Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/54913
research The Benefits of Blogging MANY EMPLOYEES have gotten in trouble with the boss for postings on personal blogs. But a study from researchers at New York University in New York City and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylva- nia, finds that employees' extracurricular blogging habits might actually benefit companies in the long run. The study was conducted by Yan Huang, a doc- toral student at Heinz College, CMU's school of information systems and management; Param Vir Singh, associate professor of information systems at CMU's Tepper School of Business; and Anindya Ghose, an associate professor of information, opera- tions and management sciences at NYU's Stern School UPCOMING & ONGOING n STUDY OF HOME HEALTHCARE Feng Li, chair of e-business development at New- castle University's Busi- ness School in the United Kingdom, will lead a study of how to better design healthcare models that help older people remain in their homes longer. The three- year project, funded by the government's Technology Strategy Board, will work with ten private, public, and volunteer organizations to find solutions for caring for 66 May/June 2011 BizEd an aging population. Feng believes that digital tech- nologies will support new, sustainable models that can ease the burden on an over- whelmed healthcare system. n BEHAVIORAL LAB LAUNCH The University of Virginia Darden School of Busi- ness in Charlottesville has opened Behav- ioral Research at Darden (BRAD), an interdisciplin- ary behavioral lab that will help researchers in their of Business. They studied bloggers at Fortune 500 IT consulting and services companies that permitted personal and professional blogging. They found that when companies allow employees to express themselves freely in their personal blogs, their work-related blog- ging becomes more effective, especially when it comes to sharing knowledge across the organization. "Social media technologies such as corporate blogs have the potential to be of enormous value to firms," says Ghose. For that reason, the authors recom- mend that companies should not restrict personal blogging, because it has a posi- tive effect on productivity. Moreover, companies that use social media should prominently display reputation metrics for contributors, to provide incentives for employees to contribute content. "A Structural Model of Employee Behavioral Dynamics in Enterprise Social Media," is available at pages.stern.nyu. edu/~aghose/enterprise blogs.pdf. experiments in areas such as organizational behavior, marketing, business ethics, judgment and decision mak- ing, behavioral operations, and entrepreneurship. n RESEARCH ON RETAIL Two research centers at the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business have partnered with the Center for Advanc- ing Retail Technologies (CART) in Syracuse, New York. Faculty in the Center for Customer Insight and Marketing Solutions and the Supply Chain Management Center of Excellence at Yan Huang Param Vir Singh Anindya Ghose McCombs will use CART's data on retail technologies, consumer behaviors, and other areas for research. CART has similar agree- ments with research centers at Stanford University in California, Cornell University in New York, the University of Florida, and Northwestern University in Illinois. n COLLABORATION AIDS INVESTORS An upcoming research survey will explore whether individual investors have suf- ficient access to information to assess the risk factors of the stock market. Eileen