Building an Event Startup at USC, and More – Los Angeles News
Happy Friday! Let’s explore some of the biggest stories coming out Los Angeles lately.
Leavey School of Business Announces Food Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center – Leavey School of Business News
Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business’ renowned food industry program, founded in 1973, has evolved into one of the country’s leaders in the field.
With its continuing focus on new technologies for responsible farming, production and distribution, the school recently introduced the The Center for Food Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CFIE).
“Many of our MBA students are interested in studying innovation and entrepreneurship in the food industry and applying what they have learned to develop business opportunities either as entrepreneurs themselves or with their companies,” according to a recent press release.
Connections with Silicon Valley will be a foundation of the center, as well as a strong emphasis on sustainability, climate change, animal welfare, and the issue of food insecurity.
Dr. Gregory Baker, Executive Director of the Center, says “[The CFIE] builds on our 45-year history of education and scholarship in the food and agribusiness industry. We will continue our strong partnership with industry leaders while forging new partnerships with the innovators and entrepreneurs”.
For more on the CFIE, visit Leavey’s News & Events page.
UCLA Anderson Media, Entertainment & Sports Center Studies Gaming and Advertising – UCLA Anderson News and Events
UCLA Anderson School of Management’s Center for Management of Enterprise in Media, Entertainment & Sports (MEMES) published a recent study with Versus Systems, Inc. that will help form the future of advertising within online games and other media platforms.
The study reveals the unsurprising fact that there are a large number of online gamers out there—of respondents across various demographics, 50 percent played a game in the past week, and 41 percent did in the last 24 hours. A gap, however, arose in just who identifies as a “gamer” with only 13 percent self-identifying as such. Among women surveyed, 11 percent identified as a gamer. Millennial males played the most, followed by women of Gen Z.
Advertising’s function within games was the other focus of the study. With traditional ads within television programming diminishing, advertisers need to engage consumers within a newer media landscape.
One of the more striking results the survey found was that rewards were the primary driver of gaming behavior. The survey asked respondents what would make them play or watch more games, and the answer was resoundingly “prizes” as opposed to engaging with friends or affordability.
You can read more from the gaming study here.
For more details on the study, visit the Globe NewsWire press release.
USC Marshall MBAs ‘Engage’ through Talent Booking Startup – USC Marshall News and Events
Two USC Marshall MBAs—Jake Olson (’19) and Daniel Hennes (’19)—received accolades for their event startup; an online marketplace that will streamline and modernize talent booking.
Engage is the product of Olson’s experience with blindness, and of Hennes’ assistance while the two were school roommates. Olson lost his eyesight as a child to a rare condition, and he conquered multiple odds to achieve his goal of not only attending USC, but also of becoming a long snapper for the Trojans football team.
His success led him to motivational speaking, combining the busy schedule of a college student, making booking engagements a burden. Olson noticed that the booking industry was still stuck in the analog age, with fax machines and checkbooks prevailing.
[Left to right] Daniel Hennes, Brett S. Roenick, Brendan M. Egan, Mike Olson, John S. Shegerian, Jake Olson, Noah Schwartz / Photo via marshall.usc.edu
Hennes and Olson caught the attention of the USC Marshall Venture Fund, which helps to incubate businesses within the MBA community.
“Jake and Daniel are solving a 21st-century business challenge in a way that feels unique to the Los Angeles tech and entertainment landscape—this is exactly the kind of creative thinking the Fund intends to support,” says Michael Rivera, Managing Director of the Venture Fund.
You can read here for more on Olsen, Hennes and the event startup.
Berkeley Charity Study Examines How We Often Dehumanize Those in Need
An often-seen angle of charity is that the recipient is down on their luck, destitute, and in need of outside assistance; but that imagery may play into a indirect dehumanization of those in need, and make things worse than before, writes Berkeley University Haas School of Business assistant professor Juliana Schroeder.
Schroeder, who’s research focuses on “judgment, decision-making, and interpersonal and intergroup processes,” criticizes the way in which charities like Sally Struthers’ Christian Children’s Fund portray its aid recipients as helpless victims may “unintentionally send a signal they have low mental capacity.”
