People

In a recent China Daily interview, Prof. Xiong Yan, Associate Professor of HKU Business School, commented on proposed tighter regulation of licensed money lenders in Hong Kong, highlighting their role within the broader financial system.

Yan Xiong, Associate Professor from HKU Business School, addressed this in the HKET. Despite student anxieties, enrolments continue to rise, driven by the view that AI empowers rather than replaces accountants. "Students must identify employers' real needs, then adapt and equip themselves," she emphasises.

Manufacturers often preannounce reference prices for products that have not yet been produced or even developed. These prices are rarely binding, meaning that the manufacturers can make price adjustments in the future, possibly at a cost. In this paper, we argue that price preannouncements can serve as a weak price commitment that, we find, helps the manufacturers secure better deals from their suppliers, thereby lowering their procurement costs and improving their profit. Surprisingly, even an extremely weak price commitment can substantially improve a manufacturer’s profit. On the other hand, when the price commitment is credible enough, the manufacturer forgoes the price preannouncement. Collectively, these results underscore the strategic effects that price preannouncements can have on firms’ marketing decisions.

As global technology conglomerates project an unprecedented $390 billion expenditure on Artificial Intelligence infrastructure in 2025, the discourse surrounding a potential "AI bubble" has intensified. Does the current lag in immediate commercial returns signify a market failure, or is there a deeper economic logic at play?

China's 15th National Games wrapped up with a closing ceremony held in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province on Friday evening after more than two weeks of competition. Held all across the Greater Bay Area, the sporting event attracted thousands of visitors. CGTN reporter Zheng Songwu met local residents and guests in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to hear their impressions.

Big data and data technology have facilitated the widespread adoption of personalized pricing practices. While price personalization enables firms to extract greater rent from consumers, it often reduces price transparency, which can negatively impact firm profits in situations involving consumer coordination. In such contexts, a firm's commitment to pricing strategies can become essential for restoring profitability. We explore several commitment devices available to firms and discuss their implications. These devices include delegating pricing decisions to a manager who prioritizes consumer surplus, leveraging existing networks as signals for later consumers or to build reputation, and implementing uniform pricing or price caps in response to regulatory restrictions.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, some borrowers may use it to enhance their credit data in order to obtain loan approvals. Instead of approving borrowers through extensive data collection from multiple sources, lenders might consider self-imposing limits to focus on improving the quality of the data collected while also increasing loan profits.

We study voluntary cost disclosure by duopoly firms when they can invest in a cost-reduction technology, i.e., when their private cost is endogenously determined. We find that, contrary to most of the literature, firms disclose their endogenous cost information regardless of the type of competition. The underlying mechanisms and welfare implications, however, are different. Under Bertrand competition, cost disclosure helps a firm avoid aggressive investment in cost reduction to coordinate actions to the mutual advantage of the duopoly firms. Under Cournot competition, disclosing cost information enables a firm to show a hardened stance toward the competing firm. Although firms gain from their disclosure decisions under Bertrand competition, their disclosure decisions under Cournot competition place them in a prisoner’s dilemma, as both firms would be better off if they chose not to disclose their information. Consequently, consumers may lose under Bertrand competition but gain under Cournot competition.

We study information sharing between strategic investors who are informed about asset fundamentals. We demonstrate that a coarsely informed investor optimally chooses to share information if his counterparty investor is well informed. By doing so, the coarsely informed investor invites the other investor to trade against his information, thereby reducing his price impact. Paradoxically, the well informed investor loses from receiving information because of the resulting worsened market liquidity and the more aggressive trading by the coarsely informed investor. Our analysis sheds light on phenomena such as private communications among investors and public information sharing on social media.