Research

Turning Corporate Compliance into Competitive Advantage

Posted on by Nancy White

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law, Vol. 19, No.2 (2017)

Robert Bird, Stephen Park

Compliance is a core concern for corporate governance. Firms devote tremendous amounts of money, personnel, and attention to ensure compliance with regulatory mandates — and yet compliance failures proliferate. This is because the current static and binary view of compliance hinders both efficient compliance by firms and effective regulation by government. Understanding the reality that compliance is both dynamic and driven by efficiency empowers firms to evolve past mere conformance and into wealth maximizing innovation. This Article develops an efficient investment-risk (EIR) model of compliance that captures the tradeoffs between cost and risk, parses the oft-commingled concepts of technical efficiency and allocative efficiency, and enables firms to obtain a competitive advantage through compliance. We also turn our attention to regulators, and highlight how the EIR model can enhance regulatory design, foster regulator-firm cooperation, and advance the mutual goals of business and society. Full article.

Gender Equality: Are We Making Progress?

Posted on by Claire Hall
Management professor Gary Powell has spent most of his 41-year UConn career as an expert on gender differences in the workplace.
Management professor Gary Powell has spent most of his 41-year UConn career as an expert on gender differences in the workplace. (Nathan Oldham/UConn School of Business)

Retiring Professor Gary Powell, Expert in Gender Equality in the Workplace, Recognizes Some Progress in 40+ Years, But Not Enough

Management professor Gary Powell has spent most of his 41-year UConn career as an expert on gender differences in the workplace, and is widely recognized as a pioneer in the field.

Powell announced his retirement on June 1, but will remain active at the University, teaching in the fall semesters and continuing to add to a lengthy list of research achievements. Continue Reading

UConn Professor Gets Some Answers About Social Media Addiction

Posted on by Melissa Ferrigno

Mansfield Patch – A University of Connecticut faculty member has reached a conclusion about social media addiction — the answer seems to lie not with quantity of postings but whether people post more on weekends than weekdays.

UConn operations and information management professor Xue Bai and two colleagues revealed the findings in a newly published study in the journal “Information & Management” titled, “Weekdays or weekends: Exploring the impacts of microblog posting patterns on gratification and addiction.”

Social Media Addiction: Who’s Most at Risk?

Posted on by Melissa Ferrigno

HealthNewsDigest.com – Are you at risk of becoming addicted to social media?

It seems the answer lies not in how much you tweet or microblog, but rather, whether you post significantly more on weekends than weekdays.

That’s what UConn operations and information management professor Xue Bai and two colleagues found in a newly published study in the journal Information & Management titled, “Weekdays or weekends: Exploring the impacts of microblog posting patterns on gratification and addiction.” Their findings are based on in-depth study of the habits and responses of a diverse group of 308 microbloggers.

Are You At Risk of Becoming a Social Media Addict?

Posted on by Claire Hall
A graphic of a laptop, phone, tablet, and desktop on a desk with various speech bubbles containing social media icons and a clock in the background.
Social Media Addiction (Jeffrey Schleicher/UConn School of Business)

UConn Professor Discovers that Heavy Weekend Users May be Substituting Social Media for a Social Life

Are you at risk of becoming addicted to social media?

It seems that the answer lies not in how much you tweet or microblog, but, rather, if you find yourself posting significantly more on weekends than weekdays. Continue Reading

Consumer Pseudo-Showrooming and Omni-Channel Placement Strategies

Posted on by Nancy White

Management Information Systems Quarterly Vol. 41, Iss. 2 (2017)

Zheyin (Jane) Gu, Giri Kumar Tayi

Recent advances in information technologies (IT) have powered the merger of online and offline retail channels into one single platform. Modern consumers frequently switch between online and offline channels when they navigate through various stages of the decision journey, motivating multichannel sellers to develop omni-channel strategies that optimize their overall profit. This study examines consumers' cross-channel search behavior of "pseudo-showrooming," or the consumer behavior of inspecting one product at a seller's physical store before buying a related but different product at the same seller’s online store, and investigates how such consumer behavior allows a multichannel seller to achieve better coordination between its online and offline arms through optimal product placement strategies. Full article.