Consumer Behavior

What's a customer really worth? Can you find out, without endlessly complex modelling? And once you know, what should you do with that knowledge? Managing Customers as Investments has the answers. You'll learn simple ways to get reliable customer value information - in a form you can use. You'll discover how to use it to measure marketing effectiveness, generate improvements throughout the entire customer relationship lifecycle, and improve decision making. Everyone tells you to manage your business around customers. This book tells you how to do it.

Combining survey responses and trading records of clients of a German retail broker, this paper examines some of the causes for the apparent failure to buy and hold a well-diversified portfolio. The subjective investor attributes gleaned from the survey help explain the variation in actual portfolio and trading choices. Self-reported risk aversion is the single most important determinant of both portfolio diversification and turnover; other things equal, investors who report being more risk tolerant hold less diversified portfolios and trade more aggressively.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how regulatory focus theory (Higgins 1997, 1998, 2002)—a theory of motivation and self-regulation that has been rapidly gaining prominence in consumer research (e.g., Aaker and Lee 2001; Briley and Wyer 2002; Pham and Avnet 2004; Zhou and Pham 2004)—can be drawn upon to explain a variety of consumer decision-making phenomena. We briefly review the major tenets of the theory, which proposes a fundamental distinction between two modes of self-regulation called promotion and prevention.

In this paper, we investigate the equilibrium behavior of decentralized supply chains with competing retailers under demand uncertainty. We also design contractual arrangements between the parties that allow the decentralized chain to perform as well as a centralized one.

This paper conducts a probabilistic analysis of an important class of heuristics for multi-item capacitated lot sizing problems.

Prior research suggests that bicultural individuals (i.e., individuals with 2 distinct sets of cultural values) shift the values they espouse depending on cues such as language. The authors examined whether the effects of language extend to a potentially less malleable domain, behavioral decisions, exploring the extent to which bilingual individuals shift the underlying strategies used to resolve choice problems.

We study a model of imperfect competition and limited production capacity, in which a choice of low product quality enables firms to increase total production. We find that in the presence of limited capacity, such reduced quality often results in increased social welfare. We also explore the relation between the extent of competition and the choice of quality. We find that, in some cases, reduced competition leads to increased production, decreased average quality, increases total welfare, and makes consumers better off.

Using pooled cross-sectional data from the Surveys of Consumer Finances, and new panel data from TIAA-CREF, we examine the empirical relationship between age and portfolio choice, focusing on the observed relationship between age and the fraction of wealth held in the stock market. We illustrate and discuss the importance of the well-known identification problem that prevents unrestricted estimation of age, time and cohort effects in longitudinal data.