Dear friends:

As another semester draws to a close, I’d like to invite you to recognize the scholarly work of our faculty by engaging with our fall 2022 issue of Broad Matters. These selected highlights feature Broad faculty research, thought leadership and insights, covering impactful expertise on timely topics.

Warm regards,

Judith Whipple
Interim Dean

Broad College of Business

Will retailers see more red this holiday season?

Retailers have been gearing up for another blockbuster holiday shopping season, but consumers burned by the highest inflation in a generation may have other ideas.

Ayalla Ruvio, associate professor of marketing, and Forrest Morgeson, assistant professor of marketing, surveyed over 500 consumers in mid-November about their spending plans, concerns and priorities. In an article at the Conversation, Ruvio and Morgeson highlight three consumer behaviors from the results of their survey that suggest consumers are acting as if the United States is already in a recession.

Health insurance companies overpay for some hospital radiology services

Health insurance companies may be overpaying for common radiology services, leading to higher costs for patients and providers. A new study published in the journal Radiology found that insurance companies negotiated different prices for the same services within the same hospital and even negotiated different prices across their own various health plans.

“With most goods and services, you know the price before you choose to purchase. Prior to the Hospital Transparency Rule’s passing, a lot of medical services didn’t make their pricing publicly available, so patients and payers would only find out after being billed,” said John (Xuefeng) Jiang, lead author of the study and Eli Broad Endowed Professor of accounting.

These 5-to-9 habits could be hurting your 9-to-5 productivity

Although it’s easy to find advice on how to increase your productivity during the workday, most people probably aren’t thinking about using after-work time to maximize productivity or the cognitive resources they’re expending when they’re off the clock.

Russell Johnson, MSU Foundation Professor of management, is one of several management and productivity experts who spoke to Fast Company on how your evening habits affect your workplace productivity.

Advancing disability inclusion and creating an improved future of work

A team of experts from MSU’s Broad College of Business, College of Engineering and College of Education have been awarded a three-year, $400,000 Strategic Partnership Grant from the MSU Foundation to develop solutions to employ people with disabilities. The team is also partnering with Lansing-based nonprofit Peckham Inc. and national nonprofit network SourceAmerica on the project.

“Inclusion of people with disabilities is critically important for individuals because it results in greater independence, quality of life and well-being,” Sriram Narayanan, Kesseler Family Endowed Faculty Fellow, professor of supply chain management and faculty lead for the grant, said. “However, a major challenge in employing individuals with disabilities is the wide variation in the type and severity of disabilities that traditional work environments struggle to accommodate.”

Changes made to Twitter are changes in the public square

Twitter isn’t just a social platform; it’s a public square, for good or ill. Over time, its archives have become a repository of human behavior that researchers can use to infer attitudes that are difficult to detect through methods from traditional field research. Public health agencies turned to Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic to promote behavior that mitigates the risk of infection. But without content moderation that bans misinformation about COVID-19 — and Twitter recently lifted that ban — the same mechanisms amplify misinformation and allow falsehoods to spread faster than the truth.

Anjana Susarla, Omura-Saxena Professor in Responsible AI, authored two articles in the Conversation on the risk to public health caused by Twitter’s removal of the misinfo ban and what the world would lose if Twitter itself were to collapse.

Growing an entrepreneurial mindset

Research from the Broad College is bringing excellence to the entrepreneurial mindset at Michigan State University. In this episode, the Broad Matters podcast welcomes the new faculty director for the Burgess Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Laurel Ofstein. Through her research focusing on social entrepreneurship and women entrepreneurs, Ofstein is informing the future of entrepreneurship and enhancing the student experience at MSU.

Listen in your podcast player of choice, or read the transcript to get the insights from Broad Matters.