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A new Management Science study, "When Do People Prefer Carrots to Sticks? A Robust 'Matching Effect' in Policy Evaluation," suggests that by understanding how people evaluate policies, marketers and policymakers can better frame and improve acceptance rates. 

"For a policy to succeed, it must not only be effective in changing behavior, it must also be accepted by stakeholders," says co-author Ellen Evers, of UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. "Therefore it is crucial to understand how different descriptions of the exact same policy can lead to dramatically different rates of acceptance."

Your physical attributes could have an impact on your participation in financial markets, according to a study of nearly 40,000 people entitled “Stature, Obesity and Portfolio Choice” recently published in the INFORMS journal Management Science. “Specifically, we find that individuals who are relatively tall and of normal weight are more likely to hold stocks in their financial portfolios,” the authors found. The relationship is one of correlation rather than causation, as is often the case with such studies, and experts point to a far more complex relationship between lower income families, access to education and, often times, more expensive fresh food.