Marketing
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Item Marketing Implications of Sustainability(2024) Kim, Sanghwa; Kannan, P. K.; Trusov, Michael; Business and Management: Marketing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation considers the marketing implications of sustainability. In particular, I study the spillovers of an environmental challenge and a sustainable alternative to marketing practices. The first essay documents an increase in consumer spending with higher levels of air pollution. Moreover, the prominent effect in hedonic categories suggests mood regulation as an underlying mechanism, where the nature of its consumption helps reduce individuals’ negative affect. The second essay reveals consumers’ increased restaurant visits in the presence of e-scooters in urban areas. Moreover, the greater benefits in cities with lower urban accessibility suggest an instrumental role of such micromobility in reducing transportation costs. This mechanism particularly helps restaurants with lower popularity, which brings an advantage to businesses in the long tail, addressing their geolocational inequalities. The two essays provide implications for marketing researchers and practitioners to improve the local economy and develop a sustainable society for consumer welfare.Item Beyond statistical significance: Five principles for the new era of data analysis and reporting(Wiley, 2023-07-24) Wedel, Michel; Gal, DavidA crisis of confidence in research findings in consumer psychology and other academic disciplines has led to various proposals to abandon, replace, strengthen, or supplement the null hypothesis significance testing paradigm. The proliferation of such proposals, and their often-conflicting recommendations, can increase confusion among researchers. We aim to bring some clarity by proposing five simple principles for the new era of data analysis and reporting of research in consumer psychology. We avoid adding to researchers' confusion and proposing more onerous or rigid standards. Our goal is to offer straightforward practical principles that are easy for researchers to keep in mind while analyzing their data and reporting their findings. These principles involve (1) interpreting p-values as continuous measures of the strength of evidence, (2) being aware of assumptions that determine whether one can rely on p-values, (3) using theory to establish the applicability of findings to new settings, (4) employing multiple measures of evidence and various processes to obtain them, but assigning special privilege to none, and (5) reporting procedures and findings transparently and completely. We hope that these principles provide researchers with some guidance and help to strengthen the reliability of the conclusions derived from their data, analyses, and findings.Item When is sociality congruent with self-care?(Wiley, 2022-11-15) Ratner, Rebecca K.; Kim, Nicole You Jeung; Wu, YuechenKumar and Epley (2023) argue that people underinvest in spending time, effort, and money on other people, and that consumers' own well-being would improve from increased “sociality.” We pose two questions to enhance understanding of the relationship between sociality and efforts to benefit one's own well-being: (1) when will other-oriented consumption promote versus hinder consumers' own well-being, and (2) what leads consumers to embrace versus forego efforts to improve their well-being (i.e., self-care) that does not involve sociality? We propose that the degree to which the consumer is concerned about incorporating others' preferences, the magnitude of resources involved, and the temporal dynamics of consumption will be relevant factors in addressing these two questions. Future research to explore the proposed three factors and other factors will be important for consumers who seek to improve their well-being as well as marketers who seek to promote it.Item When the Future Comes: Essays on Consumer Attitude toward Artificial Products(2023) Chen, Qihui; Kirmani, Amna; Wang, Yajin; Business and Management: Marketing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation consists of two essays that investigate how consumers react to artificial products. Specifically, each essay focuses on one type of artificial product: robots and lab-grown meat, respectively. The first essay investigates the interaction effect of personal control and the potential for negative judgment on consumers’ robot preferences. Across five studies, I find that when the consumption context enables the high potential for negative judgment, consumers with low (vs. high) personal control have stronger preferences for service robots because they are less confident in leaving a positive impression on others and thereby experience stronger social anxiety. However, when the consumption context enables the low potential for negative judgment, consumers feel confident in leaving a positive impression on others, so personal control affects neither social anxiety nor robot preference. The second essay studies why consumers resist lab-grown meat and proposes a novel theory to explain it: the life-creation perception theory. Across six studies, I demonstrate that consumers have more negative attitudes toward lab-grown meat than lab-grown dairy products because they associate lab-grown meat (vs. dairy products) with artificially creating life and thereby violating the laws of nature to a greater degree. In addition, theory-based interventions are shown to increase consumer acceptance of lab-grown meat by disassociating lab-grown meat from creating life. Across these two essays, I intend to provide insights into how consumers interact with artificial products in the marketplace and how marketers can increase consumers’ adoption of these innovations accordingly.Item ESSAYS ON THE IMPACT OF ELECTRONIC WORD-OF-MOUTH DYNAMICS ON CONSUMER BEHAVIOR(2022) Zhao, Xindi; Trusov, Michael; Business and Management: Marketing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recognizing the importance of product reviews for product sales in online retail platforms, this dissertation studies the effect of electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) dynamics on consumer behavior, including information processing, review-reading behavior, product evaluation, purchase decision, and reviewing behavior. In the first essay, I focus on incentivized reviews, which are posted by reviewers who received economic incentives (e.g., free product) from the firm, and explore how their emergence in a reviewing system influences subsequent organic (i.e., nonincentivized) review contributions for the focal product. I find that the ratings of subsequent organic reviews decrease