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.
I view the research articles presented here as prototypical examples of what may be called “the new wave” in studying Asian markets and consumers. This emerging “new wave” has a different focus than research done over the last few decades. Research is shifting from an emphasis on traditional Asian culture toward a focus on consumer culture and how this consumer culture manifests itself in various Asian markets. The “new wave” research also focuses less on general concepts and more on uniquely Asian phenomena. Finally, methodologically research is shifting from “East” vs.
We develop and test hypotheses regarding the role of social contagion in customer adoption of new sales channels. We examine two aspects of social contagion (local contagion and homophily) and two channels (Internet and bricks-and-mortar store). Drawing on diffusion theory, we propose a conceptual framework that identifies the factors associated with new channel adoption.
We develop and test hypotheses regarding the role of social contagion in customer adoption of new sales channels. We examine two aspects of social contagion (local contagion and homophily) and two channels (Internet and bricks-and-mortar store). Drawing on diffusion theory, we propose a conceptual framework that identifies the factors associated with new channel adoption.
It is becoming increasingly easier for researchers and practitioners to collect eye tracking data during online preference measurement tasks. We develop a dynamic discrete choice model of information search and choice under bounded rationality, that we calibrate using a combination of eye-tracking and choice data. Our model extends the directed cognition model of Gabaix et al. (2006) by capturing fatigue, proximity effects, and imperfect memory encoding and by estimating individual-level parameters and partworths within a likelihood-based, hierarchical Bayesian framework.
This paper studies the competition between Web 2.0 communities in a game theoretic framework. We model three important features of these institutions: (i) firms' content is usually user-generated; (ii) consumers' content preferences are governed by local network effects, and (iii) consumers have strong tendencies to multi-home. Our analyses reveal that ex-ante identical community sites can acquire differentiated market positions that spontaneously emerge from user-generated content.
The paper investigates the long-run consequences of multichannel shopping on customers' spending. Using data from a major US catalog company which introduced an online channel, our results validate previous findings that multichannel customers spend more than mono-channel customers in the short run. However, the difference in spending dissipates over time with multichannel customers reverting to their regular consumption pattern in 3 years.
The paper investigates the long-run consequences of multichannel shopping on customers' spending. Using data from a major US catalog company which introduced an online channel, our results validate previous findings that multichannel customers spend more than mono-channel customers in the short run. However, the difference in spending dissipates over time with multichannel customers reverting to their regular consumption pattern in 3 years.
We develop a model to understand and predict customers’ observed multichannel behavior in a customer support setting.
Facebook is rapidly gaining recognition as a powerful research tool for the social sciences. It constitutes a large and diverse pool of participants, who can be selectively recruited for both online and offline studies. Additionally, it facilitates data collection by storing detailed records of its users' demographic profiles, social interactions, and behaviors. With participants' consent, these data can be recorded retrospectively in a convenient, accurate, and inexpensive way.
We comment on Gilovich and colleagues' program of research on happiness resulting from experiential versus material purchases, and critique these authors' interpretation that people derive more happiness from experiences than from material possessions. Unlike goods, experiences cannot be purchased, and possessions versus experiences do not seem to form the endpoints of the same continuum.
We report the results of a survey conducted in November 2014 in which 29 quantitative marketing scholars from around the world reflected on the present and future of their field. The survey focused on substantive areas, methods and tools, practical and managerial relevance, doctoral training, and promotion and tenure. The results of the survey revealed several general insights on the challenges and opportunities faced by the field of quantitative marketing research.
We report the results of a survey conducted in November 2014 in which 29 quantitative marketing scholars from around the world reflected on the present and future of their field. The survey focused on substantive areas, methods and tools, practical and managerial relevance, doctoral training, and promotion and tenure. The results of the survey revealed several general insights on the challenges and opportunities faced by the field of quantitative marketing research.
We report the results of a survey conducted in November 2014 in which 29 quantitative marketing scholars from around the world reflected on the present and future of their field. The survey focused on substantive areas, methods and tools, practical and managerial relevance, doctoral training, and promotion and tenure. The results of the survey revealed several general insights on the challenges and opportunities faced by the field of quantitative marketing research.
