belong to disadvantaged castes face a much higher likelihood of not living past their fifth birthday than their counterparts in non-deprived castes. IIASA researchers examined the association between castes and under-five mortality in an effort to help reduce the burden of under-five deaths in the country.

Nicole Johnson, assistant professor of counseling psychology at Lehigh University, set out to examine the influence, both positive and negative, of presidential campaigns, voting behavior, and candidate selection, on social views of rape culture.

College of Business Professor studies the impact geography has on San Francisco's Children's Savings Accounts program.

The theory of collective action states that there is no incentive for individuals in large groups to participate in the provision of work for public benefit. With the largest laboratory experiment in economic research to date, a group of German experimental economists have now shaken this theory to the core and made an astonishing discovery: Our commitment is by no means only dependent on the influence we have. What is far more important is whether we really know what we are striving for.

The result of the 2016 US presidential election was, for many, a surprise lesson in social perception bias -- peoples' tendency to assume that others think as we do, and to underestimate the size and influence of a minority party. Many psychologists attribute the source of these biases to faulty cognitive processes like 'wishful thinking' or 'social projection,' but according to a study published August 12, 2019 in Nature Human Behavior, the structure of our social networks might offer a simpler explanation.

According to new research released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, race influences the investment judgments of asset allocators. Experts believe this may contribute to the stark racial disparities in the world of institutional investing.