Consumer Behavior

This paper recasts the consumption asset pricing model in terms of observable accounting outcomes by recognizing accounting principles that connect those outcomes to consumption and the risk to consumption. The model prompts the construction of a pricing factor from observed accounting information. The factor performs well relative to extant factors in explaining cross-sectional returns. Further, it delivers out-of-sample expected returns that forecast the actual returns and the forward betas that investors actually experience.

This paper focuses on teaching the application of anthropology in business to marketing students. It begins with the premise that consumer marketers have long used ethnography as a component of their qualitative market research toolkit to inform their knowledge about and empathy for consumers. A question for market research educators who include ethnography in their curricula is if and how to teach the richness of anthropologically based approaches, especially given a decoupling of ethnographic method from anthropological theory in much consumer research practice.

Previous qualitative work has documented that platform workers place an immense importance on their reputation due to the use of algorithmic management by online labor platforms. We provide a general experimental method, which can be used across platforms and time, for numerically quantifying the intensity with which platform workers experience reputation system-based algorithmic management. Our method works via an experiment where workers choose between a monetary bonus or a positive review.

An important challenge for many firms is to identify the life transitions of its customers, such as job searching, expecting a child, or purchasing a home. Inferring such transitions, which are generally unobserved to the firm, can offer the firms opportunities to be more relevant to their customers. In this paper, we demonstrate how a social network platform can leverage its longitudinal user data to identify which of its users are likely to be job seekers. Identifying job seekers is at the heart of the business model of professional social network platforms.

This research sheds light on consumer motivations for participating in the sharing economy and examines downstream consequences of the uncovered motivations.

We find that people who experience social marginalization are more likely to share COVID-19 news indiscriminately, that is, sharing news that is factually untrue and true, as well as news that seems surprising and unsurprising. This effect, driven by their general motivation to seek meaning, holds when people self-identify as being socially marginalized (i.e., experiencing frequent feelings of discrimination) and when they are situationally induced to feel marginalized. We demonstrate that an intervention to help people obtain a temporary sense of meaning by having high (vs.

This research investigates the joint effect of calorie posting and social context on consumers’ food choices and embarrassment. We hypothesize and demonstrate that posting calorie information on a menu becomes more effective in reducing the total calorie of meal orders when the food is ordered in public (vs. in private).