Decision Making & Negotiations

Consumers often have multiple goals that are active simultaneously and make choices to satisfy those goals. However, no work to date has studied how people choose when all available options serve a goal (e.g., a choice-set goal) that conflicts with another goal they hold (e.g., an incidental goal). We demonstrate that in such contexts, consumers are more likely to choose the option that is most instrumental for attaining the choice-set goal, even when that option poses the greatest violation of the incidental goal.

The second Global Business Anthropology Summit was held May 28-29, 2019 at Fordham University in New York City. The 2019 Summit brought together 160 industry practitioners and academic scholars to build upon the work of the 2018 Summit. The 2019 Summit was explicitly and emphatically forward thinking and action oriented to advance anthropological ideas in business.

Failing to refinance a mortgage can cost a borrower thousands of dollars. Based on administrative data from a large financial institution, we show that around 50% of borrowers leave thousands of dollars on the table by not refinancing. Survey data indicate that, among all the behavioral factors examined, only suspicion of banks motives is consistently related to the probability of accepting a refinancing offer. Finally, we report the results of three field experiments showing that enticing offers made by banks fail to increase participation and may even deepen suspicion.

Dietary variety increases food intake, but it is unclear if sensory differences elicit increases in eating-related behaviors. Using a 4×3 between-subject pilot experiment, we examined if increasing sensory variety (control, color, shape, both color and shape) and priming individuals to notice differences or similarities in the foods (positive, neutral, negative) influenced ad libitum proximal intake, liking, and willingness to purchase pears and peppers among 164 Greater Boston adults >18y/o.

We consider the compensation design problem of a firm that hires a salesperson to exert effort to increase demand. We assume both demand and supply to be uncertain with sales being the smaller of demand and supply and assume that, if demand exceeds supply, then unmet demand is unobservable (demand censoring).

Advances in information technology have enabled consumers to connect and communicate as they never have before. This chapter conceptualizes information and the digital machines that enable contemporary connection and communication as being part of a “Moveable Feast.” A brief historical review tracing the impact and evolution of information technology on consumers’ lives and the marketplace is first provided.

When carefully planned, language can be a strategic tool for managing a brand’s communication to target customers and for building brand equity. This paper explains how and why managers should conduct a brand language audit -- a comprehensive inventory of the many and varied linguistic devices used by brands in the category -- and then use the findings from the audit to develop a brand language brief. The brand language brief is a blueprint for crafting a distinctive language for a brand.

Maintenance service plans (MSPs) are contracts for the provision of maintenance by a service provider to an equipment operator. These plans can have different payment structures and risk allocations, which induce various types of incentives for agents in the service chain. How do such structures affect service performance and service chain value? We provide an empirical answer to this question by using a unique panel data covering the sales and service records of more than 700 diagnostic body scanners.