Consumer Behavior

In today's turbulent business environment, customer retention presents a significant challenge for many service companies. Academics have generated a large body of research that addresses part of that challenge — with a particular focus on predicting customer churn. However, several other equally important aspects of managing retention have not received a similar level of attention, leaving many managerial problems not completely solved, and a program of academic research not completely aligned with managerial needs.

Students who want to work in business are well served by taking anthropology courses and earning anthropology degrees. Their anthropological education can be applied in a broad array of businesses: marketing, advertising, marketing research, design, new product development, organizational culture and change, sustainability, risk management, and more.

In incentive-aligned choice experiments, each decision is realized with some probability, Prob. In three eye-tracking experiments, we study the impact of varying Prob from 0 (as in purely hypothetical choices) to 1 (as in real-life choices) on attention, information processing, and choice. Consistent with the bounded rationality literature, we find that as Prob increases from 0 to 1, consumers process the choice-relevant information more carefully and more comprehensively.

Geographic price discrimination is generally considered beneficial to firm profitability. Firms can extract higher rents by varying prices across markets to match consumers' preferences. This paper empirically demonstrates, however, that a firm may instead prefer a national pricing policy that fixes prices across geographic markets, foregoing the opportunity to customize prices. Under appropriate conditions, a national pricing policy helps avoid intense local competition due to targeted prices.

Research has shown that possessions have the power to change consumers' self-construal and activate different aspects of the self. Building on this literature, the authors suggest that the salience of product ownership not only activates the product-related self but also simultaneously deactivates product-unrelated selves, resulting in impaired performance on tasks unrelated to the activated self. In five experiments, we first elicit feelings of ownership over a product (e.g., a calculator) to activate a product-related identity (e.g., the math self).

We investigate the increasingly common business setting in which companies face the possibility of both observed and unobserved customer attrition (i.e., "overt" and "silent" churn) in the same pool of customers. This is the case for many online-based services where customers have the choice to stop interacting with the firm either by formally terminating the relationship (e.g., canceling their account) or by simply ignoring all communications coming from the firm.

We propose new metrics for investment performance based on short-run trading profitability. Since investment opportunities are scarce and value-relevant information decays over time, marginal decisions made by fund managers (i.e., trades) should provide more accurate signals about underlying skill than portfolio alphas, which are contaminated by the returns on "stale" positions.

We extend latent Dirichlet allocation by introducing a topic model, hierarchically dual latent Dirichlet allocation (HDLDA), for contexts in which one type of document (e.g., search queries) are semantically related to another type of document (e.g., search results). In the context of online search engines, HDLDA identifies not only topics in short search queries and web pages, but also how the topics in search queries relate to the topics in the corresponding top search results.