Business & Entrepreneurship

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.

New legislation designed to reverse a decades-long decline in worker’s rights under the National Labor Relations Act could play a critical role in reducing the growing income gap between rich and poor in America, according to the recent congressional testimony of a sociologist from Washington University in St. Louis.

The idea of a plant-based patty being tested by Burger King makes business sense, if not health sense, to Washington University in St. Louis researchers who have studied the fast-food marketplace.

Two Olin Business School researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are highlighted in a new federal report issued March 27 showing how U.S. farmers — facing a surge of weather events and disease outbreaks — can increase production and revenues with innovations produced by government-funded agricultural research.

The game’s history and traditions are rich, but they threaten to suffocate its future. The “unwritten rules” and the game’s entrenched conservatism are standing in the way of fun. It will take more than bat flips and a backwards ballcap to let it through.

You — as part of the 10 percent of the American population who participates in this form of technically illegal gambling — have a 1-in-9.2 quintillion chance of picking the perfect March Madness bracket, says a statistical expert from Washington University in St. Louis.

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 growing number of first-year students are seeking career advice and resources early in their college careers. In response, the Career Center has launched a number of new career-readiness program specifically for first-year students. The center also collaborated with Arts & Sciences on a pilot program that combines career planning and academic advising.  

Before customers jump on the bandwagon of online crowd information and buy a dinner, a book, or a movie ticket, suppose there were a way to make the bandwagon better? That’s the central question behind “Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds,” a research paper co-authored by Washington University in St. Louis’ Xing Huang and published in the journal Management Science.

A new study involving two Olin Business School researchers finds that analysts disseminate earnings news by revising share-price targets or stating they expect firms to beat earnings estimates, often tempering such information — even suppressing positive news — to facilitate beatable projections.