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Olubunmi Faleye Rani Hoitash patents and overall firm value all suffer." Now that increased corporate governance is a given, boards will need to work harder to strike a balance between gov- ernance and guidance. "An exclusive focus on board monitoring and management oversight can have unintended consequences which can lead to a deterioration, rather than an increase, in shareholders' value," says Faleye. Udi Hoitash The study titled "The Costs of Intense Board Monitoring" is forthcoming in the Journal of Financial Economics. It can be found at ssrn.com/ abstract=1343364. Video Games Make Workers Smarter Video gamers have known it all along, but now they have proof: Interactive video games improve cognitive skills. A study from the University of Colo- rado Denver Business School finds that workers trained via video games do their jobs better and retain infor- mation longer than those trained via more passive methods. Tracy Sitzmann, assistant profes- sor of management and author of the article, examined 65 studies and data from 6,476 trainees. She discovered that those who trained with video games demonstrated sig- nificantly improved skills over those in comparison groups. Their dem- onstration of factual knowledge was 11 percent better, their skill-based knowledge was 14 percent better, and their knowledge retention rate was 9 percent better. In her study, Sitzmann points to the example of Cold Stone Cream- ery. After losing money because workers were serving up too much ice cream, the company created an interactive video game that taught them how much should go into each scoop. She also cites Miller Brewing Company, which is devel- oping a game called Tips on Tap that shows bartenders how to pour the perfect glass of beer. They lose points if the mug hits the tap, where it could become contaminated. To be most effective, video games must have three characteristics, says Sitzmann. First, they must be inter- active. Sixteen percent of the video games that Sitzmann studied were no more effective than more tradi- tional teaching methods because they allowed trainees to remain passive as they learned. Second, employ- ees must be free to play the game whenever they like—and the more interactive the game, the more often employees will want to play. Finally, the video games must be only one part of a larger train- ing plan, says Sitzmann. Trainees also should be given instruc- tion before and after the game is played to assure they've learned the concepts presented. The study "A Meta-Analytic Examination of the Instructional Effectiveness of Computer-Based Simulation Games" will be published in the winter edi- tion of Personnel Psychology. Tracy Sitzmann Twitter Helps Small Biz Compete Not every small business can afford high- profile marketing campaigns or catch the attention of news media. But when small companies "tweet" their messages, they can make up for that disadvantage, say Greg Miller, Hal White, and Beth Blank- espoor of the University of Michi- gan Ross School of Business in Ann Arbor. The three sampled nearly 3,700 press releases from 73 information technology firms between 2007 and 2009. They then examined how a company's level of tweet- ing during the time of major news events affected how much news coverage that event received. They also looked at the effect the level of tweeting had on a company's bid- ask spreads—the difference between the highest price buyers bid for company shares and the lowest price sellers are asking. They found that tweeting dur- ing a news event lowers that spread and increases the number of shares available. Moreover, the smaller the firm, the stronger that effect. The authors speculate that tweet- ing provides investors with informa- tion they otherwise would not have about smaller firms—and, therefore, prevents them from trading out of fear of losing money. And it helps companies get important informa- tion out to a wider audience. "After all," says Miller, "if investors or other intended recipients don't receive the information, disclosures become meaningless." Their paper, "The Impact of Managerial Dissemination of Firm Disclosure," is available at ssrn. com/abstract=1657169. n z BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011 59