Business & Entrepreneurship

A new business study involving Washington University in St. Louis provides analytical theories showing that such driver-monitoring technology can not only prove beneficial to the bottom lines of some consumers, but also to insurance companies by alleviating moral hazards that affect the risks of accidents.

Two Olin Business School faculty members at Washington University in St. Louis collaborated to create a new customer choice algorithm designed to better populate six available slots for products in online stores hosted by Alibaba. Their model produced 28% higher revenues in one week — or nearly $22 million. The study earned them the 2019 Olin Award.

In the first big-data study combining objective medical and compensation records with demographics, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Aarhus University in Denmark discovered once a company switches to a pay-for-performance process, the number of employees using anxiety and depression medication increased by 5.7 percent over an existing base rate of 5.2 percent.

A new paper by a team of researchers — including two faculty from Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis — shows the practice of dynamic pricing can generate unintended consequences by changing the behavior of customers.

As a student, JD Ross, BSBA ’11, BS ’11, ran two businesses. Ever entrepreneurial, after graduating from the university, Ross created a new way to sell homes with Opendoor.

New research from Olin Business School on crowdfunding websites discovers that projects actually raise money faster just before they reach their funding goal.

When 800,000 government employees eventually return to work after a shutdown that started Dec. 22, expect them to work less efficiently — or, at minimum, feel less engaged and far less respected, says an expert in government leadership and organizational strategy at Olin Business School.

A new study by a group of business school researchers, including Washington University’s Daniel Elfenbein of Olin Business School, used a computational model to interpret decision-making, learning and experiences that end in an entrepreneur’s success and failure in market entry and exit.

An Olin Business School analysis of more than 550 million items sold by individuals on eBay in 2015 and 2016 — transactions totaling $22.3 billion — signals that we’re more likely to buy goods from someone we perceive comes from a similar political persuasion.

Already in the No. 2 spot in the insurance broker company AON-COFCO, Qing “Clare” Wu had achieved what most people dream of. Still, she didn’t want to miss an opportunity to improve her business skills, so she enrolled in Washington University and Fudan University’s joint executive MBA program. While there, she inspired her classmates to take up running, and after graduation gained the top spot at AON.