Breaking the Cycle: How the News and Markets Created a Negative Feedback Loop in COVID-19
New research from CBS Professor Harry Mamaysky reveals how negativity in the news and markets can escalate a financial crisis.
New research from CBS Professor Harry Mamaysky reveals how negativity in the news and markets can escalate a financial crisis.
Adapted from “Global Value Chains in Developing Countries: A Relational Perspective from Coffee and Garments,” by Laura Boudreau of Columbia Business School, Julia Cajal Grossi of the Geneva Graduate Institute, and Rocco Macchiavello of the London School of Economics.
Adapted from “Online Advertising as Passive Search,” by Raluca M. Ursu of New York University Stern School of Business, Andrey Simonov of Columbia Business School, and Eunkyung An of New York University Stern School of Business.
This paper from Columbia Business School, “Meaning of Manual Labor Impedes Consumer Adoption of Autonomous Products,” explores marketing solutions to some consumers’ resistance towards autonomous products. The study was co-authored by Emanuel de Bellis of the University of St. Gallen, Gita Johar of Columbia Business School, and Nicola Poletti of Cada.
Co-authored by John B. Donaldson of Columbia Business School, “The Macroeconomics of Stakeholder Equilibria,” proposes a model for a purely private, mutually beneficial financial agreement between worker and firm that keeps decision-making in the hands of stockholders while improving the employment contract for employees.
At Columbia Business School, our faculty members are at the forefront of research in their respective fields, offering innovative ideas that directly impact the practice of business today. A quick glance at our publication on faculty research, CBS Insights, will give you a sense of the breadth and immediacy of the insight our professors provide.
As a student at the School, this will greatly enrich your education. In Columbia classrooms, you are at the cutting-edge of industry, studying the practices that others will later adopt and teach. As any business leader will tell you, in a competitive environment, being first puts you at a distinct advantage over your peers. Learn economic development from Ray Fisman, the Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise and a rising star in the field, or real estate from Chris Mayer, the Paul Milstein Professor of Real Estate, a renowned expert and frequent commentator on complex housing issues. This way, when you complete your degree, you'll be set up to succeed.
Columbia Business School in conjunction with the Office of the Dean provides its faculty, PhD students, and other research staff with resources and cutting edge tools and technology to help push the boundaries of business research.
Specifically, our goal is to seamlessly help faculty set up and execute their research programs. This includes, but is not limited to:
All these activities help to facilitate and streamline faculty research, and that of the doctoral students working with them.
‘Moral hazard’ links geoengineering to mitigation via the fear that either solar geoengineering (solar radiation management, SRM) or carbon dioxide removal (CDR) might crowd out the desire to cut emissions. Fear of this crowding-out effect ranks among the most frequently cited risks of (solar) geoengineering. We here test moral hazard versus its inverse in a large-scale, revealed-preference experiment (n~340,000) on Facebook and find little to no support for either outcome. For the most part, talking about SRM or CDR does not motivate our study population to support a large U.S.
Routines shape many aspects of day-to-day consumption. While prior work has established the importance of habits in consumer behavior, little work has been done to understand the implications of routines — which we define as repeated behaviors with recurring, temporal structures — for customer management. One reason for this dearth is the difficulty of measuring routines from transaction data, particularly when routines vary substantially across customers. We propose a new approach for doing so, which we apply in the context of ridesharing.
Routines shape many aspects of day-to-day consumption. While prior work has established the importance of habits in consumer behavior, little work has been done to understand the implications of routines — which we define as repeated behaviors with recurring, temporal structures — for customer management. One reason for this dearth is the difficulty of measuring routines from transaction data, particularly when routines vary substantially across customers. We propose a new approach for doing so, which we apply in the context of ridesharing.
In the past decades, as traditional luxury goods and conspicuous consumption have become more mainstream and lost some of their signaling value, new alternative signals of status (e.g., vintage, inconspicuous consumption, sustainable luxury) have progressively emerged. This research applies the grounded theory method to establish a novel framework that systematically unifies existing conceptualizations, findings, and observations on alternative signals of status.
