Consumer Behavior

This research focuses on the diffusion patterns of the adjacent generations of technology and its relation to the time that elapses between them (intergeneration time). The authors analyze 45 new technologies in 15 industries and find that the adoption curves systematically vary across generations from 2 years for dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips to more than 30 years for steelmaking. The longer the intergeneration time, the slower the adoption of the subsequent technology.

It is not easy to summarize Ned Phelps's monumental contribution to economics.

We consider a two-echelon distribution system in which a supplier distributes a product to N competing retailers. The demand rate of each retailer depends on all of the retailers' prices, or alternatively, the price each retailer can charge for its product depends on the sales volumes targeted by all of the retailers. The supplier replenishes his inventory through orders (purchases, production runs) from an outside source with ample supply. From there, the goods are transferred to the retailers.

Increasingly, the greatest source of economic value for many companies is a set of intangible assets that, typically, are not reflected on their balance sheets. Whereas for B2C companies these intangible assets are often dominated by brand value, for many B2B companies these assets are a set of relationships with a core group of powerful customers. When these relationships are well-developed and ongoing, they produce sustainable returns to shareholders.

The authors discuss research progress and future opportunities for modeling consumer choice on the Internet using clickstream data (the electronic records of Internet usage recorded by company web servers and syndicated data services). The authors compare the nature of Internet choice (as captured by clickstream data) with supermarket choice (as captured by UPC scanner panel data), highlighting the differences relevant to choice modelers.

As more firms adopt a customer asset management approach to their business, it has become increasingly important to understand how customer management efforts relate to the financial performance of the firm. Of specific interest to shareholders is the relationship between traditional financial measures and customer-centric measures. The customer-centric measure that has received the most attention is customer lifetime value (CLV).

Data from downtown Boston in the 1990s show that loss aversion determines seller behavior in the housing market. Condominium owners subject to nominal losses 1) set higher asking prices of 25-35 percent of the difference between the property's expected selling price and their original purchase price; 2) attain higher selling prices of 3-18 percent of that difference; and 3) exhibit a much lower sale hazard than other investors, but hold for both.

In this chapter we first explore contexts in which people may actually prefer to have choices made for them by others, showing, for example, that members of more interdependent cultures may be more motivated when significant others make choices for them than when they choose for themselves. Then, we examine situations in which a limited choice set may prove more motivating than a more extensive choice set, showing, for example, that even members of highly independent cultures can sometimes find too much choice demotivating.

Recent studies of cultural activities in America have stressed the importance of three sorts of phenomena: (1) a boundary-effacement effect in which members of different classes are to some degree homogeneous in their preferences (colloquially, "some things are liked or disliked by everybody"); (2) an omnivore effect in which upscale people tend more than their more downscale counterparts to engage in or appreciate a broad variety of cultural activities ("some people like everything"); and (3) a distinction effect in which more upscale consumers use certain cultural habits as a way of marki