Media Coverage

It's an age-old question: Is it healthier to focus on the type of food you eat or the portion size? Whatever the correct answer is, consumers tend to be more influenced by the perceived healthiness of a food (nuts over chocolate, for example), than a food's portion size. That's one of the findings in new study, to be published in the INFORMS journal Management Science, that also finds that this tendency to neglect food quantity in favor of food type can partly be mitigated by encouraging consumers to compare different portion sizes of food side-by-side.

A team from Northwestern University that included Chicago Marathon personnel were presented the Innovative Applications in Analytics Award at the 2018 INFORMS Business Analytics Conference for their project SAFE (Situational Awareness for Events) system, which incorporates critical data into one user-friendly dashboard to provide leaders of large-scale events like marathons a centralized information source. 

Research published in the INFORMS journal Organization Science found that reconnecting with long lost people can lead to strong friendships, even if lots of time has passed without contact with them.

In a recently published a study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science entitled “Some Customers Would Rather Leave Without Saying Goodbye,” researchers examine “a hybrid of the standard contractual and non-contractual categorization of customer–firm relationships” looking at two different types of churners they denoted as “overt”, those who inform an organization of their departure from the consumer base and “silent”, the consumers who simply disengage without notice, or just fade away by halting their purchase behavior. 

Marketers look to trendsetters as “influencers,” but can the influencer be influenced herself? A study recently published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science suggests that, in fact, early propagators of trends tend to respond less to advertising than latecomers.