Research Insights

As the gig economy grows, companies need to adapt to a changed incentives landscape.

Shared coupons are more popular than coupons sent directly by firms, but are redeemed less often. Switching the focus to the coupon’s social benefits changes the results.

Imagine you’re a successful executive at a large IT company. You’re in charge of security. Your decade-old firm is well established, selling complex, popular IT solutions to large corporations and government bodies. It’s an ordinary Saturday morning, you’re having your coffee and your phone rings. The caller informs you that your company has been subject to a massive cyberattack. Your company’s systems are compromised, and, worse, so are those of your customers. It’s your “nightmare moment”.

2023年剛結束的兔年春節內地民眾過得怎樣？調查顯示，兔年春節期間，民眾的幸福感平均值為5.47，介於“比較開心”與“開心”之間（1為最低值，7為最高值），“比較開心”以上人群占比為83.1%。

Pay transparency refers to a pay communications policy in which a company voluntarily provides pay-related information to employees — for example, about the process of the pay system (process transparency) and actual pay levels or ranges (outcome transparency), or even an open policy for employees to freely share information about their pay (communications transparency). Companies around the world have been increasingly adopting pay transparency policies and practices as a means of narrowing the gender pay gap and fostering an engaged and positive working environment that builds trust. Pay transparency can help companies achieve these goals — but it can also have unintended consequences. The authors present three pitfalls to watch out for, plus ways to avoid them.

To combat stress and burnout, employers are increasingly offering benefits like virtual mental health support, spontaneous days or even weeks off, meeting-free days, and flexible work scheduling. Despite these efforts and the increasing number of employees buying into the importance of wellness, the effort is lost if you don’t actually recover. So, if you feel like you’re burning out, what works when it comes to recovering from stress? The authors discuss the “recovery paradox” — that when our bodies and minds need to recover and reset the most, we’re the least likely and able to do something about it — and present five research-backed strategies for recovering from stress at work.

Jian Zhang from the HKU Business School along with authors from the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, INSEAD in Singapore and the PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua University, helped to advance understanding of this phenomenon in their recent paper, called Air Pollution, Behavioral Bias, and the Disposition Effect in China. The team studied how air pollution can affect mental health by intensifying a certain type of cognitive bias observed in financial markets.

Take the recent study by Chen Lin and Mingzhu Tai from the HKU Business School, conducted with collaborators from the University of California, Berkeley and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Their paper addressed a fundamental worry for almost everyone during the pandemic: Money. Specifically, they examined how people in the U.S. saved money in response to COVID-19.

In their study “Do multinationals transfer culture? Evidence on female employment in China”, published in the Journal of International Economics in July 2021, authors Heiwai TANG and Yifan ZHANG show that MNC practices do impact the behaviour of local companies, and the outcome is a positive impact on the productivity of local companies.