Research Insights

Dr Sangwoon Park’s study takes a scientific look at what makes friendships at work tick and how these friendships affect productivity in the workplace. His findings reveal that worker productivity declines when friends socialize at work, but that, surprisingly, people are also willing to “pay” almost 5% of their wages to work near a friend – suggesting that friends who work together get more out of their jobs than just money.

Dr Michael Chau’s study uses the machine learning and rule-based classification components of artificial intelligence to find people online who are in emotional distress. Using these techniques may help health professionals locate struggling individuals faster, getting help to them before it’s too late.

What could be the result if some compelling opportunities, like lottery jackpots, were potentially lucrative enough to distract the investors' attention from monitoring the stock market?

The majority of fledgling businesses fly straight into the unforgiving rule of natural selection – only the fittest and strongest survive. In terms of start-ups, the rule is even more merciless. What can start-ups do to succeed in this brutal environment? Professor David Tse, Stelux Professor of Marketing and Director of the Contemporary Marketing Centre at the HKU Business School, believes Breakthrough Innovation (BI) is an effective strategy for success. Simply put, BI fosters strategies that help service new and under-served markets.

‘Workers against bosses’ is a common theme, but mutual interest is more important in creating value, according to HKU Business School professors.

Public services touch every aspect of the lives of people around the world. These millions of service users also have opinions, both good and bad, on the quality of the public services they access. But how often are they asked about these opinions? And do these opinions help create changes and improvements to the services?

Crunching numbers is essential to investment success, but often times the role of accounting is left behind. Professor Guochang Zhang, Area Head of Accounting and Law at HKU Business School, wants to see a change in the way investors view company valuation, by bringing accounting to the centre stage of valuation theory.

As coronavirus rages across the globe, online business is still booming, with data and analytics driving this trend. People now marooned at home for the foreseeable future are finding the daily goods they need from online stores, solace in conferencing apps, and entertainment provided by streaming platforms. The world is revolving increasingly online with lockdowns in place, and data is being even further highlighted as an undisputable source of wealth.

Though Asia has been the world’s fastest-growing region for decades, until recently there were limited case studies that referenced Asian business and economic topics, as most case studies were produced in Europe and North America. The Asia Case Research Centre (ACRC) was founded in 1997 to redress this imbalance and cater to unmet demand. ACRC has produced numerous Asia-based cases focusing on global sourcing, business ethics and many other topics aimed at academics, national and international institutions, and organisations of all sizes.