“Charities want to motivate people to give more, but they may also make people think poor people don’t have the ability to take care of themselves. If you perceive of someone as having less mental capacity to think or feel, then you are subtly degrading and dehumanizing them,” she explains.
Schroeder, along with Northwestern’s Adam Waytz and University of Chicago’s Nicholas Epley, published a new study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, which reveals “fundamental truths about how people think about giving and receiving aid.” The researchers found that not only do people act “more paternalistically towards those they believe have lower mental capacity,” but that they also “often believe they have more mental capacity than others.”
Schroeder explains, “When you think of a person having less self-control and willpower, you think they will make bad decisions and will be more likely to waste the aid. They don’t know what is good for themselves. People are pretty convinced they have a lot of willpower, while others don’t have the same level of self-control.”
The good news is that these perceptions are malleable. By questioning them, we can begin to “question how our perceptions of ourselves and others may affect the way we behave.”
Schroeder concludes, “When you dehumanize an individual or a group it can affect how you help them. People can be more cognizant about the ways they are thinking about their own mental capacity and that of others and pause to get more information before they start helping.”
New Stanford Study Looks the Effect of the Status Quo Bias
There’s a bias to keep things the way they are, even if things aren’t going well, according to the Stanford Graduate School of Business. But what is the efficacy of the so-called “status quo bias?”
Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s 2008 book Nudge popularized the default effect, which explains that if consumers are offered a “side dish of salad instead of fries,” for instance “then people [will] eat more salad.” In other words: “we tend to stick with what we’re given.”
In new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford Professor of Management Margaret Neale and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Professor David Daniels, along with Stanford graduate students Julian Zlatev and Hajin Kim conducted an experiment to put this notion to the test. To their surprise, the experiment revealed that the exact opposite was true.
In the context of a game, “choice architect” attempts to convince a “choice maker” to select one option over the other. However, before the “choice architect” presents any options to the “choice maker,” Zlatev explains that “the choice architect was able to select which option showed up as the default.”
“When we looked across all of the studies, people chose to set the desired option as the default roughly 50 percent of the time.”
This phenomenon, which the researchers dubbed “default neglect” came as a surprise due to the fact that many participants “demonstrated a partial intuitive grasp of reasons why defaults can sway individual choices.”
“If you prompt people about specific reasons why people tend to stick with defaults, then they’re more likely to give you a reasonable answer,” Daniels says. “When left to their own devices, choice architects didn’t seem to spontaneously consider why people might be susceptible to defaults.”
Neale believes that the presence of default neglect exerts an invisible but potent influence on our decisions. “These are small changes in how we present decisions that can dramatically affect the quality of people’s lives, the quality of their communities and the larger world. But we don’t use defaults because we don’t realize in any kind of day-to-day environment how powerful these things are.”
The Reason Digital Ads Seem So Personal, According to Columbia Business School Research
Ad optimization, at its core, was always about effectively persuading human emotion. Those consumer habits, according to new research from the Columbia Business School, can be traced right down to individual digital footprint, helping “people overcome their human limitations.”
In new research entitled “Psychological Targeting as an Effective Approach to Digital Mass Persuasion” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Assistant Professor of Business Management Sandra Matz’s team explores a new development in the idea of “personalized persuasion.” Thanks to the accessibility of our digital footprints, marketers can now tailor persuasive messages to a “person’s fundamental character traits and psychological needs.”
Professor Matz and her co-authors conducted three experiments in which they targeted over 3.5 million Facebook users based on “Likes,” then measured users’ reactions (i.e. “clicks” and “conversions”) to “persuasive appeals in the form of Facebook ads that either aligned with or ran counter to the users’ psychological profiles.”
In one experiment, the researchers customized online beauty retailer ads that targeted either introverts or extroverts, based on their unique Facebook Likes. The researchers found that “matching the content of persuasive messages to individuals’ psychological characteristics resulted in up to 40 percent more clicks and up to 50 percent more purchases than their mismatching or un-personalized messages.”
While psychological targeting certainly has many advantages when it comes to product positioning, it has the potential to be more insidious. On a more individual level, psychological targeting can easily be “used to exploit weaknesses in people’s character and persuade them to take action against their best interest,” such as Facebook users with psychological traits related to pathological or compulsive behaviors.
