Big Business, Small Business, and Not-For-Profit Business Research

Exciting developments from the business world. Here's some of the latest research:

Protip for banks: Don’t over-invest in mortgages. Dr. Natacha Postel-Vinay at University of Warwick has done some research into Chicago during the great depression; the city had the highest urban bank failure rate at the time. Chicago’s real-estate boom led to a banking sector bust, although I’m sure that couldn’t possibly happen again.

Please don’t wait for the next available register. Syracuse University’s Martin J. Whitman School of Management has found that cashiers take longer to ring up customers when they’re all queued up in the same giant line, while they work faster when each cashier is responsible for their own line of customers. Note the part where they admit that “faster” does not equal “better service.”

“Affordability” is in the eye of the beholder (or voucher holder). Researchers from researchers from Florida Atlantic University, the University of Texas, Arlington, and the University of Utah have found that “affordable housing” is not very affordable when you add in the cost of getting to your job.

You don’t have to be crazy to be an executive at a nonprofit organization, but it helps. NC State University research has found that nowhere near as many of them retire “voluntarily” as had been previously assumed. Be sure to read the quote from the guy saying that the only people who take executive roles are the ones who are too naïve to understand what a disaster it’s going to be.

Natural disaster? Entrepreneurs to the rescue! Trenton Williams of Syracuse University has found that entrepreneurship “serves as a vehicle for generating positive social outcomes.” In some situations, survivors of natural disasters can alleviate suffering and generate transformational change for residences experiencing chronic poverty by creating their own businesses.

Frictionless Sharing: Invasive? Or Super Invasive?

If I had to draft a list of things that were objectively worse than Hitler, the Washington Post Social Reader as seen on Facebook would be right up near the top.

Have you seen it? They craft headlines that are incredibly misleading to entice you to click through to the story, but then you can't actually read it until you agree to let the social reader tell all your friends what you're looking at. If they're also interested in the headline, they can't see the accompanying story without telling THEIR friends, and so on.

In fact, I think the concept of "frictionless sharing," the idea that all of your reading, listening, and watching activities online should be broadcast to everyone you know without any effort (or approval!) on your part may be the only thing worse than the social reader.

Is it even legal? Professor Neil M. Richards of Washington University in St. Louis has been in the news lately sharing his concerns about it, so I know I'm not some lone crank. Meanwhile, The Next Web busted SocialCam when it used dodgy techniques to give itself a leg up in online popularity without letting people know just how "frictionless" their experience had become.


The whole concept of frictionless sharing isn't about being frictionless for you and me, the end users, it's about removing the obstacles (read: friction) preventing companies from exploiting you as just another sales tool. I don't care what other people are reading, I don't want other people to know what I'm reading, and I actively resent companies trying to use me as free advertising for their crap.

Forced Out?

A study from the University of Haifa has asked whether early retirement is as optional as it appears. According to their data, most people take early retirement options because of workplace pressure. However, their data set was taken from men who had taken early retirement from government companies that became privatized, which makes me wonder how applicable it is across the entire workforce.

I'm not saying government employees are lazy and terrible at their jobs (because plenty of other people are saying it), I'm saying that I can see where a profit-motivated corporation would look to trim its workforce as much as possible. That's probably the source of the pressure cited in the study. Is this kind of thing really happening in companies that aren't making a dramatic shift in managment and objectives?

The ideal put forth by Sigal Naim, who carried out the study, is that "everyone would be able to continue working based on his or her abilities and desires." He goes on to suggest a removal of mandatory retirement ages. That's all well and good in theory, but what happens in reality, when elderly workers who are well past their prime insist on bitterly clinging to jobs that could be used to lower the nation's unemployment rate?

Surprise! Marketers will sell you out!

You've got bigger problems than privacy violations if you needed to be told that marketers want as much of your personally identifying information as they can get their hands on. Strangely enough, the consumers providing that information would rather not give them carte blanche to track their myriad personal details. Who would have guessed?

A UMass Amherst study shows that marketers and consumers have differing expectations of "privacy." I'm not surprised. Most of the consumers would rather choose or control what information that marketers had access to. Most marketers didn't expect consumers to be bothered by the fact that they were harvesting as much data as they could get their hands on.

I don't understand why marketers don't get this, especially after the backlash generated by so many embarrassing incidents. Google took a hit by pre-emptively connecting people through Google Buzz. Blizzard provoked fan outrage by trying to get everyone in their forums to post using real names. I can respect the fact that they want to grab as much information as they can to increase their sales, but I wish they'd be honest about their motivations instead of lying to us (and possibly themselves) about how they just want to use this information to make our lives better.

ATTENTION WORKFORCE:

You're screwed, for several reasons, according to the University of New Hampshire.

