We develop a flexible content-based search model that links the content preferences of search engine users to query search volume and click-through rates, while allowing content preferences to vary systematically based on the context of a search. Content preferences are defined over latent topics that describe the content of search queries and search result descriptions.
Narratives, and other forms of discourse, are powerful vehicles for informing, entertaining, and making sense of the world. But while everyday language often describes discourse as moving quickly or slowly, covering a lot of ground, or going in circles, little work has actually quantified such movements or examined whether they are beneficial.
This research provides a first investigation into how interest-free financing promotions influence consumer behavior. Five experiments demonstrate that framing an economically equivalent financing offer in a way that makes salient that it is interest-free increases consumers’ demand for credit to finance experiential, but not material goods.
This research highlights how gender shapes consumer payments in pay-what-you-want contexts. Four studies involving hypothetical and real payments show that men typically pay less than women in pay-what-you-want settings, due to gender differences in agentic versus communal orientation. Men approach the payment decision with an agentic orientation, and women approach it with a communal orientation. These orientations then shape payment motives and ultimately affect payment behavior.
We examine how choice bracketing affects expected value maximization in experience-based choice. Experience-based choices are a series of individual choices made sequentially, for which feedback follows each choice, and are thus naturally bracketed narrowly. Previous research broadly bracketed multiple experience-based choices for decision makers by aggregating the choices (such that each choice pertained to multiple individual choices) or by reducing feedback frequency.
Loss aversion, the principle that losses impact decision making more than equivalent gains, is a fundamental idea in consumer behavior and decision making, though its existence has recently been called into question. Across five unique samples (Ntotal = 17,720), we tested several moderators of loss aversion, which supported a preference construction account. Across studies, more domain knowledge and experience were associated with lower loss aversion, though people of all knowledge and experience levels were loss averse.
Utilizing transaction-level financial data, we explore how household consumption responded to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As case numbers grew and cities and states enacted shelter-in-place orders, Americans began to radically alter their typical spending across a number of major categories. In the first half of March 2020, individuals increased total spending by over 40% across a wide range of categories.
Online and social media campaigns reach billions of people every day. While commercial companies have built up extensive expertise in using these tools to recruit and build relationships with customers, researchers and policymakers have been slower to take full advantage of these new digital tools. The growth of mobile access in developing countries is opening up many opportunities to use social media tools to pursue development objectives: from surveys and impact evaluations to digital delivery of behavior-change campaigns.