In light of the widely discussed political divide and increasing societal polarization, we investigate in this paper whether the polarization of political ideology extends to consumers’ preferences, intentions, and purchases. Using three different data sets—the publicly available social media data of over three million brand followerships of Twitter users, a YouGov brand-preference survey data set, and Nielsen scanner panel data—we assess the evolution of brand-preference polarization.
Researchers and practitioners in marketing, economics, and public policy often use preference elicitation tasks to forecast realworld behaviors. These tasks typically ask a series of similarly structured questions.
Researchers and practitioners in marketing, economics, and public policy often use preference elicitation tasks to forecast realworld behaviors. These tasks typically ask a series of similarly structured questions.
This paper focuses on teaching the application of anthropology in business to marketing students. It begins with the premise that consumer marketers have long used ethnography as a component of their qualitative market research toolkit to inform their knowledge about and empathy for consumers. A question for market research educators who include ethnography in their curricula is if and how to teach the richness of anthropologically based approaches, especially given a decoupling of ethnographic method from anthropological theory in much consumer research practice.
An important challenge for many firms is to identify the life transitions of its customers, such as job searching, expecting a child, or purchasing a home. Inferring such transitions, which are generally unobserved to the firm, can offer the firms opportunities to be more relevant to their customers. In this paper, we demonstrate how a social network platform can leverage its longitudinal user data to identify which of its users are likely to be job seekers. Identifying job seekers is at the heart of the business model of professional social network platforms.
Minimalism in consumption can be expressed in various forms, such as monochromatic home design, wardrobe capsules, tiny home living, and decluttering. This research offers a unified understanding of the variegated displays of minimalism by establishing a conceptual definition of consumer minimalism and developing the twelve-item Minimalist Consumer Scale to measure the construct.
This research sheds light on consumer motivations for participating in the sharing economy and examines downstream consequences of the uncovered motivations.
This research sheds light on consumer motivations for participating in the sharing economy and examines downstream consequences of the uncovered motivations.
This research investigates the joint effect of calorie posting and social context on consumers’ food choices and embarrassment. We hypothesize and demonstrate that posting calorie information on a menu becomes more effective in reducing the total calorie of meal orders when the food is ordered in public (vs. in private).
Smartphones have made it nearly effortless to share images of branded experiences. This research classifies social media brand imagery and studies user response. Aside from packshots (standalone product images), two types of brand-related selfie images appear online: consumer selfies (featuring brands and consumers’ faces) and an emerging phenomenon the authors term “brand selfies” (invisible consumers holding a branded product).
The authors propose that purchasing luxury can be a unique means to engage in sustainable consumption because high-end products are particularly durable. Six studies examine the sustainability of high-end products, investigate consumer decision making when considering high-end versus ordinary goods, and identify effective marketing strategies to emphasize product durability, an important and valued dimension of sustainable consumption.
The author proposes a topic model tailored to the study of creative documents (e.g., academic papers, movie scripts), which extends Poisson factorization in two ways. First, the creativity literature emphasizes the importance of novelty in creative industries. Accordingly, this article introduces a set of residual topics that represent the portion of each document that is not explained by a combination of common topics. Second, creative documents are typically accompanied by summaries (e.g., abstracts, synopses).
This Better Marketing for a Better World special issue of the Journal of Marketing is motivated by the gap that remains between what is studied in our field and what is possible. We believe that we still know too little about marketing’s role in improving -- or harming -- our world.
Marketing is the functional area primarily responsible for driving the organic growth of a firm. In the age of digital marketing and big data, marketers are inundated with increasingly rich data from an ever-expanding array of sources. Such data may help marketers generate insights about customers and competitors. One fundamental question remains: How can marketers wrestle massive flows of existing and nascent data resources into coherent, effective growth strategies?
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.
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.