This article introduces the method of single-neuron recording in humans to marketing and consumer researchers. First, the authors provide a general description of this methodology, discuss its advantages and disadvantages, and describe findings from previous single-neuron human research. Second, they discuss the relevance of this method for marketing and consumer behavior and, more specifically, how it can be used to gain insights into the areas of categorization, sensory discrimination, reactions to novel versus familiar stimuli, and recall of experiences.
The authors discuss the current state and future scenarios of brand experience — a new concept that they contributed to the brand management literature. Specifically, they present three research and practical trends, and marketing challenges: (i) the proliferation of settings and media that evoke brand experiences; (ii) the role of brands in consumption experiences; and (iii) the need of brand experiences to reach positive psychological outcomes.
Just as we have learned a great deal in consumer psychology by focusing on understanding how different sub-groups of humans think, this paper suggests that we can also learn from examining how different types of animals think. To that end, this manuscript offers a review of literature on topics in animal cognition that have also been investigated by consumer researchers.
This research examines how core consumers of selective brands react when core users obtain access to the brand. Contrary to the view that non-core users and downward brand extensions pose a threat to the brand, this work investigates the conditions under which these non-core users enhance rather than dilute the brand image.
This research examines how oral haptics (due to hardness/softness or roughness/smoothness) related to foods influence mastication (i.e., degree of chewing) and orosensory perception (i.e., orally perceived fattiness), which in turn influence calorie estimation, subsequent food choices, and overall consumption volume. The results of five experimental studies show that, consistent with theories related to mastication and orosensory perception, oral haptics related to soft (vs. hard) and smooth (vs. rough) foods lead to higher calorie estimations.
Advertising supported content sampling is ubiquitous in online markets for digital information goods. Yet, little is known about the profit impact of sampling when it serves the dual purpose of disclosing content quality and generating advertising revenue. This paper proposes an analytical framework to study the optimal content strategy for online publishers and shows how it is determined by characteristics of both the content market and the advertising market.
To date the effectiveness of inducing lower-calorie choices by providing consumers with calorie information has yielded mixed results. Here four controlled experiments show that adding dish-specific calorie information to menus (calorie posting) tends to result in lower-calorie choices. However, additionally grouping low-calorie dishes into a single "low-calorie" category (calorie organizing) ironically diminishes the positive effects of calorie posting. This outcome appears to be caused by the effect that grouping low-calorie options has on consumers' consideration sets.
Mobile advertising is one of the fastest-growing advertising formats. In 2013, global spending on mobile advertising was approximately $16.7 billion and it is expected to exceed $62.8 billion by 2017. The most prevalent type of mobile advertising is mobile display advertising (MDA), which takes the form of banners on mobile webpages and in mobile applications. This paper examines which product characteristics are likely to be associated with MDA campaigns that are effective in increasing consumers' favorable attitudes towards products and purchase intentions.
Emotionally pleasant TV commercials are often preferred over merely factual ones. A large-scale study of Belgian TV ads confirms this notion and shows that such commercials also create more positive feelings toward the advertised brand. Interestingly, these effects depend on neither the level of involvement associated with the product category nor the type of product. Independent of the perceived creativity of the commercial or its informational value, emotionality had a significant impact on the evaluation of a brand.
We model the multifaceted impact of pricing decisions in B2B contexts and show how a seller can develop optimal inter-temporal targeted pricing strategies to maximize long-term customer value. We empirically model the B2B customer's purchase decisions in an integrated fashion. In order to facilitate targeting and to capture the short and long-term dynamics of B2B customer purchasing, our modeling framework weaves together in a hierarchical Bayesian manner, multivariate copulas, a non-homogeneous hidden Markov model, and control functions for price endogeneity.
We model the multifaceted impact of pricing decisions in B2B contexts and show how a seller can develop optimal inter-temporal targeted pricing strategies to maximize long-term customer value. We empirically model the B2B customer's purchase decisions in an integrated fashion. In order to facilitate targeting and to capture the short and long-term dynamics of B2B customer purchasing, our modeling framework weaves together in a hierarchical Bayesian manner, multivariate copulas, a non-homogeneous hidden Markov model, and control functions for price endogeneity.
