News Releases

BALTIMORE, MD, June 18, 2024 – Advertising has long been known to depict a virtual reality of life leading some people to expect more out of life than is practical. This is driven by idyllic imagery and storytelling, among other techniques such as an emphasis on materialism.

BALTIMORE, MD, May 8, 2024 – Because public health experts have determined that menthol-flavored cigarettes pose higher health risks to smokers than non-menthol varieties, policymakers for years have considered banning menthol. Most of the measures taken to date have been at the state level, but new research suggests that this approach has backfired. The better alternative, researchers suggest, is a higher tax on menthol cigarettes, or a national ban at the federal level.

BALTIMORE, MD, April 09, 2024 – Do market researchers still need to conduct original research using human participants in their work? Not always, according to a new study, which found that thanks to the increasing sophistication of large language models (LLMs), human participants can be substituted with LLMs and still generate similar outputs as those generated from human surveys.

BALTIMORE, MD, March 25, 2024 – Four INFORMS members have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Antonio Conejo is a professor in integrated systems engineering at The Ohio State University. Martha Grabowski is the McDevitt Distinguished Chair in Information Systems, Information Systems Program Director and professor of information systems in the Madden College of Business and Economics at Le Moyne College. Patricia Mokhtarian is a Clifford and William Greene Jr. Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Stephen Wright is a George B. Dantzig Professor of computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

BALTIMORE, MD, March 11, 2024 – In business and in life, the power of mentorship has long been understood, but how important is it that your mentor look like you? This question was at the center of a new study, which specifically found that mentor gender has a powerful impact on female entrepreneurs.

BALTIMORE, MD, March 5, 2024 – New research in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science has found that companies and brands that have aligned themselves with Black Lives Matter (BLM) suffered a negative impact at the hands of consumers.

BALTIMORE, MD, February 28, 2024 – Delivering childhood vaccines via drone could be a triple whammy – saving lives, saving money and improving health outcomes – according to new research in the INFORMS journal Transportation Science. The authors developed optimization models to strategically design a distribution network for drones to deliver vaccines. Their proposed approach was evaluated using real-world data from the Vanuatu region, where vaccine delivery by drones was tested in a UNICEF-sponsored project.

BALTIMORE, MD, February 21, 2024 – Artificial intelligence (AI) has made great strides in the past few years, even months. New research in the INFORMS journal Management Science finds that AI agents can build trust – like that of humans.

BALTIMORE, MD, February 12, 2024 – New research has found that women and minorities are more likely to pay higher premiums when they take out auto loans. A new study conducted by researchers at three leading universities found that women and minorities pay a statistically significant and greater dealer interest rate markup than men and non-minorities.

BALTIMORE, MD, January 3, 2024 – New research has found a way to leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to more efficiently screen out bad ideas to focus on only good ideas in the crowdsourcing process within ideation. More specifically, the research has arrived at a simple model for screening out ideas that experts might consider “bad.” Importantly, managers can adjust their model to determine how many bad ideas to screen out, without losing good ones. The research also found a single new predictor that screens out atypical ideas and preserves more inclusive and rich ideas.