Consumer Behavior

In sponsored search advertising, advertisers bid to be displayed in response to a keyword search. The operational activities associated with participating in an auction, i.e., submitting the bid and the ad copy, customizing bids and ad copies based on various factors (such as the geographical region from which the query originated, the time of day and the season, the characteristics of the searcher), and continuously measuring outcomes, involve considerable effort. We call the costs that arise from such activities keyword management costs.

Sandra Matz, Yin Wah Fiona Chan, and Michael Kosinsky survey models of personality. They cover a wide range of personality models including the most popular Five Factor Model (FFM). The authors stress the importance of the underlying assumptions, which lead to each model. The discussion includes also the relationships between the models and the suitability of the models for automatic detection of personality through digital footprints.

The authors explore how firms can enhance consumer performance in online idea generation platforms. Most, if not all, online idea generation platforms offer all consumers identical tasks in which (1) participants are granted access to ideas from other participants and (2) ideas are classified into categories, but consumers can navigate freely across idea categories. The former is linked to stimulus ideas, and the latter may be viewed as a first step toward problem decomposition.

We develop and test hypotheses regarding the role of social contagion in customer adoption of new sales channels. We examine two aspects of social contagion (local contagion and homophily) and two channels (Internet and bricks-and-mortar store). Drawing on diffusion theory, we propose a conceptual framework that identifies the factors associated with new channel adoption.

This paper studies the competition between Web 2.0 communities in a game theoretic framework. We model three important features of these institutions: (i) firms' content is usually user-generated; (ii) consumers' content preferences are governed by local network effects, and (iii) consumers have strong tendencies to multi-home. Our analyses reveal that ex-ante identical community sites can acquire differentiated market positions that spontaneously emerge from user-generated content.

It is becoming increasingly easier for researchers and practitioners to collect eye tracking data during online preference measurement tasks. We develop a dynamic discrete choice model of information search and choice under bounded rationality, that we calibrate using a combination of eye-tracking and choice data. Our model extends the directed cognition model of Gabaix et al. (2006) by capturing fatigue, proximity effects, and imperfect memory encoding and by estimating individual-level parameters and partworths within a likelihood-based, hierarchical Bayesian framework.

During the 2014 EPIC Conference, Allen Batteau and Robert J. Morais led a workshop entitled “Toward Conceptual, Methodological, and Ethical Standards of Practice in Business Anthropology.” This article summarizes the objectives and results of the workshop.

The paper investigates the long-run consequences of multichannel shopping on customers' spending. Using data from a major US catalog company which introduced an online channel, our results validate previous findings that multichannel customers spend more than mono-channel customers in the short run. However, the difference in spending dissipates over time with multichannel customers reverting to their regular consumption pattern in 3 years.

We comment on Gilovich and colleagues' program of research on happiness resulting from experiential versus material purchases, and critique these authors' interpretation that people derive more happiness from experiences than from material possessions. Unlike goods, experiences cannot be purchased, and possessions versus experiences do not seem to form the endpoints of the same continuum.