For some business contexts, a transaction starts with a customer making an initial purchase decision (e.g., reserving a specific car, or putting a specific product in the shopping cart), and ends when the customer pays for the chosen product if the initial decision is held on, or a new product if the initial decision is replaced. This format of transaction, which comprises two related discrete decisions, cannot be fully accommodated by existing choice models which mainly deal with either discrete or concrete decisions, or, in rare cases, a combination of one discrete decision and one continuous decision (i.e., the so-called discrete-continuous choice model which has been widely used in the telecom business to model the mobile plan subscription for each month and the minute usage in the month). More importantly, this two-step transaction adds a great deal of richness into the customers’ as well as firms’ decisions which cannot be easily uncovered with existing tools. As an example, while the first decision is made for future consumption, the second one is usually for immediate consumption. Yet, these two are related decisions and it’s likely that the second one is influenced by the first one. How customers make the two decisions and to what extent the time gap between the two affects the second decision are interesting questions that this study will explore. This proposal will complete a few on-going projects that help us better understand the customers’ and firms’ behaviours in such two-step transactions. It will also explore many new directions that are enabled by this new format of transaction.

Cultural proximity and trust have been found to affect international trade, portfolio investment and direct investment (Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales 2009), product adoption (Albuquerque, Bronnenberg and Corbett 2007), and pro-social lending (Burtch, Ghose and Wattal 2014). However, no study has examined the mechanisms through which culture and trust influence consumer demand. Existing studies tend to focus on cross-country cultural differences and trust. In geographically vast countries like China, India and the US, there are huge regional differences in culture and trust. There has not been any attempt to study the impact of within-country cultural differences on domestic trade and consumption and their policy implications. This project has two research questions and objectives. First, how cross-country cultural proximity and trust influence consumer’s brand preference and price sensitivity, and consequently consumer’s demand. I will use the European car market as an empirical context. Second, how within-country cultural proximity and trust affect choices of sellers of different destination provinces by buyers of different origin provinces on online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) shopping, and what are the policy implications for regional e-commerce development and digital divide. I use the Chinese online C2C shopping as the empirical context. Not only will this project help deepen our understanding of cultural elements in demand and consumption, it will also help policy makers to take relevant measures to alleviate the possible negative impact of cultural biases in demand and consumption.

In the last few decades, social entrepreneurs have tried to address the needs of the poor in Asia, especially where governments and markets have failed. In particular, social entrepreneurs in health stand out for their innovative and far-reaching work in disease prevention, treatment and enabling conditions for good health. There have been many captivating stories and cases, but no systematic studies that have assessed the models and contributions of social enterprises as a whole. We shall conduct a systematic review of health social enterprises to produce a taxonomy of models and identify factors associated with their success and effectiveness.

Given the numerous business scandals in recent years (e.g., Volkswagen, AIG, etc.), many scholars and practitioners have advocated for increased CEO morality. Although CEO morality is assumed to be a highly desirable trait, in this research I propose its downside —reduced firm innovation. I propose that CEOs high on morality are likely to promote a rule-adhering organisational climate within their organisations, which discourages their employees to think “outside of the box”. This rule-adhering organisational climate will in turn stifle firm innovation as a whole. This research will provide a more complete understanding of the effects of CEO morality on firm-level outcomes.

Social power, defined as an individual’s relative capacity to modify the states of other people by providing or withholding rewards or administering punishments, has been recognised as a persuasive influence on human behaviour. We investigate whether power really corrupts by examining the effect of power on ethical behaviour. We are interested in testing whether the powerful are more or less likely to donate to charity as compared to the powerless, and whether the powerful are more or less likely to buy counterfeit luxury products. The research will contribute to our understanding of the triggers of (un)ethical behaviour and the role of power in the ethical domain.

The objective of this project is to design effective models and systems for car/ride sharing services, with the eventual goal to provide viable solutions, from both operational and technological perspectives, to sustainable transportation development. The research scope covers the following three areas: 1) designing service region for one-way car/ride sharing systems; 2) managing fleet operations in various car/ride sharing business models; 3) promoting synergy with public transport.

This research project aims to understand how reference-dependent behaviours of consumers affect the aggregate level market response as well as how the firm should make optimal pricing decisions. The project investigates this question from two separate perspectives. First, the dynamic pricing literature with reference effect commonly imposes assumptions about consumer behaviour directly on the market response. While this may be convenient for analytical purposes, it may not accurately reflect the real market response. We propose to bridge this gap and examine the analytical and empirical consequences when one builds up the reference dependent demand function from the consumer behaviour model. Second, we analyse the problem of determining the optimal prices in more realistic settings such as reference prices can evolve stochastically or the firm needs to manage the pricing decisions for multiple products.

The public transportation system in Singapore faces peak-hour overloads. At times, MRT trains are over-crowded to the extent that commuters cannot board the trains. The Ministry of Transport (MOT) and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) have been trying to shift part of the crowd to off-peak periods by offering fare discounts for off-peak travel. This research examines the effectiveness of a surcharge policy at shifting travel from peak to off-peak periods and commuters’ perception of the policy. We also develop and test different potential solutions to increase commuters’ receptivity toward peak-hour surcharge. In particular, we investigated the behavioural and psychological impact of donating the collected surcharge to charity—varying the proportion of the surcharge to donate (50 per cent or 100 per cent) and the degree of autonomy commuters have in deciding the benefactor of the donation. To this end, we conducted a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) involving more than 900 commuters across the nation, examining their travel patterns before, during, and after a six-week intervention period as well as capturing their attitudes toward the surcharge policy at different points in time during the experiment.

Increased competition has a causal effect on banks’ pricing strategies to compete for consumers and profits. We test this conjecture using an exogenous shock due to the interstate banking restriction that has been sequentially lifted across states since 1994. We find strong evidence that increased competition leads banks to reduce initial rates offered on the adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) to attract borrowers but increase interest rates after the rate reset and thereby exploit consumer inattention in the pricing terms. Different banks design pricing strategies that are optimal to their own profit structures. Consistent with theoretical predictions, we find that banks shroud more with naïve borrowers or less financially sophisticated borrowers, who are more subject to behavioural bias. Subsequently, banks earn more profits from lower default risk and delayed prepayments.

We examine how political events influence the performance and behaviour of politically connected firms. We focus on the time-varying aspects of political ties over a reasonably long time horizon in countries where these ties are prevalent. Our analysis pays special attention on countries that experienced instances of political instability in the recent past as the time series variations in political conditions will allow us to examine the effect of political connections, while controlling for potentially unobserved differences in corporate and political actors. The expected findings of our study should provide important contributions to the existing literature on the effect of time-varying political ties on firm value and information quality. In sum, our research agenda is geared towards contributing to the broad question of how a country’s political environment affects its economic development and the performance of the private (but potentially connected) sector.