Decision Making & Negotiations

The tendency to see life as zero-sum exacerbates political conflicts. Six studies (N = 3223) examine the relationship between political ideology and zero-sum thinking: the belief that one party's gains can only be obtained at the expense of another party's losses. We find that both liberals and conservatives view life as zero-sum when it benefits them to do so. Whereas conservatives exhibit zero-sum thinking when the status quo is challenged, liberals do so when the status quo is being upheld.

In this article, we provide a descriptive account of how people from different generations vary in their use of financial management technology, their access credit markets, and how they finance consumption and incur financial costs and penalties. We use a detailed panel of transaction-level data from Iceland on individual spending, incomes, balances, and credit limits from a personal financial management software. We find that technology adoption is faster for millennials, but use of consumer credit and financial penalties are higher for older generations.

We consider the compensation design problem of a firm that hires a salesperson to exert effort to increase demand. We assume both demand and supply to be uncertain with sales being the smaller of demand and supply and assume that, if demand exceeds supply, then unmet demand is unobservable (demand censoring).

Advances in information technology have enabled consumers to connect and communicate as they never have before. This chapter conceptualizes information and the digital machines that enable contemporary connection and communication as being part of a “Moveable Feast.” A brief historical review tracing the impact and evolution of information technology on consumers’ lives and the marketplace is first provided.

What does it take for success in the media business? Creativity, innovation, and performance, of course. Plus experience and good judgment. However, it also requires an understanding of the principles and tools of management. This book summarizes the major dimensions of a business school curriculum and applies them to the entire media, media-tech, and digital sectors. Its chapters cover—in a jargonless, non-technical way—the major management functions.

We use five years of bidding data to examine the reaction of advertisers to widely disseminated press on the lack of effectiveness of brand search advertising (queries that contain the firm's name) found in a large experiment run by eBay (Blake, Nosko and Tadelis, 2015). We estimate that 11% of firms that did not face competing ads on their brand keywords, matching the case of eBay, discontinued the practice of brand search advertising.

This article provides a critical review of what is known about affect regulation in relation to consumption behavior. Based on numerous findings from psychology, communication research, and consumer research, we identify a core set of general principles of affect regulation in consumer behavior. First, we define affect regulation, clarify its relations to the concepts of coping and compensatory consumption, and refine the emerging concept of “displaced coping.” We then review the generic strategies used in the regulation of general negative affective states.

When deciding whether to buy an item, consumers sometimes think about other ways they could spend their money. Past research has explored how increasing the salience of outside options (i.e., alternatives not immediately available in the choice set) influences purchase decisions, but whether the type of alternative considered systematically affects buying behavior remains an open question. Ten studies find that relative to considering alternatives that are similar to the target, considering dissimilar alternatives leads to a greater decrease in purchase intent for the target.