News Releases

Anything you put in front of a prospective homebuyer can either help or hurt your chances of making the sale. This includes everything from the written description, graphics, video, and of course, photos. A new study looked at how photos of plants are used in online real estate listings, and more specifically, whether home profiles with more images of plants, versus fewer images, systematically differ in how a home is valued.

New research has found that increased local social media news coverage can encourage independent restaurants and stores to begin offering “impossible meats”— plant-based meat alternatives designed to replicate conventional meat while reducing carbon emissions and offering potential nutritional benefits. The estimated news effect was stronger in counties with a larger share of liberal residents.

A peer-reviewed study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science revealed that direct competitors in retail, online and offline firms, can both benefit by working together when it comes to handling product returns. The research shows that “buy online, return in store” (BORS) partnerships, such as those between Amazon and Kohl’s, can impact competition in a way that benefits both companies. At the same time, consumers can also be better off under some circumstances, leading to a win-win-win scenario for all players.

In a new study in INFORMS journal Marketing Science, prospective customers of commercial good discriminated against femininity expressed in photos on products. The femininity "penalty" did not vary for customers that are men, women or nonbinary.

INFORMS has named 12 distinguished leaders as the 2026 class of INFORMS Fellows, one of the highest honors in the profession.

Announcing the results of the 2026 INFORMS Board of Directors election and the new board for 2027.

Current thinking increasingly treats artificial intelligence (AI) as a scalable substitute for human coaching in digital health. New research published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science challenges that assumption, finding that access to human coaches in addition to an AI coach leads to significantly greater weight loss than AI coaching alone.

It’s the most common dilemma that serialized digital content platforms face. Should they release an entire book or season at once so audiences can binge, or release chapters or episodes over time to encourage audiences to return?

Most medical devices do not hit the market through rigorous safety testing but by being deemed similar enough to something already approved—the “predicate” device through a mechanism known as the FDA’s 510(k) pathway. But similar is not a synonym for safe. While the assumption may be that substantial equivalence is a reasonable stand-in for a safety review, a share of devices cleared with this method still get recalled, and the FDA spends valuable time reviewing devices the same way, regardless of how risky it is on paper.

As companies race to integrate artificial intelligence into the workplace, new research suggests workers benefit most when AI is paired with experience rather than treated as a replacement for it.