Consumer Behavior

The rise of "Big Data" had a big impact on marketing research and practice. In this article, we first highlight sources of useful consumer information that are now available at large scale and very little or no cost. We subsequently discuss how this information — with the help of new analytical techniques — can be translated into valuable insights on consumers' psychological states and traits that can, in turn, be used to inform marketing strategy.

Stress can impact various aspects of a person's well-being. While some researchers have suggested that consumption-related activities may cause stress, no research has yet explored such stress among vulnerable, younger consumers. To better understand this phenomenon, the concept of adolescents' perceived brand deprivation stress (BDS) is introduced as a state of tension perceived negatively by a young consumer when he or she does not have specific brands from a particular product category.

We exploit the release of a mobile application for a financial aggregation platform to analyze how technology adoption changes consumer financial decision making. The app reduced the cost of accessing personal financial information, and we find that this led to a drop in non-sufficient fund (NSF) fees. Because of the manner in which these fees are incurred, this represents an unambiguous welfare improvement for users of the platform. The leading explanation for this result appears to be mistake avoidance due to easier access to information.

The adoption and diffusion of new products and behaviors has been studied extensively and comprehensively (e.g., Rogers 2003). Disadoption — how and why people volitionally stop using products and/or cease certain behaviors (e.g., customer defection, smoking cessation) — by contrast, has received less and more situation-specific attention. This paper presents a general (conceptual) framework for understanding disadoption. Disadoption is defined and delineated from other behavioral discontinuances.

This tutorial provides evidence that character misrepresentation in survey screeners by Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers ("Turkers") can substantially and significantly distort research findings. Using five studies, we demonstrate that a large proportion of respondents in paid MTurk studies claim a false identity, ownership, or activity in order to qualify for a study. The extent of misrepresentation can be unacceptably high, and the responses to subsequent questions can have little correspondence to responses from appropriately identified participants.

We evaluate the effects of the 2009 Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) that provided intermediaries with sizeable financial incentives to renegotiate mortgages. HAMP increased intensity of renegotiations and prevented substantial number of foreclosures but reached just one-third of its targeted indebted households. This shortfall was in large part due to low renegotiation intensity of a few large intermediaries and was driven by intermediary-specific factors.

While research on conspicuous consumption has typically analyzed how people spend money on products that signal status, we investigate conspicuous consumption in relation to time. We argue that a busy and overworked lifestyle, rather than a leisurely lifestyle, has become an aspirational status symbol. A series of studies shows that the positive inferences of status in response to busyness and lack of leisure are driven by the perceptions that a busy person possesses desired human capital characteristics (competence, ambition) and is scarce and in demand on the job market.

Uncertainty is an unavoidable part of human life. How do states of uncertainty influence the way people make decisions? We advance the proposition that states of uncertainty increase the reliance on affective inputs in judgments and decisions. In accord with this proposition, results from six studies show that the priming of uncertainty (vs. certainty) consistently increases the effects of a variety of affective inputs on consumers' judgments and decisions.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) campaigns have traditionally focused on maximizing the profitability of the targeted customers. In this paper we investigate the social effects of CRM campaigns. We demonstrate that, in business settings that are characterized by network externalities, a CRM campaign that is aimed at changing the behavior of specific customers propagates through the social network, thereby also affecting the behavior of non-targeted customers.