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Critics say capitalism erodes institutions and relationships. Turns out, working in sales might, according to a new study in the INFORMS journal Organization Science. A survey of people from different countries revealed that working in a sales-related job was associated with being less trusting, even controlling for other factors. To confirm this experimentally, participants here and abroad were randomly assigned to generate a positive review of a low-quality product. Compared to generating an honest review, generating an artificially positive review caused participants to see people as less honest.

Collective creativity in diverse teams is a kind of black box: We have a good idea of what goes in it (e.g. team composition) and what comes out of it (e.g. creativity), but we know very little about the process – what actually happens when people from different cultures work together. In order to illuminate this process, a new study published in the INFORMS journal Organization Science, examines how the cultural backgrounds of team members interact to shape team dynamics and outcomes.

It's an age-old question: Is it healthier to focus on the type of food you eat or the portion size? Whatever the correct answer is, consumers tend to be more influenced by the perceived healthiness of a food (nuts over chocolate, for example), than a food's portion size. That's one of the findings in new study, to be published in the INFORMS journal Management Science, that also finds that this tendency to neglect food quantity in favor of food type can partly be mitigated by encouraging consumers to compare different portion sizes of food side-by-side.

A team from Northwestern University that included Chicago Marathon personnel were presented the Innovative Applications in Analytics Award at the 2018 INFORMS Business Analytics Conference for their project SAFE (Situational Awareness for Events) system, which incorporates critical data into one user-friendly dashboard to provide leaders of large-scale events like marathons a centralized information source.