Media Coverage

The price for a 30-second ad to run during the Super Bowl this year is reportedly topping $5 million. A new study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science focuses on the relationship between Super Bowl viewership and corresponding sales of brands advertised in the game. The question asked by the study is: "Do these things pay off?" The answer is both yes and no.

Patients often wait weeks or months for medical appointments. When they finally arrive at physicians’ offices, patients often face further delays. This in-office waiting occurs for many reasons. Perhaps those patients arrived early. Perhaps earlier patients put the physicians behind schedule, or urgent calls interrupted them. However, according to a new article by INFORMS member Michael J. Armstrong, professor at Brock University, and his colleagues, sometimes clinics purposely schedule appointments before physicians expect to be ready. They do this to ensure physicians don’t run out of work.

Benefits of Super Bowl ads linger in the months following the annual game, with sales boosts during other major sporting events like NCAA March Madness, NBA playoffs and MLB games, according to a study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science. 

A study recently published in the INFORMS journal Management Science finds lower rates of within-industry entrepreneurship in states with strong noncompete enforcement. Using data on about 5.5 million new firms in 30 states, the researchers found that strongly bound workers were significantly less likely to build new companies within the same industry.

Bros don't know. In a new study in the INFORMS journal Management Science, individuals and groups of three were given general-knowledge and forecasting questions. All-male groups had worse discussion dynamics than groups with at least one woman. As a result, their judgments were more poorly calibrated than the other groups’ — and even compared to individual men or women.