Consumer Behavior

We study the role of commitment in communication and its interactions with rules, which determine whether information is verifiable. Our framework nests models of cheap talk, information disclosure, and Bayesian persuasion. It predicts that commitment has opposite effects on information transmission under the two alternative rules. We leverage these contrasting forces to experimentally establish that subjects react to commitment in line with the main qualitative implications of the theory. Quantitatively, not all subjects behave as predicted.

An idea is a collection of existing concepts or words. What makes an idea original or appealing is how these concepts or words are combined in the context in which they appear. Similarly, a food recipe is a combination of ingredients, and it is often evaluated based on how these ingredients fit together to form the whole. In this research, we leverage representation learning methods, specifically word embeddings, to measure the fit among ingredients in the recipe and capture the possibly complex interactions between these ingredients.

A growing body of research has revealed that firms leverage nationalism in their strategies. However, it is unclear why some firms are more likely to do so than others. This paper uses institutional theory to address this question and examines the influences of domestic and foreign customers. We study firms’ responses to nationalist movements, a type of sociopolitical mobilization arising in response to international controversies.

Generative AI’s recent advancements in creating content have offered vast potential to transform the advertising industry. This research investigates the impact of generative AI-enabled visual ad creation on real-world advertising effectiveness. For this purpose, we collaborate with a display ad platform and leverage a quasi-experimental setting that includes over two million ad-day observations by over seven thousand advertisers across nearly 50 product categories, encompassing more than 16 billion ad impressions and 116 million clicks.

This research tests a solution for consumers to recover faster from negative experiences. We identify this solution by examining how the manner in which review writers express their emotions and rational thoughts in their reviews causally influences review writers.