Not only are subjective feelings an integral part of many judgments and decisions, they can even lead to improved decisions and better predictions. Individuals who have learned to trust their feelings performed better in economic-negotiation games than their rational-thinking opponents. But emotions are not just relevant in negotiations and decisions. They also play a decisive role in forecasting future events. Candidates who trusted their feelings made better predictions than people with less emotional confidence.
This paper focuses on add-on sales to determine both their value per se and their value as a reflexive measure of brand equity. Specifically, this paper examines the "accessory premium" for automobiles, i.e., accessories installed by dealers at the time of sale. Using J.D. Power Data, the authors find that higher add-on accessory sales accrue to higher equity brands which make accessory sales a potentially useful measure of brand equity (J. Marketing 67: 1?17, 2003). In addition, the authors examine how the revenue premium metric varies by age cohort.
Marketing variables that are included in consumer discrete choice models are often endogenous. Extant treatments using likelihood-based estimators impose parametric distributional assumptions, such as normality, on the source of endogeneity. These assumptions are restrictive because misspecified distributions have an impact on parameter estimates and associated elasticities. The normality assumption for endogeneity can be inconsistent with some marginal cost specifications given a price-setting process, although they are consistent with other specifications.
We study consumers' click behavior on organic and sponsored links after a keyword search at an Internet search engine. Using a dataset of individual-level click activity after keyword searches from a leading search engine in Korea, we find that consumers' click activity after a keyword search is quite low and is heavily concentrated on the organic list. However, searches of less popular keywords (i.e., keywords with lower search volume) are associated with more clicks per search and a larger fraction of sponsored clicks.
Substitution decisions have been examined from a variety of perspectives. The economics literature measures cross-price elasticity, operations research models optimal assortments, the psychology literature studies goals in conflict, and marketing research has examined substitution-in-use, brand switching, stockouts, and self-control. We integrate these perspectives into a common framework for understanding consumer substitution decisions; their specific drivers (availability of new alternatives, internal vs.
The door is the boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds in the case of an ordinary dwelling, between the profane and sacred worlds in the case of a temple. Therefore to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world (van Gennep 1960: 20).
This study shows how experiential product attributes that are part of the design of new products can create compelling consumer experiences. Following processing-fluency theory, when consumers attend to experiential attributes (sensory or affective), they should process them fluently (i.e., spontaneously and with little effort); however, consumers should process functional attributes always deliberately, irrespective of whether or not they attend to them.
This cross-cultural study examined television advertising appeals (functional versus experiential and local versus global appeals) and their relationship with brand knowledge core components (brand awareness, brand attitude, and brand uniqueness) across countries at different levels of economic development. A dataset of 257 television commercials from 23 countries was used in the analysis. The researchers found that the experiential (emotional) appeal had a stronger relationship with the components of brand knowledge in countries with medium and high gross domestic product (GDP).
This cross-cultural study examined television advertising appeals (functional versus experiential and local versus global appeals) and their relationship with brand knowledge core components (brand awareness, brand attitude, and brand uniqueness) across countries at different levels of economic development. A dataset of 257 television commercials from 23 countries was used in the analysis. The researchers found that the experiential (emotional) appeal had a stronger relationship with the components of brand knowledge in countries with medium and high gross domestic product (GDP).
We propose an approach for using individual-level data on social interactions (e.g., number of recommendations received by consumers, number of recommendations given by adopters, number of social ties) to improve the aggregate penetration forecasts made by extant diffusion models. We capture social interactions through an individual-level hazard rate in such a way that the resulting aggregate penetration process is available in closed form and nests extant diffusion models.
This special section is the result of an effort by several scholars to move marketing academic research toward greater practical relevance. This initiative, called Theory Practice in Marketing (TPM), started with a conference at Columbia Business School in 2011, and the five papers published in this special section were presented at the second TPM conference held at Harvard Business School in 2012.
