Business & Entrepreneurship

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.

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.

Prepare for a Super Bowl broadcast rife with social-issue and cause advertisements, because that’s what younger generations — read: consumers — want from a Sunday less about football than marketing, says Olin sports marketing expert Patrick Rishe.

Researchers, including a postdoctoral fellow at Olin Business School, have studied where potential relationship problems exist between managers and employees who are close, and how to avoid such pitfalls.

If an event is otherwise highly enjoyable, pausing to take photographs will detract from a person’s engagement and enjoyment … and potentially affect the business visited, according to research by a team that included Olin Business School’s Robyn LeBoeuf.

Working with budding local tech companies can be good for researchers, good for startups and good for the local economy — even if, in the end, the researcher decides to head back to the lab. Here’s the story of what one PhD student is learning about his options.