Impulses, a Culinary EMBA, and Immigration Figures – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
How God Influences Your Grocery Bill – Questrom School of Business Blog
BU Questrom Professor of Marketing Didem Kurt recently co-authored new research with the University of Pittsburgh’s J. Jeffrey Inman and Harvard’s Francesca Gino that explored links between “grocery sales data and rates of religious adherence in thousands of counties across the country.”
According to the study, “religion and religious messages were linked to lower spending.”
People who were reminded of God’s presence were less likely than another control group to spend money on “impulse purchases such as magazines and gum,” an effect that the researchers note “persisted whether or not an individual described themselves as religious.”
Kurt explains, “We attribute this result to the notion that thinking about God reminds people of commonly shared values—such as frugality—even if they don’t believe in God. Managers may want to consider proximity to houses of worship when choosing a retail location. They need to be cognizant of the effect of religious cues and reminders on consumer spending.”
You can read the full article here and check out the complete paper on Science Direct.
A Full-Course Meal – Sawyer Business School Blog
The Sawyer Business School Blog recently profiled David Lanci, EMBA ’02, who after many years as a chef, shifted into the food services industry and founded NexDine, which offers “catering and dining services to corporations, schools, colleges, and senior living facilities around the country.”
Lanci told the Sawyer blog that his Suffolk EMBA “gave [him] the confidence to go out and start this company. One thing I really learned from my EMBA is to take a holistic view of everything and never have a singular view. It’s not just about what’s on the plate.”
NexDine founder David Lanci, EMBA ’02
Lanci continues:
“I realized that how you communicate with the people in the group has a dramatic impact on the outcome. I realized it wasn’t just out of sheer will you could get something done. You had to collaborate, and that was the aha moment for me.”
He concludes, “Food is almost the easy part. It’s just as challenging—if not more so—to manage people, manage clients, manage budgets. And in our industry, we’re not making widgets. We can’t do everything the same way for every client. Every location is different. People’s appetites are different.”
You can read the full interview with Lanci here.
Undocumented Immigrant Population Roughly Double Current Estimate – MIT Sloan Newsroom
According to new research from MIT Sloan’s Mohammad Fazel-Zarandi and Yale’s Edward Kaplan and Jonathan Feinstein, “the number of undocumented immigrants living in the country is about 22.1 million, nearly twice the most prominent current estimate of 11.3 million.”
Fazel-Zarandi explains, “It’s likely that undocumented immigrants are more difficult to locate and survey than other foreign-born residents and if contacted, they may be inclined to misreport their country of origin, citizenship, and number of household residents, fearing the legal consequences of revealing their status.”
He continues:
“A common argument in favor of a tougher immigration policy is that people who have entered the country illegally elevate levels of violent criminal activity.”
“Whatever the extent of criminality that is assessed, it’s clear that crime statistics be thought of in relation to a substantially larger population of undocumented immigrants. This lessens the risk in per capita terms. What’s acceptable for a population of 11 million is unlikely to be sufficient for a population of 22 million.”
You can read the full article here.
MIT on the Problems with Twitter, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
Marketers Take Note: When Too Many Choices are a Burden, Not a Benefit – Questrom School of Business News
BU Questrom School of Business Ph.D. alum Sarah Whitley recently co-authored a new Journal of Consumer Research paper with Associate Professor Remi Turdel and fellow Assistant Professor Didem Kurt, in which they discovered “that people typically want more choices when they’re buying for pleasure [and they want] fewer choices when they make a purchase for strictly utilitarian or functional reasons.”
The research dives into what is more commonly known as the Paradox of Choice. The idea crept into the market lexicon shortly after the release of the 2004 book The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less from psychologist Barry Schwartz, NYU alum and U. Penn Ph.D. The general idea Schwartz derived was that consumer anxiety could be caused by too many options. However, research from Whitley, Turdel, and Kurt reveal that it may only pertain to specific kinds of purchases, not simply overall.
Whitley says the major takeaway is that businesses can be more strategic if they know “what motivates the buying decisions of their customers.”
“For product categories where people feel that they have unique preferences, it may be worth it to have more variety. It may be fine to reduce the number of offered products where this is not the case.”
You can read the full article here.
Solving Twitter’s ‘Follow-Back’ Problem – MIT Sloan Newsroom
About four years ago, MIT Sloan Associate Professor of Operations Tauhid Zaman put together a social media experiment in which he used Taylor Swift’s friends on Twitter to “open the gates to her inner circle.”
Dubbed the “follow-back problem,” Zaman sought to understand “the underlying dynamics of follows on Twitter, [such as] what kinds of Twitter interactions matter the most when trying to get followers? And do overlapping social networks actually help build connections? If they do, then to what degree do they help?”
Zaman found that Twitters “who don’t follow many other people are unlikely to follow you back, while those who follow a lot of people are likely to follow you if you follow and retweet them.” He also found that if, for instance, “Swift follows somebody who, in turn, follows Zaman, then Zaman has a greater chance that Swift will follow him.”
The article notes that social media tools can “have a tremendous blast radius” in terms of their ability to powerfully influence the opinions of a whole country.
“In my opinion, this can be far more dangerous than conventional weapons which have a fixed blast radius. These are weapons, and I’m building efficient ways to use the weapons, so this has to be handled with care,” Zaman said.
Read the full article, the first in a three-part series examining new work about Twitter, influence, and bots, here.
How CEOs Manage Time – Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business School Professors Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria recently published a piece in the Harvard Business Review that examines how CEOs allocate their time.
According to the article, face-to-face interactions take up “61 percent of the work time of the CEOs we studied. Another 15 percent was spent on the phone or reading and replying to written correspondence. The final 24 percent was spent on electronic communications.”
The authors describe the CEO’s job as “relentless.” They write, “Given that work could consume every hour of their lives, CEOs have to set limits so that they can preserve their health and their relationships with family and friends. To sustain the intensity of the job, CEOs need to train—just as elite athletes do. That means allocating time for health, fitness, and rest.”
You can read the full article here.