This special section is the result of an effort by several scholars to move marketing academic research toward greater practical relevance. This initiative, called Theory Practice in Marketing (TPM), started with a conference at Columbia Business School in 2011, and the five papers published in this special section were presented at the second TPM conference held at Harvard Business School in 2012.
The case describes the launch of a social media platform by the largest container shipping company in the world. Students will have the opportunity to thoroughly evaluate the campaign, which by observable criteria, has done extremely well. The case provides details on the various platforms used, the nature of content provided on each, and the associated budgets (including headcount). The budget figures are particularly interesting because they permit a rich discussion around the social media program's ROI.
The value of a business depends on its future not its past. Nonetheless, some managers base key decisions on backwards-looking metrics or models that have been shown to be inappropriate in many situations.
What metrics and models can provide managers with steering control for maximizing the value of their business? This editorial provides some ideas.
This research examines how consumers choose retailers when they are uncertain about store prices prior to shopping. Simulating everyday choice, participants made successive retailer choices where on each occasion they chose a retailer and only then learned product prices. The results of a series of studies demonstrated that participants were more likely to choose a retailer that offered an everyday low pricing strategy (EDLP) or that offered frequent small discounts over a retailer that offered infrequent large discounts.
Despite a 20-year trend toward integrated marketing communications, advertisers seldom coordinate television and search advertising campaigns. We find that television advertising for financial services brands increases both the number of related Google searches and searchers' tendency to use branded keywords in place of generic keywords. The elasticity of a brand's total searches with respect to its TV advertising is 0.17, an effect that peaks in the morning.
We propose a framework for the joint study of the consumer's decision of where to buy and what to buy. The framework is rooted in utility theory where the utility is for a particular channel/brand combination. The framework contains firm actions, the consumer search process, the choice process, and consumer learning. We develop research questions within each of these areas. We then discuss methodological issues pertaining to the use of experimentation and econometrics.
It has been observed that ad-evoked feelings exert a positive influence on brand attitudes. To investigate the empirical generalizability of this phenomenon, we analyzed the responses of 1,576 consumers to 1,070 TV commercials from more than 150 different product categories. The findings suggest five empirical generalizations. First, ad-evoked feelings indeed have a substantial impact on brand evaluations, even under conditions that better approximate real marketplace settings than past studies did.
Consumer psychology faces serious issues of internal and external relevance. Most of these issues originate in seven fundamental problems with the way consumer psychologists plan and conduct their research that could be called the seven sins of consumer psychology.
Markets for information products exhibit varying degrees of competition on both the supply and the demand side. This paper studies the potential complementarity of information products, equilibrium information buying behaviors and information price setting in such markets. Our game-theoretic model consists of two information providers selling imperfect information to two competing clients and allows for different information quality levels as well as varying degrees of client competition.
We posit that compared to the cognitive system, the affective system of judgment and decision making is relatively more engaged in the present. Specifically, we hypothesize that even if their accessibility is held constant, affective feelings are weighted more heavily in consumer judgments and decisions set in the present than in equivalent judgments and decisions set in the future or in the past.
The Attachment-Aversion (AA) Relationship model offers a unifying model of customer-brand relationships. To develop it further as a relevant consumer-psychology model, future research should examine three key factors: how brand perception differs from person perceptions; what role brand experiences play as determinants of customer-brand relationships, and how the AA Relationship model fits with other brand frameworks. The author offers insights and suggestions on how to address these three tasks.
Should advertising be approached differently in emerging than in developed markets? Using data from 256 TV commercial tests conducted by a multinational FMCG company in 23 countries, we consider two routes of persuasion: a functional route, which emphasizes the features and benefits of a product, and an experiential route, which evokes sensations, feelings, and imaginations. Whereas in developed markets the experiential route mostly drives persuasion, the functional route is a relatively more important driver in emerging markets.
Should advertising be approached differently in emerging than in developed markets? Using data from 256 TV commercial tests conducted by a multinational FMCG company in 23 countries, we consider two routes of persuasion: a functional route, which emphasizes the features and benefits of a product, and an experiential route, which evokes sensations, feelings, and imaginations. Whereas in developed markets the experiential route mostly drives persuasion, the functional route is a relatively more important driver in emerging markets.