Consumer Behavior

In a field experiment three salesman employed six alternative messages in attempting to sell a magazine subscription to student subjects randomly selected from the registrar's listing at a major university. Three conversational and three nonconversational messages, developed from Bales's Interaction Process Analysis, were employed in a telephone selling paradigm, designed to minimize extraneous nonverbal communication. Each salesman contacted prospective subjects (n = 78, 73, 118) until he had completed 42 sales attempts, 7 per message, for which a postquestionnaire was administered.

A distinction is drawn between the multiattribute attitude model as a measurement device and as a theory of attitude formation and change. Using an analysis of variance paradigm to investigate the underlying multiplicative and summative assumptions, Fishbein's multiattribute theory is found to demonstrate reasonably high construct validity. Individual differences in attribute combination rules are identified, and the issue of cognitive averaging vs. cognitive summation is raised.

In the study of consumer behavior, economics and marketing may perhaps seem headed on divergent paths. Economics models of man typically appear deterministic, while marketing models of man often are stochastic. This article links the microeconomic theory of demand (in a oligopoly situation) to a simple stochastic model of consumer behavior and, with data for one product, compares the empirical success of that model with those of various other models found in the literature.

We study the role of commitment in communication and its interactions with rules, which determine whether information is verifiable. Our framework nests models of cheap talk, information disclosure, and Bayesian persuasion. It predicts that commitment has opposite effects on information transmission under the two alternative rules. We leverage these contrasting forces to experimentally establish that subjects react to commitment in line with the main qualitative implications of the theory. Quantitatively, not all subjects behave as predicted.

Generative-AI is swiftly permeating every facet of our daily lives. Most notably, ChatGPT—a chatbot leveraging large language model (GPT-4) to understand and generate human-like language—has received global recognition, becoming one of the most widely adopted AI-based applications. Despite some limitations, generative AI technologies have not only affected consumer markets and business operations but also have the potential to revolutionize academic research.

An idea is a collection of existing concepts or words. What makes an idea original or appealing is how these concepts or words are combined in the context in which they appear. Similarly, a food recipe is a combination of ingredients, and it is often evaluated based on how these ingredients fit together to form the whole. In this research, we leverage representation learning methods, specifically word embeddings, to measure the fit among ingredients in the recipe and capture the possibly complex interactions between these ingredients.

A growing body of research has revealed that firms leverage nationalism in their strategies. However, it is unclear why some firms are more likely to do so than others. This paper uses institutional theory to address this question and examines the influences of domestic and foreign customers. We study firms’ responses to nationalist movements, a type of sociopolitical mobilization arising in response to international controversies.