Marketing

Historically, when a major new type of machine has been built, men have at first been too apprehensive about what it would do to them immediately. Then, after it has been around for a while and hasn?t put them out of work, they have become too complacent about what its longer term effects would be. Today, many marketers behave as though they were in the stage of overcomplacency about the long-range impact of the computer. They seem sure it is not a near-term threat, so they give it mostly mundane chores and, in a sense, assume it will always be simply a routine data processor.

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.

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.

While setting explicit goals often boosts performance, we identify a novel way in which setting a goal can backfire. In 13 studies and four supplemental studies, using both incentive-compatible and hypothetical designs across a range of consumer domains, we demonstrate that setting an explicit goal and making progress towards it decreases the likelihood that people subsequently switch to alternative means of pursuit. This occurs because means are perceived to be more effective relative to alternatives if they have been used to progress towards a clear reference point.

Consumers’ spending decisions are shaped not only by their objective financial resources but also by their subjective perceptions of wealth. This research investigates the interplay between subjective poverty (e.g., feeling financially constrained) and income in driving spending. Across five studies including real-world spending data from a U.K.