This article presents new conceptual and managerial insights about consumer experiences of positive emotions in the marketplace and how to engineer these emotional experiences for business purposes. Specifically, we provide an in-depth conceptual analysis of three positive emotions that are of high relevance for marketers: (1) consumer pride, (2) consumer excitement, and (3) consumer relaxation.
Technological advances have resulted in a hyperconnected world, requiring a reassessment of branding research from the perspectives of firms, consumers, and society. Brands are shifting away from single ownership to shared ownership, as heightened access to information and people is allowing more stakeholders to cocreate brand meanings and experiences alongside traditional brand owners and managers.
This research examines how drip pricing--a strategy whereby a firm advertises only part of a product's price upfront and then reveals additional mandatory or optional fees/surcharges as the consumer proceeds through the buying process--affects consumer choice and satisfaction. Across six studies, we find that when optional surcharges are dripped (vs. revealed upfront) consumers are more likely to initially select a lower base priced option which, after surcharges are included, is often more expensive than the alternative.
Consumer research often fails to have broad impact on members of our own discipline, on adjacent disciplines studying related phenomena, and on relevant stakeholders who stand to benefit from the knowledge created by our rigorous research. We propose that impact is limited because consumer researchers have adhered to a set of implicit boundaries or defaults regarding what we study, why we study it, and how we do so. We identify these boundaries and describe how they can be challenged.
Consumer research often fails to have broad impact on members of our own discipline, on adjacent disciplines studying related phenomena, and on relevant stakeholders who stand to benefit from the knowledge created by our rigorous research. We propose that impact is limited because consumer researchers have adhered to a set of implicit boundaries or defaults regarding what we study, why we study it, and how we do so. We identify these boundaries and describe how they can be challenged.
Qualitative research is often used by marketers to develop new brand positionings. This case illustrates how two sequentially applied qualitative approaches were used to generate positionings for a pet food brand. The methods included psychologically oriented focus groups and anthropologically informed ethnographies. When implemented independently by a single market research company, the two approaches inspired highly distinctive brand positionings.
Marketing research relies on individual-level estimates to understand the rich heterogeneity of consumers, firms, and products. While much of the literature focuses on capturing static cross-sectional heterogeneity, little research has been done on modeling dynamic heterogeneity, or the heterogeneous evolution of individual-level model parameters. In this work, the authors propose a novel framework for capturing the dynamics of heterogeneity, using individual-level, latent, Bayesian nonparametric Gaussian processes.
We study multi-period sales-force incentive contracting where salespeople can engage in effort gaming, a phenomenon that has extensive empirical support. Focusing on a repeated moral hazard scenario with two independent periods and a risk-neutral agent with limited liability, we conduct a theoretical investigation to understand which effort profiles the firm can expect under the optimal contract.
Submitting queries to search engines has become a major way for consumers to search for information and products. The massive amount of search query data available today has the potential to provide valuable information on consumer preferences. In order to unlock this potential, it is necessary to understand how consumers translate their preferences into search queries. Strategic consumers should attempt to maximize the information content of the search results, conditional on a set of beliefs on how the search engine operates.
Once artificial intelligence (AI) is indistinguishable from human intelligence, and robots are highly similar in appearance and behavior to humans, there should be no reason to treat AI and robots differently from humans. However, even perfect AI and robots may still be subject to a bias (referred to as speciesism in this article), which will disadvantage them and be a barrier to their commercial adoption as chatbots, decision and recommendation systems, and staff in retail and service settings.
In this research, we investigate the prevalence, robustness and possible reasons underlying the polarity of online review distributions with the majority of the reviews at the positive end of the rating scale, a few reviews in the mid-range and some reviews at the negative end of the scale.
At each stage in customers' journeys, they encounter different types of numeric information that they process using different judgment strategies. Relevant numbers might include budgets, price, product attributes, product counts, product ratings, numbers in brand names, health and nutrition information, financial information, time-related information, and others. This manuscript provides a review of the vast array of numerical information presented to consumers at different stages of the customer journey.
