How to nudge your customers without pushing them away Designing decisions in a way that nudges but does not force consumers to make better choices offers a way to alleviate many of society’s problems. Defaults are one way to nudge consumers. They can automatically enroll people in a designated option unless someone makes an active decision to opt out, or they can nudge people […]
The two reasons it really is harder to get a job than it used to be There are two ways to interpret this trend. Economists Alicia Sasser Modestino, Daniel Shoag and Joshua Ballance believe that employers became choosy during the Great Recession in order to take advantage of the abundance of people looking for work and to screen out low-achievers. They call the process “opportunistic upskilling,” and they have shown that […]
San Francisco Chronicle With AT&T, Time Warner deal, antitrust cops should emulate FCC That’s all speculative since the effects of the merger will unfold years after the feds bless the union — in ways that are likely hard to envision now, given the fast changes in technology and consumer behavior. Yet recent research shows that mergers, even if approved with conditions by regulators, lead to higher prices for […]
MIT Technology Review Chatbots with Social Skills Will Convince You to Buy Something There are challenges to making it work in any practical way. Timothy Bickmore, a professor at Northeastern University, says one of the biggest is capturing all the different cues that may be relevant to an interaction, including facial expressions and body language. This may be especially tricky on mobile devices, although in theory a smartphone […]
Lying may be your brain’s fault, honestly This new research, while interesting, doesn’t leave neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett entirely convinced. Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and author of the forthcoming book, “How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain,” says focusing on the amygdala as the brain’s source of emotion may be misguided. Hand-selected, meta-analyses of brain […]
Fortune This one statistic shows why the feds should block the AT&T-Time Warner merger John Kwoka, an economist at Northeastern University, recently published research that looked at more than 1,000 mergers over the past twenty years. Kwoka found that at least one-third of the ones he studied actually resulted in price increases of more than 10%, when controlling for factors like changes in input costs, shifts in demand, and […]
The evening news, according to Donald Trump And even if uncommitted voters tune in, John Wihbey, an assistant professor at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, said the show comes far too late to boost Trump’s base of support. “A couple of great shows, if they pull it off, isn’t going to make much difference,” said Wihbey. “Strategically, they should have done it […]
Testing Federal Power Over Immigration “Extending deference to Congress to allow it to discriminate in citizenship laws would drill a hole in the heart of the Equal Protection Clause,” argues Martha F. Davis of Northeastern University School of law, who argued Nguyen in front of the Supreme Court.
How Weed Works Its Magic Just Got Easier To Understand “We found that the CB1 receptor consists of multiple sub-pockets and channels,” Dr. Alexandros Makriyannis, director of Northeastern University’s Center for Drug Discovery and a member of the international team of researchers who mapped CB1, said in a press statement. “This complex structure will allow chemists to design diverse compounds that specifically target portions of […]
Internet Attack Sheds Light On Vulnerabilities In ‘Internet Of Things’ If you had trouble getting to Twitter, Netflix or The New York Times last Friday, you weren’t alone. Hackers blocked access to those websites and others last week by overloading a New Hampshire company, Dyn, that directs internet traffic. The traffic came from hacked devices from peoples’ homes, otherwise known as the Internet of Things. The […]
IT World Here’s how to step out of the server closet and into a more robust (and possibly more rewarding) tech career “With people who cut their teeth in the ’70s, ’80s, or early ’90s, their education is much broader, and mental pickup is not that difficult” when it comes to learning new domains.” — PK Argarwal, regional dean, Northeastern University-Silicon Valley
Voice of America US Candidates Take Different Approaches to Being Tough on Terror But Max Abrahms, a terrorism scholar, argues that the two candidates’ differences are in fact deeper than many assume and that they stem from how each views the phenomenon of terrorism. Clinton subscribes to the “grievance model” of terrorism, the notion that terrorism is inspired by a sense of injustice, said Abrams, a political science […]