Consumer Behavior

Combinatorial auctions (CAs) are multi-unit auction mechanisms in which bidders can bid on combinations of items or packages. CAs have received considerable attention from academia, and their practical use has increased significantly over recent years especially in procurement projects. Units in procurement projects often exhibit cost synergies, and using a CA can be particularly advantageous to the auctioneer because it enables bidders to express their cost synergies in the bidding process.

The measurement and timing of reported revenue is critical to performance measurement and the development of accurate forecasting models. GM used incentives to get customers to buy its vehicles. This case asks students to consider how GM should report the sales so that the data is a valid indication of performance and can be used to accurately forecast future sales.

In this work we suggest that trait observability is an important predictor of what kind of feedback will be incorporated into self-knowledge. In two studies we find evidence that feedback about ones own observable traits, referencing social or physical characteristics, becomes incorporated into self-knowledge.  In our work, feedback on less observable traits, referencing internal states or competency, was not incorporated into self-knowledge.  This pattern holds for both positive and negative feedback, regardless of whether the feedback is explicitly or implicitly provided.

This guest editorial of JAR considers what the "new normal" of marketing will be and suggests that it will be the digitization of everything, the need for constant change and adaptation affected by the continuous flow of knowledge. Involving consumers in co-creation will be increasingly important, while raw data for market research has increased massively and so will require the tools and people to mine it.

More and more firms are engaging in greenwashing, misleading consumers about their environmental performance or the environmental benefits of a product or service. The skyrocketing incidence of greenwashing can have profound negative effects on consumer and investor confidence in green products. Mitigating greenwashing is particularly challenging in a context of limited and uncertain regulation.

Several researchers have proposed models of buyer behavior in noncontractual settings that assume that customers are "alive" for some period of time and then become permanently inactive. The best-known such model is the Pareto/NBD, which assumes that customer attrition (dropout or "death") can occur at any point in calendar time. A recent alternative model, the BG/NBD, assumes that customer attrition follows a Bernoulli "coin-flipping" process that occurs in "transaction time" (i.e., after every purchase occasion).

This article discusses the underlying dynamics behind the present debate over net-neutrality, analyzes the pro's and con's, concludes that the debate is based on false premises, and proposes a better solution — end-user sovereignty — that is both open and only lightly regulated.