after the appearance of incentivized reviews and that the magnitude of this negative impact decreases over time and the ratings recover in the long run. This is because subsequent reviewers adjust their product evaluations downwards when faced with priorincentivized reviews. In the second essay, I study the effect of a prevalence phenomenon— repetition in e-WOM—on consumer behavior. I demonstrate that high repetition in e-WOM could have a negative effect on persuasion and that this negative effect could be eliminated by modifying consumers’ inferences about the cause of repetition. Furthermore, consumers’ information-seeking behaviors are also affected by the share and type of repetition. Both essays provide an understanding of the impact of e-WOM on consumers’ judgments and decisions and offer implications for firms and platforms on how to gather, manage, and display e-WOM effectively; they also provide interesting avenues for future research.Item Essays on Digital Content Provision and Consumption(2022) Wang, Chutian; Zhou, Bobby; Joshi, Yogesh V; Business and Management: Marketing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Consumption of digital content has become an inseparable part of consumers' lives today. As providers of digital content, media platforms continuously seek to pursue pricing and product design strategies that increase their profits. This dissertation studies media platforms' digital content provision and consumers' consumption decisions. In the first essay, we focus on the pricing of digital content and analyze the impact of consumers' endogenous content consumption on platforms' paywall strategies. Paywalls increase subscription revenues for platforms, but they also impact content consumption and thus advertising revenues. We build an analytical model that endogenizes consumers' content consumption decisions. We find that under moderate ad rates, a metered paywall under which a limited amount of content is provided for free is optimal when consumers display sufficient heterogeneity in their costs of consuming content. We also study how the amount of free content and the subscription price vary with changes in the advertising rate and consumer preference. In the second essay, we analyze the accuracy of news reported by the news media. When consumers are seeking the truth and accurate reporting is costly, determining the optimal level of accuracy in reporting is a strategic decision for a profit-maximizing media firm. We build an analytical model to study this media firm decision. When consumers and the media firm are both initially uncertain about the true state of the world, we show that the media firm always chooses full accuracy if investigation and reporting are of low cost. However, if achieving accuracy is sufficiently costly, the media firm provides news only when consumers' priors regarding the truth are not too extreme, so that they see enough value in news consumption. Interestingly, consumers' truth-seeking and the firm's profit maximization can lead to reporting inaccuracy and exaggeration of the more likely state a priori. We also discuss the implications of polarization in consumers’ prior beliefs and the media firm’s different objectives on the accuracy of news.Item AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE IMPACT OF SEX ROLE IDENTITY ON THE EFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE OF SALESWOMEN(1988) Bowers Comer, Lucette; Jolson, Marvin A.; Marketing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Because of an increasing shortage of qualified salespersonnel, recruiters for sales positions are very receptive to female applicants. Despite this, sex-discrimination is still detectable in the market place. Some sales managers resist bringing women into male-oriented areas of selling, criticizing them for alleged weaknesses. Their criticisms stem from the belief that saleswomen will behave according to gender stereotypes on the job and that this behavior will impact negatively on selling performance. Sales managers need assurance that the saleswomen they hire will perform well on the job. This research investigated the usefulness of the concept of "sex role identity" as a basis for segmenting the pool of female applicants by their potential for effective performance. A survey was conducted of sales managers in three traditionally male areas of selling, who described saleswomen under their supervision. The relationships between sales managers' perceptions of gender stereotypic behavior, selling effectiveness, and sex role identity were examined. Saleswomen' s gender stereotypic behavior was defined as perceived weaknesses in three areas: "selling ability," "human relations," and "motivation." Selling effectiveness was measured as perceived proficiency in performance of six functions of selling and non-selling activities. Saleswomen were classified into sex role types on the basis of their sales managers' perceptions of their masculine ("instrumental") and feminine ("expressive") traits in their sex role identities on the Bem Sex Role Inventory. Seven research hypotheses were tested using univariate and multivariate analysis of variance and correlational analyses. The results showed that sales managers perceived some gender stereotypic behavior in the marketplace and that some of this behavior was associated with reduced selling effectiveness. Sex role types of saleswomen related to both perceived gender stereotypic behavior and selling effectiveness. Androgynous and masculine saleswomen were perceived 'as being the least stereotyped and the most effective performers. The findings give partial support for a two-dimensional model of selling effectiveness defined by masculine "instrumentality" and feminine "expressiveness." The results have implications for the selection, training , and supervision of saleswomen.Item HOW AND WHEN SIGNALING IMPACTS CONSUMPTION(2021) Kim, Nicole You Jeung; Ratner, Rebecca K.; Wang, Yajin; Business and Management: Marketing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation includes three essays that investigate the impact of signals that certain consumption choices can send to other consumers. In particular, each essay focuses on how consumers’ consumption-related decisions (e.g., choice of hedonic items, selecting low variety, and communicating that one has no preference) impact an observing audience’s perceptions of the consumer and the subsequent impacts on the observer. The first essay demonstrates that consumers strive to position themselves as attractive friends by making hedonic consumption decisions. While consumers shift to hedonic consumption, anchoring on their belief that others would heavily value