In the face of social, environmental, and financial disruptions, more attention is being paid to corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies, and sustainability benchmarks have multiplied. But does a firm's listing in a CSR index really matter to investors? HEC researchers investigated how important inclusion in the leading global CSR benchmark, the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) World, is to investors.
By Rodolphe Durand , Luc Paugam , Hervé Stolowy
Robots are making their way into diverse fields of work but human workers often still feel unsafe working alongside them, regardless of the true levels of risk. Sangseok You (Assistant Professor at HEC Paris) and colleagues have used virtual reality to explore how humans can be made to feel safer while working with robots.
By Sangseok You
Shirish Srivastava and co-researchers report that e-government prevents corruption in national institutions and service systems. They set out to learn: what can be done to enhance this unintended benefit and further curb corruption in nations?
By Shirish Srivastava
The relationship between cannabis and society is a long and deeply contested one. Throughout history, cannabis has been associated with everything from health, leisure, and pop culture to criminal and immoral behavior. But beyond the simple debate about whether cannabis is good or bad, the study of cannabis markets needs interdisciplinarity, to know what is required to construct an effective and fair contested market.
By Dane Pflueger , Daniel Martinez Ahloy
Within the last 30 years, Shanghai has been through a dramatic evolution similar to the one that Paris has experienced for more than a century. This phenomenon has had a considerable impact on both life experience and the business environment. For 5 months, I conducted one-of-a-kind field research on how people in Shanghai experience what can be called “super-acceleration”. This experience, closely tied to a feeling of short-termism, can be defined as the fast expiry of trustable bearings.
Platform companies like Uber, Airbnb and eBay represent a disruptive new economic phenomenon. Research by Dane Pflueger into the accounting that underpins these new organizations identifies a form that few accountants would recognize.
By Dane Pflueger
NGOs and commercial firms often form partnerships. What is it that drives these alliances and who really benefits? Olivier Chatain and Elena Plaksenkova created a theoretical model to understand these collaborations better. They find that NGOs make trade-offs, and commercial firms are often disappointed with the outcomes.
By Olivier Chatain , Elena Plaksenkova
This special issue of Knowledge@HEC highlights several research projects and teaching initiatives at HEC Paris in the context of big data and business analytics. Nowadays it does not take much to convince students or managers alike of the importance of data for businesses. As Wedel and Kannan (2016) put it, “data is the oil of the digital economy”. Indeed, data is completely transforming organizations, and data-driven decision making is becoming more and more a part of a company’s core. In an increasing digital world, all of us are walking data generators, leaving long data trails: we have more data on everything.
In a bid to make it easier for financial reports to be processed by computers, these must now be submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in a new language in addition to the traditional HTML format. In their recent study, Xitong Li, Hongwei Zhu and Luo Zuo explore how adopting the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is leading to more complex HTML-formatted financial reports. Instead of saving time and money, they find that submitting additional XBRL-formatted reports is costly to firms.
By Xitong Li
Should teams be hierarchical, with clear task delegation, or should they be flexible and self-organizing? So far, literature and practice offer as many examples as counter-examples in favor of each model. By distinguishing between the types of tasks and the coordination each require, a new study of software development teams is able to recommend the best configuration for successful teamwork – a finding potentially applicable to any domain.
By Sri Kudaravalli
