Research Reverb

When a company takes action on climate issues, it might come with headlines - but keeping promises can be expensive. Research from Gies College of Business tracked hundreds of thousands of news stories and found that greener the company, the more good climate action coverage can cost. In this episode of Research Reverb, Professor Gautam Pant explains why the "green spotlight" raises expectations.

In 2024, the Chinese social media platform Weibo gave influencers the option of using AI to auto-generate responses to comments. So how did the fans and consumers respond? Yang Gao analyzed those responses for his study, "When Influencers Delegate Replies: How Social AI Agents Shape User Engagement," and discussed what he and his team discovered.

Research from Gies Business economist Riley League showed that upfront authorization slashed fraudulent nonemergency ambulance rides without any impact on patient care.

Alex Vandenberg discusses the results of history on what makes a positive peer-to-peer recognition program in the workplace.

Alex Vandenberg discusses the results of history on what makes a positive peer-to-peer recognition program in the workplace.

A new framework from Gies Business professor Ujjal Mukherjee combines machine learning with scheduling optimization to tackle one of healthcare's toughest problems: the sickest patients are often the least likely to get time with a doctor.

Anand and Wang discuss the results of their study, which found unfavorable FDA inspection outcomes to be associated with fewer drug shortages

Firms can sell their dirty plants but keep using that plant's output. Professor Qiping Xu reveals the "cosmetic redrawing" of corporate boundaries and why divestment sometimes fails the planet.

Every year, 39 million American women get a mammogram, and about 10% of them receive an unsettling call that could trigger weeks of anxiety. Gies Business professor Eren Ahsen thinks new technologies can fix that. His research finds that a "delegation" model (where algorithms triage low-risk cases and flag the tricky ones for human experts) could cut screening costs by up to 30% without sacrificing clinical accuracy - and could mean high-risk patients getting answers in hours instead of weeks.

Drivers for ride-sharing companies, short-term renters, freelancers, and other one-off jobs are part of a growing market called the gig economy. The phenomenon is not new. It picked up steam in the early 2010s and carried it into the mid-2020s. Recently, researchers Spyros Lagaras, a professor of finance in Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, joined researchers Matt Denes from Carnegie Mellon University and Margarita Toutsoura from Washington University in St. Louis to take a closer look at how common it is for those who start these gigs, use them as a pathway to entrepreneurship. Their findings, which confirmed their suspicion, were published in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Working Paper Series and the Journal of Financial Economics.