Consumer Behavior

How can firms encourage consumers to adopt smartphone apps? The authors show that several inexpensive choice architecture techniques can make users more likely to enable important app features and complete app onboarding. In six preregistered experiments (n = 5,968) and a field experiment (n = 594,997), choice architecture interventions manipulating choice sequence, color, and wording of app adoption decisions dramatically increased app adoption. Across experiments, integrating multiple feature decisions into a single choice increased adoption.

Advertising on e-commerce marketplaces, wherein sponsored product listings are interleaved with organic product listings in the search results, is a large and growing phenomenon under the umbrella of "retail media." In this paper, taking the perspective of the marketplace, we obtain insights into the impact of sponsored listings being shown at the most salient positions in the list of results. To do so, we analyze data from a large-scale field experiment at Flipkart, a leading online marketplace in India. We find nuanced results that substantially vary across categories.

We study a regulation in Chile that mandates warning labels on products whose sugar or caloric concentration exceeds certain thresholds.We show that consumers substitute from labeled to unlabeled products—a pattern mostly driven by  products that consumers mistakenly believe to be healthy. On the supply side, we find substantial reformulation of products and bunching at the thresholds.

Extant literature suggests that consumers derive more happiness from experiences (e.g., vacations) than from material possessions (e.g., furniture). However, this literature typically pits material against experiential consumption, treating them as a single bipolar construct of their relative dominance: more material or more experiential. This focus on relative dominance leaves unanswered questions regarding how different levels of material and experiential qualities each contribute to happiness.

In light of the widely discussed political divide and increasing societal polarization, we investigate in this paper whether the polarization of political ideology extends to consumers’ preferences, intentions, and purchases. Using three different data sets—the publicly available social media data of over three million brand followerships of Twitter users, a YouGov brand-preference survey data set, and Nielsen scanner panel data—we assess the evolution of brand-preference polarization.

Standard search models assume that consumers actively decide on the order, identity, and number of products they search. We document that online, a large fraction of searches happen in a more passive manner, with consumers merely reacting to online advertisements that do not allow them to choose the timing or the identity of products to which they will be exposed. Using a clickstream panel data set capturing full URL addresses of websites consumers visit, we show how to detect whether a click is ad-initiated.

Researchers and practitioners in marketing, economics, and public policy often use preference elicitation tasks to forecast realworld behaviors. These tasks typically ask a series of similarly structured questions.

This paper experimentally tests the effectiveness of two short edutainment campaigns (under 25 minutes) delivered through Facebook Messenger at reshaping gender norms and reducing social acceptability of violence against women (VAW) in India. Participants were randomly assigned to watch video-clips with implicit or explicit messaging formats (respectively a humorous fake reality TV drama or a docu-series with clear calls to action).