Words are part of almost every marketplace interaction. Online reviews, customer service calls, press releases, marketing communications, and other interactions create a wealth of textual data. But how can marketers best use such data? This article provides an overview of automated textual analysis and details how it can be used to generate marketing insights. The authors discuss how text reflects qualities of the text producer (and the context in which the text was produced) and impacts the audience or text recipient.
Although consumer behavior theory has traditionally regarded evaluations as instrumental to consumer choice, in reality consumers often assess and express what they like and dislike even when there is no decision at stake. Why are consumers so eager to express their evaluations when there is no ostensible purpose for doing so? In this research, we advance the thesis that this is because consumers derive an inherent pleasure from assessing and expressing their likes and dislikes.
Human enhancement products allow consumers to radically enhance their mental abilities. Focusing on cognitive enhancements, we introduce and study a novel factor dehumanization (i.e., denying a person emotional ability and likening them to a robot) which plays a key role in consumers' reluctance to use enhancement products. In study 1, consumers who enhance their mental abilities beyond normal levels were dehumanized, whereas consumers who use the same products to restore lost abilities were not.
Human enhancement products allow consumers to radically enhance their mental abilities. Focusing on cognitive enhancements, we introduce and study a novel factor dehumanization (i.e., denying a person emotional ability and likening them to a robot) which plays a key role in consumers' reluctance to use enhancement products. In study 1, consumers who enhance their mental abilities beyond normal levels were dehumanized, whereas consumers who use the same products to restore lost abilities were not.
User-generated content has become ubiquitous and very influential in the marketplace. Increasingly, this content is generated on smartphones rather than personal computers (PCs). This article argues that because of its physically constrained nature, smartphone (vs. PC) use leads consumers to generate briefer content, which encourages them to focus on the overall gist of their experiences. This focus on gist, in turn, tends to manifest as reviews that emphasize the emotional aspects of an experience in lieu of more specific details.
Consumer robots are predicted to be employed in a variety of customer-facing situations. As these robots are designed to look and behave like humans, consumers attribute human traits to them—a phenomenon known as the “Eliza Effect.” In four experiments, we show that the anthropomorphism of a consumer robot increases psychological warmth but decreases attitudes, due to uncanniness. Competence judgments are much less affected and not subject to a decrease in attitudes.
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.
We develop theory on how a contentious moral market can develop, and we test it with data from a study of the commercialization of Buddhist temples in China from 2006 to 2016, as local government officials try to boost the local economy by transforming temples into tourist enterprises that charge admission fees. The practice is resisted by monks and the public such that the central government, which values public appearances of social justice, is pressured to support their resistance to local officials’ economic demands.
The authors propose a quantitative approach for describing entertainment products, in a way that allows for improving the predictive performance of consumer choice models for these products. Their approach is based on the media psychology literature, which suggests that people’s consumption of entertainment products is influenced by the psychological themes featured in these products. They classify psychological themes on the basis of the “character strengths” taxonomy from the positive psychology literature (Peterson and Seligman 2004).
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.
As a result of the digital revolution, new topics and themes have entered consumer research, and, as the digital revolution enters a new phase, additional new concepts and research questions will emerge. To illustrate the variety of themes on digital technology that consumer researchers have studied, I am presenting a collection of five articles that represent this active new research area. Moreover, I will look into the future and propose a research agenda to address key consumer behavior issues occurring during the next phase of the digital transformation.
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.
Mass customization interfaces typically guide consumers through the configuration process in a sequential manner, focusing on one product attribute after the other. What if this standardized customization experience were personalized for consumers on the basis of how they process information? A series of large-scale field and experimental studies, conducted with Western and Eastern consumers, shows that matching the interface to consumers’ culture-specific processing style enhances the effectiveness of mass customization.
The second Global Business Anthropology Summit was held May 28-29, 2019 at Fordham University in New York City. The 2019 Summit brought together 160 industry practitioners and academic scholars to build upon the work of the 2018 Summit. The 2019 Summit was explicitly and emphatically forward thinking and action oriented to advance anthropological ideas in business.