fun when it comes to friendship, this essay demonstrates that consumers themselves actually value other aspects of friendship more, such as meaningfulness. As a result of this discrepancy in the belief of friendship, hedonic choice does not effectively help consumers cultivate friendship with another person. The second essay investigates the signals that selecting a low (vs. high) variety of items sends to observers. Choosing low variety signals to observers that the consumer has accumulated consumption experiences in the past, and thus has greater expertise, compared to choosing high variety. This signal of expertise endows the consumer with influence to impact observers to make consumption choices that mimic the consumer and be more willing to take the consumer’s recommendations. The third essay examines the impact of expressing no preference in a joint decision making context. While consumers expect to make the decision easier for the recipient, recipients of no preference communication (vs. explicit preference communication), experience greater decision difficulty. This unexpected negative impact occurs because recipients of no preference communication perceive that the communicator actually has preferences that they are hiding. Further, because recipients infer that these hidden preferences are dissimilar to one’s own preferences, they end up making a choice for the joint consumption that they personally less prefer.Item TWO ESSAYS ON USER-GENERATED CONTENTS IN MARKETING(2020) Huh, Jin-Hee; Godes, David; Business and Management: Marketing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation studies two topics regarding user-generated content (UGC) in social media context. Due to its rapid proliferation, UGC has received much attention among both practitioners and researchers. Although past studies have investigated diverse aspects of UGC and their influences on consumer decision process, few studies have examined (1) status bias in online peer-feedback on UGC with the presence of reputation system, and (2) the impact of video UGC, a relatively new type of UGC, on product purchase and usage decisions. In Essay 1, we investigate how a reputation system affects peer-evaluations in an online community. In contrast to previous research on reputation systems, which has predominantly shown that reputation systems can induce posting activity and quality contributions, we study how reputation markers (“badges,” for example) may change peer-evaluations. We rely on a unique and detailed data set and employ a difference- in-differences approach, combined with propensity score matching, that suggests that, all else equal, posters receive disproportionately-higher evaluations of their posts after they earn a reputation marker, irrespective of post quality. This suggests a “rich- get-richer” process induced by a reputation system that may have the unintended effect of favoring some participants at the expense of equally-skilled others. In Essay 2, we examine the impact of a relatively new type of user-generated content, video user-generated content (VUGC), on consumer’s purchase and product usage decision. Due to its highly visual and auditory characteristics, VUGC has been considered as an effective marketing tool. However, as VUGC can have the risk of revealing too much information about the entertainment products, firms need to limit the amount of original content in VUGC. Under these circumstances, game developers need to have an understanding on how VUGC can impact sales and usage. To examine the impact, we collected VUGC activities and game characteristics from diverse sources. Our results indicate that VUGCs can affect sales and game usage, and the impact can vary by VUGC and game product characteristics. Our findings suggest that game developers should consider both VUGC characteristics and their product characteristics jointly when developing and implementing policies on users’ VUGC uploading, sharing, and monetizing.Item STRATEGIC MERCHANT COMPETITION AND LARGE ASSORTMENT MANAGEMENT IN ONLINE MARKETPLACES(2020) Kim, Min; Zhang, Jie; Business and Management: Marketing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation research, I study strategic merchant competitions on a retail deal platform and propose a new modeling approach for discovering consumer preference structures in online shopping environments with large and frequently changing assortments. In the first essay, I examine the impact of alternative platform policies and changes in market primitives on payoffs of players on a retail deal platform where merchants make frequent strategic decisions based on competitive considerations in a two-sided market. To this end, I construct a dynamic game model and conduct counterfactual simulations. My analyses reveal novel insights regarding the interplay between platform policies and merchants’ profits and relationships among competing merchants, and identify several mutually beneficial growth opportunities for all parties involved via policy changes. They also provide a comprehensive assessment of the net contribution of each merchant’s action to the platform eco-system, which sheds new light on how to identify and foster “star brands” in such marketplaces. In the second essay, I develop a scalable stock-keeping-unit-level modeling framework of discovering consumers’ preference structures in large and frequently changing assortments at the store/marketplace level. My proposed model identifies the underlying “topics of interest” that drive online browsing and purchase activities concerning the entire store assortment. It overcomes several limitations of standard Latent Dirichlet Allocation models for handling large assortments and enables demand forecast for products not in the existing assortments. I apply the proposed framework to investigate “topics” driving browsing and purchase activities in an online marketplace of fashion products, which reveals distinct topics driving these two types of shopping activities and their time-varying patterns of relevance. Finally, I propose a personalized product recommendation system that is based on individuals’ preference structures inferred from the model and powered by the Bayesian optimization algorithm. Hold-out comparisons show that our approach substantially outperforms benchmark recommendation algorithms commonly used in practice (such as user-, item-, and content-based collaborative filters), and it is particularly powerful in prescribing recommendations for products that do not exist in the previous assortment. This dissertation research offers a range of policy recommendations and valuable managerial insights to marketing researchers and E-commerce practitioners.