Consumer Behavior

Advertising on e-commerce marketplaces, wherein sponsored product listings are interleaved with organic product listings in the search results, is a large and growing phenomenon under the umbrella of "retail media." In this paper, taking the perspective of the marketplace, we obtain insights into the impact of sponsored listings being shown at the most salient positions in the list of results. To do so, we analyze data from a large-scale field experiment at Flipkart, a leading online marketplace in India. We find nuanced results that substantially vary across categories.

We study a regulation in Chile that mandates warning labels on products whose sugar or caloric concentration exceeds certain thresholds.We show that consumers substitute from labeled to unlabeled products—a pattern mostly driven by  products that consumers mistakenly believe to be healthy. On the supply side, we find substantial reformulation of products and bunching at the thresholds.

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.

Standard search models assume that consumers actively decide on the order, identity, and number of products they search. We document that online, a large fraction of searches happen in a more passive manner, with consumers merely reacting to online advertisements that do not allow them to choose the timing or the identity of products to which they will be exposed. Using a clickstream panel data set capturing full URL addresses of websites consumers visit, we show how to detect whether a click is ad-initiated.

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 experimentally tests the effectiveness of two short edutainment campaigns (under 25 minutes) delivered through Facebook Messenger at reshaping gender norms and reducing social acceptability of violence against women (VAW) in India. Participants were randomly assigned to watch video-clips with implicit or explicit messaging formats (respectively a humorous fake reality TV drama or a docu-series with clear calls to action).

This paper recasts the consumption asset pricing model in terms of observable accounting outcomes by recognizing accounting principles that connect those outcomes to consumption and the risk to consumption. The model prompts the construction of a pricing factor from observed accounting information. The factor performs well relative to extant factors in explaining cross-sectional returns. Further, it delivers out-of-sample expected returns that forecast the actual returns and the forward betas that investors actually experience.

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.

How does the internet affect young people's mental health? We study this question in the context of Italy using administrative data on the universe of cases of mental disorders diagnosed in Italian hospitals between 2001 and 2013, which we combine with information on the availability of high-speed internet at the municipal level. Our identification strategy exploits differences in the proximity of municipalities to the pre-existing voice telecommunication infrastructure, which was previously irrelevant but became salient after the advent of the internet.