All Insights Articles

The online, user-generated review is a boon for consumers—a chance to sidestep promotional claims and get an honest assessment. But as soon as reviews appeared online, fake reviews followed. A study co-authored by Professor Judith Chevalier looks at the prevalence of fake hotel reviews and tests a hypothesis about who might post them and why.

When Zagat launched its first survey of New York City dining, aggregating restaurant reviews by ordinary people was a novel idea. Today, the user-generated review has moved online and is a major influence on commerce. But models for collecting and presenting opinions continue to evolve.

Investment companies including Fidelity, Putnam Investments, and Voya Financial are rolling out tools that tell investors how their retirement savings compare to those of their peers. This social comparison is intended to motivate investors to increase their savings; however, new research shows that it can have the opposite effect.

Tradeoffs are an inevitable part of doing business. And sustainability work in particular involves spending a great deal of time in the tug of war of competing priorities. Eric Spiegel, president and CEO of Siemens USA, discussed that company’s efforts to minimize tradeoffs.

The holiday season is a time for joy and family and a staggering amount of shopping. In a video interview on UCD Smurfit’s Faculty Insights series, Professor Damien McLoughlin says that marketers make those sales by taking advantage of our holiday impulses, including the drive to be cheerful.

The choices we make—the cars we drive, the neighborhoods we live in, the gyms we join—are influenced by our social networks, the people we surround ourselves with. Our financial choices are no exception. While thousands of studies have examined peer effects, a new study co-authored by Florian Ederer, assistant professor of economics, is the first to clearly identify the two channels of social influence—social learning and social utility—that explain why our peers’ financial decisions affect our own.

Smart beta is the hot thing in investing strategies, marketed as a new way to diversify and reduce risk. But Eugene Podkaminer ’01 argues that common smart beta strategies recycle long-established methods and likely aren’t the most efficient way to achieve those goals.

Nobel Laureate Robert J. Shiller says that an event on the magnitude of the 2008-2009 financial crisis has to have many causes, but he sees “the spirit of the times” as a driving force behind many of them. In a lecture at Yale SOM, he described how he sees this spirit acting in everything from Fed policy to the growth in casinos.

Retailers are increasingly offering products at rental rates that are comparable to traditional purchase prices. The question is whether consumers make decisions differently when they’re looking to rent rather than buy.

Large, investment-grade companies such as Walmart and Home Depot that can easily borrow money in the capital markets often receive financing from their much smaller, credit-constrained suppliers. A new study examines the effects of this pattern of financing and finds that it squeezes small suppliers, creating a cash shortfall and causing them to cut back on capital investments.