First, you've got to deal with a lot of punks joining the workforce. The recent crop of graduates is "entitlement minded," and I'm sure you can guess what that means. They think they deserve preferential treatement, are less likely to enjoy their job, and freely take credit for other people's successes while denying responsibility for any shortcomings. You know, kind of like the contributors to Brazen Careerist.

Once these entitlement-minded workers hit your workplace, they are going to be frustrated on the job and likely to abuse co-workers. That's right, if they don't have an objective view of their relative worth and their contributions, they end up feeling slighted on the job. Or, as Professor Paul Harvey puts it, they respond poorly to "perceived inequities in the rewards received by co-workers to whom psychologically entitled employees feel superior.” This surly attitude leads to lashing out, including workplace abuse like rumor mongering, ignoring promises, and slinging insults. So you've got that to look forward to.

The best part of all? When supervisors try to communicate with these entitled employees, the entitled workers end up feeling more frustrated, not less.

What I would like to see is how this study correlates with the one from University of Toronto that showed how women working for a female supervisor are more distressed. Does this have anything to do with the way that different genders view entitlement? I'm sure Penelope Trunk would have something to say about it.

Profits or Predators Don't Matter, We're All Doomed

I don't think this study will change much in the long run, but it turns out that we might not properly understand what drives the commercial fishing industry. The currently accepted theory is that fishermen use a "top down" approach, starting with predators at the top of the food chain (notably tuna and halibut). Once fishing reduces their population and catches dwindle, fishermen move further down the food chain pulling in the fish those predators used to eat until those numbers dwindle, and so on.

According to the University of Washington, it turns out that our motivations may be more economic than evolutionary. Commercial fisheries are (understandably) motivated to catch whatever fish is the most profitable. This means that governments can influence conservation efforts and maintain sustainable levels of fishing by setting price controls on seafood.

Will it work, though? I'm pessimistic. Governments are going to be motivated by what is politically popular, and I don't think it would be possible to arrange for the kind of national cooperation required to have a lasting effect on ocean populations. We should all cultivate a taste for jellyfish, since they're the only thing that has managed to thrive thanks to our efforts.

Illusions of Value

Ohio State University has determined that when we think about money, the numbers involved can be more important than the value. Some of the subjects were actually making different choices depending on whether they were asked to make decisions about one dollar or 100 cents. In fact, it seemed like they thought that it was better to receive 100 cents than it was to receive a dollar.

To conduct the study, they used that "prisoner's dilemma" game. Are you familiar with it? I'm kind of sick of hearing about it, since it seems like the stock scenario that someone brings up when they want to sound like they know something about psychology or human behavior, but the idea is that you can screw over other "players" in the "game" or not screw them over. The outcome is based on their reactions, but it's a safer bet to screw them over (you can gain more if you don't, but you'd have to trust the other players for that).

Is anyone surprised that participants were more impressed by numbers than they were by actual values? It's kind of like the way that products are advertised for $39.99 instead of $40. Our minds can play tricks on us, so it's always important to think twice before you spend your hard-earned money.

CEOs and Rockstars

Neither should have any expectation of privacy, says a professor at Neeley TCU School of Business.

It's the collision of two values that are important to me: A person's right to privacy, and a company's need for full disclosure. I think that company information like CEO salaries and expense reports should be available to the public. I also think that a person has a right to privacy, and that they shouldn't be forced to release their medical records.

Should the SEC be able to force CEOs to disclose information about any potentially life-threatening illnesses that they have? Why stop there? What if the CEO has a wife or child who is in the terminal stage of some sort of disease, wouldn't that be distracting? Should we require them to disclose that information?

Even when you look at celebrities, who the paparazzi claim are entitled to "no expectations of privacy," their medical records are still protected--people who sell their medical records to tabloids can be prosecuted for breaking the law. Why should someone have their medical history placed on display for all to see just because they're running a company?

Touching Costs Extra

What's your favorite possession? Where did you get it? How much is it worth to you?

Now imagine I gave you something cheap, like a keychain. Would you value it as much? You might if you held it for a little while. At the very least, you'd think it was more valuable than a keychain that you hadn't held.

All it takes is 30 seconds. Test subjects that held a coffee mug for 30 seconds showed an attachment to it that was stronger than those who held it for ten seconds, or those who hadn't held it at all. How strong? Well, subjects who held their coffee mugs would aggressively bid for them in an auction setting. So aggressively that four out of seven times the test subjects would pay more than the retail price for the mug, even when they were told how much it was selling for in the nearby campus bookstore.

It's a good reason to figure out what you're going to buy and what you're willing to pay for it before you enter the store, since all it takes is a little physical contact to completely abandon common sense.

