Business Analytics

As artificial intelligence increasingly impacts our daily lives, UB School of Management researchers have developed a new framework to transform AI chatbots into more intuitive, human-like conversation partners.

Forthcoming in AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, the study introduces the Chatbot Discourse Design Framework, which helps find key conversation patterns in discussions between humans and connects them to chatbot designs to enhance their conversational abilities.

“Chatbots are everywhere, from customer service to health care, and their success hinges upon their ability to understand what you’re saying and provide meaningful responses,” says study co-author Raj Sharman, professor of management science and systems. “Our framework will allow all types of organizations to improve their operations and overall customer experience.”

Investors are capitalizing on a loophole in U.S. tax laws that has led to billions of dollars of lost tax revenue, according to new UB School of Management research.

The study finds that investors are selling and repurchasing nearly identical exchange-traded funds (ETFs), a group of stocks, bonds or other securities, as a strategy to minimize taxes owed to the federal government and bypass long-standing tax laws.

“Our study examines how investors are swapping shares of similar EFTs to claim a tax deduction for investment losses while maintaining essentially the same holdings in their stock portfolio,” says study co-author Michael Dambra, associate professor and Kenneth W. Colwell Chair of Accounting and Law. “While tax laws prohibit claiming a tax loss if an investor sells and repurchases a substantially identical investment within 30 days, the Internal Revenue Service has remained silent on where ETFs fit in this definition.”

When a reviewer loses an ‘elite’ badge on the restaurant review site Yelp, the quality of their reviews declines, but the perceived value of those reviews remains surprisingly high because of how the site displays their status, according to new research from the UB School of Management.

Available online ahead of publication in Production and Operations Management, the study investigated the impact of non-financial incentives like badges and status on Yelp, and found that when consumers see a badge indicating that a reviewer once was elite, they place more trust in those reviews, regardless of their actual depth or accuracy.  

“Demoted reviewers feel they’ve been treated unfairly, which leads them to decrease their effort and produce lower-quality reviews,” says study co-author Wreetabrata Kar, assistant professor of marketing. “But Yelp users can see a record of the years when a reviewer held ‘elite’ status, which serves as a dominating cue and causes readers to place more trust in the reviewer, even after they’ve been downgraded. This disconnect between actual and perceived quality can undermine the accuracy of reviews and potentially impact the platform’s long-term sustainability.”

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $1.5 million to a UB research project that will use artificial intelligence to study how cells and molecules respond to low doses of radiation.

Edward Snell, PhD, chief scientific officer at UB Hauptman-Woodward Research Institute, and Dominic Sellitto, clinical assistant professor of management science and systems in the UB School of Management, will serve as co-principal investigators on the research.

The project is part of the Low Dose Radiation Research program, which supports research to develop disease risk prediction and understand its role in cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurological disorders, immune dysfunction and cataract formation, and in the longer term, inform radiation protection measures for the public and the workplace. 

Algorithms have increasingly replaced stock traders over the past few decades, but a new University at Buffalo School of Management study has found that market quality decreases when humans are removed from the equation.

Published in the Journal of Finance, the study analyzed how the New York Stock Exchange was affected after floor trading was suspended in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the 13 registered exchanges in the U.S., only the NYSE continues to use human floor traders — the rest are 100% electronic.

“The closure of the NYSE trading floor due to COVID led to worse market quality across a variety of measures, including liquidity, price efficiency and auction quality,” says study co-author Dominik Roesch, PhD, associate professor of finance.