The Guilt Paradox: How a Negative Customer Emotion Can Drive Positive Outcomes

We naturally assume that negative customer emotions result in negative outcomes for a business. Fear, for instance, leads to avoidance, while anger leads to negative word of mouth. However, according to a study by Anne-Madeleine Kranzbühler, Alfred Zerres, Mirella H. P. Kleijnen and Peeter W. J. Verlegh, there is a negative customer emotion that, under specific … Continue reading The Guilt Paradox: How a Negative Customer Emotion Can Drive Positive Outcomes

The GenAI Switching Cost: Your Chat History

I was cleaning my e-mail inbox when I saw this e-mail from Gemini, about a new product feature allowing me to import my chat history from other generative AI apps: What Gemini is doing here is recognising that the cost of using a certain product is more than the direct cost of that product (e.g., … Continue reading The GenAI Switching Cost: Your Chat History

April 2026 round-up

The most exciting thing this month was, of course, the Artemis II's mission to the Moon. Inspired by it, I also re-watched Apollo 13, read Atmosphere, and listened to Space Oddity on repeat. On the work front, this month was all about teaching on the MBA programme, and writing. On the personal front, there was … Continue reading April 2026 round-up

From dot-com bubble to AI boom, with lots of questions in between

Today's post is a trip down memory lane. I have recently read the book "MBA Day by Day: How to Turn Business School Insights into Real-World Excellence" by my former colleague Chris Dalton. The book reflects the architecture of an MBA, revisiting many of the “classics” of management education, such as SWOT analysis or the … Continue reading From dot-com bubble to AI boom, with lots of questions in between

When more is more – the value of AI explanations for credence products

The quality of credence products, like car repairs or medical treatments, is very difficult to assess before purchase because those products contain many intangible attributes that are difficult to observe and understand. For example, I can’t really see the components that make a vaccine effective – I need to trust (hence the descriptive “credence”) that vaccines are … Continue reading When more is more – the value of AI explanations for credence products

Choosing when to use generative AI for writing tasks

Last week, I came across various headlines about a study conducted by the New York Times, which found that readers preferred short stories generated by AI to those written by humans. Previous studies had found the same in relation to poetry and adverts. Before you decide to delegate your writing to generative AI, though, you should consider that texts may … Continue reading Choosing when to use generative AI for writing tasks

LLMs can flatter you into being wrong

Much has been written about the dangers of LLMs’ hallucinations. Hallucinations occur when the model confidently presents an incorrect answer. This happens because LLMs are not knowledge systems. For example, when Co-Pilot made up the existence of a fictitious match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and West Ham. But hallucinations are not the only epistemic risk linked to … Continue reading LLMs can flatter you into being wrong

The Reputational Risk of Disclosing AI Use

I am currently marking coursework where students were allowed to use generative AI, but they have to detail how they used it and include screenshots. And this reminded me of a paper that I read some time ago, entitled "Competence Penalty Is a Barrier to the Adoption of New Technology". This paper reports a study … Continue reading The Reputational Risk of Disclosing AI Use