Thought
“Treat a near-accident as an accident.”
Professor of operations, information, and decisions and Jeffrey A. Keswin Professor Gad Allon’s advice to airport decision-makers on the Wharton Business Daily podcast (now titled This Week in Business). Allon emphasized the need for a long-term solution to the nationwide shortage of air traffic controllers, referencing incidents at Newark Liberty International Airport this past spring when numerous planes were essentially “flying blind” due to lack of staff as well as equipment issues. “We have to think about that situation of what if 170 planes in the air crashed during that time? How much budget would we pay at that time to try to fix those issues?”
Data Interpreted
The IRS earns about this much back for every dollar it spends auditing taxpayers in the top 10 percent of the income distribution scale.
That earnings number is roughly less than half when it comes to lower-income taxpayers, said Wharton assistant professor of business economics and public policy Ben Sprung-Keyser on an episode of This Week in Business. His research suggests that auditing wealthier individuals yields significantly higher federal revenue, with implications for tax policy and enforcement strategy.
Thought
Does AI Limit Our Creativity?
As more companies look to tools like ChatGPT to supercharge creativity, Wharton researchers offer a word of caution: Generative AI may boost individual performance, but it can also limit how teams think.
A study by professor of operations, information, and decisions and Andrew M. Heller Professor Christian Terwiesch and professor of marketing and Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz Professor Gideon Nave, along with Mack Institute research fellow Lennart Meincke G23 GEN24, revisits and extends earlier experiments on how ChatGPT influences participants completing creative tasks.
In one experiment, people were asked to invent a toy using a fan and a brick. Among those using the AI, nearly all suggestions clustered around the same concept, with several participants naming their toys “Build-a-Breeze Castle.” By contrast, the human-only group generated entirely unique ideas. In fact, just six percent of the AI-generated ideas were considered unique, compared with 100 percent in the human group.
“If you rely on ChatGPT as your only creative advisor, you’ll soon run out of ideas, because they’re too similar to each other,” says Terwiesch.
The Wharton co-authors took a broader view on the original experiments, focusing not only on the quality of individual ideas but on the diversity of ideas generated across participants, identifying subtle patterns of overlap that might not be obvious at first glance. In 37 out of 45 comparisons, ideas generated with ChatGPT were significantly less diverse than those from other methods — and this pattern held even when the researchers used different techniques to measure similarity. As the study’s authors wrote: “The true value of brainstorming stems from the diversity of ideas rather than multiple voices repeating similar thoughts.”
To solve this problem, researchers propose “chain-of-thought prompting.” Rather than asking the chatbot for a single idea all at once, this method breaks the task into smaller, structured steps. It can increase the variety of responses and reduce repetition, said Terwiesch.
The paper, published in Nature Human Behaviour, arrives as generative AI moves deeper into business workflows, not just for writing and coding but also for creative tasks like ideation, product naming, and brand development. “People have been dreaming about AI being creative, but we have never been closer to having a system reaching a point where we can be at human creativity,” said Terwiesch. “That’s a big deal.” —Seb Murray
Data Interpreted
The amount Google pays annually to remain the default browser on many devices
Assistant professor of business economics and public policy Leon Musolff discussed findings from his field experiment on search-engine settings during an episode of This Week in Business. The research examined how consumer behavior contributes to Google’s dominance and analyzed what it means for antitrust policy and competition between Google and Bing.
Thought
“We found significantly more negative conversations about collective layoffs when they were about offshoring than about automation.”
Wharton Human-AI Research co-director and Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing Stefano Puntoni on a paper he co-authored in the Journal of Consumer Research. Consumers viewed corporate layoffs as a violation of their implicit social contract with a company, Puntoni said in an interview with Knowledge at Wharton podcast host Dan Loney. In other words, sending jobs abroad doesn’t just affect the workers — it dents the company’s image, too. Though often used interchangeably, outsourcing refers to hiring an external firm to perform tasks, while offshoring means moving those tasks abroad — a distinction consumers don’t overlook.
Data Interpreted
Employees were this much more likely to quit a startup when hired through direct outreach.
Research from assistant management professor Danny Kim and Michael Pergler GRW23 found that candidates recruited by emerging ventures were more likely to leave sooner compared to those who submitted applications themselves. This “firm-driven search” tactic boosts visibility for startups, improving their odds of hiring, but also raises the chances that new staff won’t stick around.
Published as “Data” in the Fall/Winter 2025 issue of Wharton Magazine.