The authors actively embrace the numerous ethical questions that surround the application of psychological targeting:
“How do we as consumers and society at-large want to use this new technology? In what settings do we want to facilitate its application, and when do we want to restrict it? For which purposes should we use it, for which should we not? Under which agreements should we be allowed to implement it, and with which required degree of transparency?”
Lehigh Explores Impacts of Paid Search Advertising on Sites Like Yelp
Yelp’s surprisingly durable platform continues to sway consumers’ decisions about who and where to patronize, with 163 million unique monthly visitors.
This is especially true with the advent of paid advertising that appears alongside search results. But what influence does it have on the production end? The Lehigh University College of Business and Economics recently discussed a new study that suggests “paid search advertising can be a profitable investment for small businesses.”
Despite the exponential growth of digital advertising in the past five years, research has uncovered that the effects are actually “limited for branded advertisers since consumers already know and intend to buy from the brand when they search.”
This fact sparked the imaginations of Lehigh economics professor Daisy Dai and Harvard Business School Administration professor Michael Luca who were both interested in understanding “the impact on small businesses whose names are less known and who may gain from an increase in visibility.”
The duo eventually found themselves at the helm of the “largest-scale search advertising experiment run on online platforms in terms of number of businesses involved.” Dai and Luca conducted an experiment in which they took a pool of 18,000 restaurants and randomly assigned free search advertising packages to 7,000 of them, most of which had “not actively advertised on Yelp prior to the experiment.”
According to the article, the researchers examined “page views of the business’ Yelp page, requests for directions, phone calls to the restaurants from Yelp’s mobile page or mobile app, and clicks on the restaurants’ URL on their Yelp page” and compared the “outcome of businesses that did or did not receive free advertising.” The experiment found that “Yelp advertising leads to a 25 percent increase in page views and a 9 to 18 percent increase in purchase intentions, such as direction requests, visits to the restaurant’s website and calls to the restaurant,” according to Dai.
Another insight was related to the number of Yelp reviews each business received, which grew by 5 percent, then “dropped to zero immediately after the advertising period, suggesting ads temporarily raised awareness of businesses that users otherwise would not discover.”
Dai concludes, “Our study finds that an average local restaurant can benefit from search advertising on Yelp. Unlike previous online advertising experiments that usually focus on a few big brands, we yield insights for small businesses.”
Harvard Business School Research Offers New Spin on “Time Is Money” Axiom
Money can buy happiness, according to recent research from the Harvard Business School. But, it primarily has to be spent on making time.
Ashley Whillans, an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at HBS, published research on the “impact of buying one’s way out of negative experiences,” whether that means find ways to reduce a commute or taking a vacation. She points to “time stress”—or the tension that arises when time becomes a scarce resource—as a critical source of unhappiness, especially for many wealthy individuals. She explains:
“People have been trying to find ways to use their discretionary income to maximize their quality of life for a long time. We were really interested in seeing if buying ourselves out of negative experiences might be another pathway to happiness that had been relatively unexplored.”
For the purposes of their research, Whillans and her team define happiness as both overall and moment-to-moment satisfaction.
Whillans surveyed American, Canadian, Danish, and Dutch citizens across the socioeconomic spectrum about their feelings after they made a time-saving purchase. All participants generally reported positive feelings after ordering take-out food, for instance, but Whillans found that when they made these purchases too often, consumers developed a type of “hedonic adaptation” where they used the extra time to do something pleasurable rather than productive.
The role of gender in the time/money/happiness equation is notable, particularly when it comes to the post-work childcare and housekeeping “second shift” many American and Canadian women have to pull. The result is that women “have more educational opportunities than before, and [are] likely to be making more money and holding high-powered jobs but their happiness is not increasing commensurately.”
In ongoing research Whillans is pursuing with Michael Norton, a Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration, into the influence that time-saving purchases have on relationship satisfaction, she explains that “both men and women feel less pulled between the demands of work and home life, and that positively impacts the relationship.”
Whillans’ research offers tangible proof that outsourcing specific tasks throughout the week is a fiscally responsible way to relieve stress.
Check out the rest of Harvard Magazine’s story on the research here.
