News Room

Today’s consumers can shop for almost anything without ever leaving home. So it may be surprising to learn that weather can influence their buying mood even when they are indoors. It’s long been known that weather affects temperament, and that good weather tends to bring people out of the house more than bad weather. It’s one reason why — when an election outcome may hinge on voter turnout — candidates hope it doesn’t rain on Election Day. Yet, new research in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science suggests that even when shoppers stay inside — and browsing through ads on their smartphones — good weather will inspire them to buy.

Michael Trick, INFORMS member and the Harry B. and James H. Higgins Professor of Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, has been appointed dean of Carnegie Mellon in Qatar, effective September 1, 2017.

If you’re the chief executive of a publicly traded company and want a raise, what should you do?

(a) Keep breathing.

(b) Get yourself on CNBC.

The first answer will probably work, but getting some media attention will work better, especially if your company isn’t too large and its stock has been doing well. Those are the key findings of a new study in the INFORMS journal Organization Science of CEO pay and U.S. media exposure conducted by a pair of American-trained business professors in Asia.

Does weather impact sales? Four data scientists noticed the weather was a “huge focal point for many mobile marketing campaigns.” But, they wondered, what specific weather conditions drove sales. Their research, appearing in INFORMS’ Marketing Science, shows many large marketers, such as Burberry, Ace Hardware, and Taco Bell (among others), unleashed weather-based mobile marketing messages, promoting specific products.

INFORMS member and professor of mathematics at the U.S. Naval Academy Sommer Gentry represented INFORMS and the mathematics community on the FOX show Superhuman, by tackling an O.R. problem that involves counting sub-rectangles in an m-by-n grid and in an m-by-n grid with corners cut out.