What Makes Someone a Jerk?

How do you define what a jerk is? When you get mad at someone for acting like a jerk, is it because they're actually doing awful things, or is it just because they're not being as nice as you would like? The University of Chicago has found out that not only is it better to be nice to people, but we tend to punish people if we feel slighted by them.

Let me explain the experiment. In part 1, you are participating with another guy. The other guy is given $100, and chooses to give you $50. If the roles were reversed afterwards, and you were given another $100 with the option to share some of it with the other guy, how much would you give him?

In part 2, pretend the study gives you $100, but lets the other guy take as much from you as he wants (and he takes $50). When it's your turn, and he gets $100, how much would you take from him?

It turns out that most people felt like they were getting ripped off in part 2, and took as much as they could from the other guy. In part 1, people generally felt grateful and shared their $100 evenly with the other guy to thank him for his earlier generosity.

It's strange because in both situations, the participant ends up with $50 more than he had before. But in the first part, they liked the other person in the study. In the second part, they thought that they were paired with a jerk. They acted accordingly.

Slap Wraps as an Evolutionary Imperative

See also: acid-wash jeans, beanie babies, and those goddamn Wii Fits that are cropping up everywhere I look. They're all fads, but now Science offers the reason behind our societal obsession (and later abandonment) of the Latest Big Thing: we evolved that way.

The idea is that 1) We see something (a corporate logo). 2) We start to unconsciously associate that something with a "reward" (the product), but we see it infreqently and assume it is scarce. 3) That's when we work to actively acquire it and make it part of our lives. 4) The logo & product are suddenly everywhere, because everybody has one 4) and our unconscious mind decides that this product isn't worth working for, since it can be found so easily all over the place and decide that it must be worthless (Oh, how I wish my subconscious would skip to the part where it decides that a Wii is worthless!). And that, boys and girls, is the life cycle of a fad.

That's all well and good, but after announcing this theory, those maniacs at Rensselaer decide that marketers should use this information to find new ways of pushing things on us subconsciously. That's like announcing that bears should look into getting stainless steel claws. People, they have enough of an advantage already.

Then again, you shouldn't be suprised at the professor who recommended this. It's the same guy who wants to harvest your eyes for robots.

Making Night Shifts Suck More to Suck Less

I can't imagine what a pain in the ass it must be to make a living working the night shift. I had a friend who worked nights at the post office, unloading and sorting all the mail that came in on the trucks through the night, and he hated it. He said that even on his days off, he still couldn't feel like a normal person, because everyone he knew was operating on a completely different schedule.

So, Rush University Medical Center looked into night shift workers. They're trying to make sure that night shift employees are efficient. I guess that they're workin' for the Man, trying to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of the workers, but whatever.

The medical center is now claiming that people can offset some of the difficulties of adapting to night shift work, as long as you are strict about monitoring when you sleep and make sure to wear wicked dark sunglasses when outside in the daytime. It sounds like a hassle, but I guess that the trade off is that you're less likely to hate your job as much. Or, you still hate it as much but manage to work more efficiently.

The good news is that they're calling it a "compromise" adaptation, in that people aren't sleeping entirely through the daytime, they're just reducing the hours that they spend awake during the day. It still sounds like it kind of sucks, though. How high would the pay have to be before you considered a night shift job?

Why Your Coworkers Want You Fired

It's not personal, it's just business. They think that by getting you in trouble, they can distract attention from themselves. They'll throw you under the bus in a heartbeat if it means keeping their own job.

An assistant professor of management at the University of New Hampshire thinks that as the economy gets worse, you'll see more and more of that behavior. I don't know if I'd go so far as to agree with his claim that we're "obsessed with assigning blame," but I've definitely taken the fall for idiot coworkers before (and probably will in the future!). The tough part, as he accurately points out, is when you've been wrongfully accused--working to clear your name just makes you look more guilty.

So, I guess that the moral of the story is that the worse the economy gets, the more important that it is to blame other people watch your ass, and make sure you won't be left holding the bag if things fall apart.

It's CSI with a Calculator

Looking at dirt might not be a very appealing career option, but there's a certain level of coolness to be found in catching criminals. Even if you catch them by staring at spreadsheets, account balances, and wire transfers. Forensic accounting has now become a large enough field to support four undergraduate programs in the United States.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham is tooting their own horn in a recent press release, but they are one of those 4 schools that offer forensic accounting. (That's right four whole courses of undergraduate training. That kind of intensive study almost guarantees your status as an expert.)

They raise a valid point; people will be more tempted to commit financial crimes as the economy gets worse. There could be an increased demand for forensic accountants to catch these white-collar criminals. There could also be an opportunity for a crooked forensic accountant to make a killing by selling his knowledge to the highest bidder.

