Marketing Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2790
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Item REPUTATION DYNAMICS IN MARKETING CONTEXTS(2019) Ukanwa Zeiger, Kalinda Ukanwa; Godes, David; Rust, Roland T.; Business and Management: Marketing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is an examination of the impact of dynamic consumer reputation effects on firm decision-making in the marketplace. Essay I is a study of the impact of firm interventions on competitive reputation building among consumers on an online platform. Specifically, I model an actor’s decision to upload pirated content in order to build his reputation, despite facing threats from copyright lawsuits (firm interventions seeking to deter uploading activity) and intense competition on the platform. We propose a novel theory that explains what could occur in this scenario: high-reputation consumers will decrease their reputation-building activity, but their low-reputation competition may see an opportunity to enhance their reputation and increase activity. We argue that because competition for reputation is active on the site, the lawsuits may deter uploading in the short-run but may actually lead to more piracy over the long-run. Our findings support the theory: while high-reputation publishers decrease the likelihood of uploading as lawsuits increase, low-reputation uploaders do the opposite: they upload more. Essay II is an examination of the impact that a consumer group's reputation can have on firm decision-making. Specifically, we investigate 1) conditions under which a non-prejudiced firm may discriminate in service against its consumers based on group reputation, and 2) how subsequent consumer word-of-mouth can impact demand and profits over time. This mixed-methods study shows that discrimination can be profitable in the short-run but can backfire in the long-run due to the effects of consumer word-of-mouth and firm competition. Results indicate that high consumer heterogeneity in quality (i.e., their profitability to the firm) and low measurement error in detecting consumer quality attenuate the magnitude of service discrimination. The authors provide managerial recommendations on reducing service discrimination's profit-damaging effects. This research emphasizes the long-term benefits of switching to a service policy that does not use group reputation information. This dissertation contributes to the general marketing literature by providing new insights into how the reputation of the consumer, a sparsely researched area, can have direct impact on the firm in its decision-making.Item Marketing in Mobile, Omni-Channel and Multi-Format Contexts(2019) Gu, Xian; Kannan, P. K.; Business and Management: Marketing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation studies the marketing issues in mobile, omni-channel and multiformat contexts. In the first essay, while conventional wisdom indicates that apps have a positive impact on customer spending, I critically examine this premise by estimating the impact of app adoption on customers’ omni-channel spending in the context of a hotel chain and identifying the factors contributing to such impact. Exploiting the variation in customers’ timing of app adoption and difference-in-differences approach, I find that app adoption has a significant negative impact on total customer spending. This negative effect is robust to controlling for customer self-selection bias, measuring effects across alternative time frames, customer spending patterns and app usage behaviors, using different measures of purchase and alternative model specifications, and using different random samples. A survey of app adopters reveals that customers who adopt the focal app are also most likely to adopt competitors’ apps, and therefore are likely to search more and shop around, leading to decreased share of wallet with the firm. My analysis also reveals that the negative impact on spending is lower for those customers who use the apps for mobile check-in than those who use the apps for just searching. So by encouraging customers to engage with the full functionality of the app, firms can possibly mitigate the negative impact. In the second essay, I further develop an integrated dynamic structural model to investigate consumers’ decision to adopt the mobile app, and its subsequent impacts on their decisions to purchase using alternative shopping channels. The policy simulations show that consumers are less likely to make reservations with the focal firm if the firm had not introduced their apps. Finally, in the third essay, I investigate the strategy of extending the product line by providing an additional premium version as a means to spur demand for the existing premium version. I highlight how extending the results of the standard product line model is insufficient in such cases due to the conceptual nuances that the presence of the free version introduces in a freemium context. I conduct a randomized field experiment with an online content provider, the National Academies Press, which offers book titles in a PDF version for free and sells the paperback version for a premium. Overall, I show that paperback titles accompanied by an additional premium version, either an ebook or a hardcover format, have higher sales than those in the control condition. The positive impact on paperback sales is stronger for titles that are more popular or lower in price, and the effect of introducing the ebook version is higher when the ebook price is closer to the paperback price. By analyzing customer choices at the individual level, I identify the existence of the compromise effect and the attraction effect in the extended product line setting, a significant contribution not only in the freemium context but also to the product line literature.