What? I'm just sayin'. Yeah, it was a bit of a slow news day, why do you ask?

Black Friday? We're All In It Together

Seriously. If we work together, we can drive prices down. North Carolina State University has completed a study showing that comparing prices at multiple online retailers will contribute to driving down the prices of that product.

Think about it. Online retailers monitor their traffic more obsessively than ever. Everyone's terrified that they'll have terrible holiday sales figures, and they're trying to remain as competitive as possible. When they see you're going to other sites with lower prices, they'll have to lower prices themselves if they want to stay in business.

There's some other stuff in the study, about loyal customers, switching customers, the ratio of each, but I got bored and stopped paying attention. I mean, I'm not running a store, so why do I care? The short version of the extra stuff is that some retailers won't care, and will shaft you anyway on the prices because they have enough loyal customers to get away with it.

Don't get shafted! Do your research! Shop around!

Thankful for Excuses to Sell Things

It's Thanksgiving day, and that's one of my favorite holidays. I think that makes it a great day to check one of my favorite websites, the Association for Dressings and Sauces website. They've got a press release for every month of the year (although they could stand to update a few of the ones that are 2+ years old).

The Association has a press release about the holidays that's for the month of December, but I think a lot of their tips would work for Thanksgiving. And by "tips" I mean "excuses to push dressings and sauces." What else would you expect from a trade organization?

Some of it's kind of inventive. For example, they recommend having bowls of fruit as a substitute for candy or chocolates. Then they recommend that you serve them with some sort of fruit dip. They suggest basting your turkey with a tangy or smoky sauce from the grocery store. And not to neglect their dressing contingent, they recommend that you make the leftover turkey into a salad later--so you can top it with salad dressing.

Chaos Kills in the Workplace

How many studies have to be released about lousy bosses before people realize that they are a serious health hazard? I mean honestly, they can do worse than kill a company. The really bad ones keep the company going long enough to completely destroy all their employees.

The Health Behavior News Service is taking a timid stance on the matter but admitting that instability in the workplace MIGHT lead to increased risk of heart attacks.

I guess that Finland has just wrapped up a study showing that your risk of heart attack is 1.8 times higher in a disorganized setting than it is in an organized one. By "organized," we're talking clear division of tasks, workers who understand their job responsibilities and what they're being judged on, and how everyone is supposed to work together.

I don't think I've ever worked at a job like that. I guess I'd better start looking out for my heart.

100 Years of Mixed Blessings

Nitrogen has been a pretty powerful tool, increasing crop yields on one hand and killing marine life on the other. But most of its impact wouldn't have been felt if it weren't for a 100-year-old process, the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen.

The widespread availability of nitrogen created by the process allowed for the use of nitrogen in explosives and fertilizer (and sometimes both at the same time) and spawned a huge chemical industry that was able to discover new uses and applications for it. The problem now is to figure out how to meet the increased demand we've created.

Hi there, third world countries! Were you looking to develop your farming efforts so that you can actually feed your citizens?

In a way, it's kind of like oil. In the early 1900s, no one cared about it. Now, everyone wants a car and oil is a resource that affects almost all of us in our daily lives. Similarly, four of the world's leading environmental research centers think that nitrogen is going to become important, and I agree with them when you consider the increased demand for biofuels along with the growing needs of a globally increasing population.

I disagree when they say we'll have a nitrogen-based economy. Do we have an oil-based economy now? Yes, oil is a crucial part of the economy, but not the sole scale against which all other economic gains or losses are measured.

I could be wrong, though. What do you think the next big natural resource is going to be?

Catfights in the Workplace

Are totally hot.

That's why women should report to female supervisors, as has been proven by science. The University of Toronto studied stress in the workplace and found that women working under a female supervisor reported more distress than women working for a male supervisor. I'm sure that when they say "distress," they are referring solely to the tensions that build steadily until they boil over into an explosion of hot girl-versus-girl action.

Guys, on the other hand, find their supervisors annoying no matter what their gender may be. Until the supervisor gets sick of their bad attitude and fires them.

The happiest employees (as relative as "happy" can get on the job, read: employees with lowest distress levels and fewest physical symptoms) were the ones who reported to a pair of supervisors, one male and one female.

Why Stores Don't Want You To Pay Cash

Paying cash means you pay attention, and paying attention means you aren't willing to pay as much. They've proved this with recent studies showing that people spend more when using credit cards or other non-cash forms of payment.
Of course, researchers already knew that shoppers who pay attention end up
spending less. I'm sure that marketers are now working harder than ever on getting us to spend our money without even thinking about it.