Decision Making & Negotiations

As a result of the digital revolution, new topics and themes have entered consumer research, and, as the digital revolution enters a new phase, additional new concepts and research questions will emerge. To illustrate the variety of themes on digital technology that consumer researchers have studied, I am presenting a collection of five articles that represent this active new research area. Moreover, I will look into the future and propose a research agenda to address key consumer behavior issues occurring during the next phase of the digital transformation.

In this article, we provide a descriptive account of how people from different generations vary in their use of financial management technology, their access credit markets, and how they finance consumption and incur financial costs and penalties. We use a detailed panel of transaction-level data from Iceland on individual spending, incomes, balances, and credit limits from a personal financial management software. We find that technology adoption is faster for millennials, but use of consumer credit and financial penalties are higher for older generations.

This article provides a critical review of what is known about affect regulation in relation to consumption behavior. Based on numerous findings from psychology, communication research, and consumer research, we identify a core set of general principles of affect regulation in consumer behavior. First, we define affect regulation, clarify its relations to the concepts of coping and compensatory consumption, and refine the emerging concept of “displaced coping.” We then review the generic strategies used in the regulation of general negative affective states.

In May 2013 Nicolas Beytout launched L’Opinion, a news organization that published a daily newspaper, with a robust digital presence. L’Opinion was opinion-focused, with Libéral economic thought pieces and analysis at the heart of its content. The media industry had changed drastically in the decade preceding, with brutal competition among the traditional media and new entrants like the platforms Google and Facebook. The political environment was also a moving target, with anti-European nationalism on the rise.

Internet recommender systems are popular in contexts that include heterogeneous consumers and numerous products. In such contexts, product features that adequately describe all the products are often not readily available. Content-based systems therefore rely on user-generated content such as product reviews or textual product tags to make recommendations.

When deciding whether to buy an item, consumers sometimes think about other ways they could spend their money. Past research has explored how increasing the salience of outside options (i.e., alternatives not immediately available in the choice set) influences purchase decisions, but whether the type of alternative considered systematically affects buying behavior remains an open question. Ten studies find that relative to considering alternatives that are similar to the target, considering dissimilar alternatives leads to a greater decrease in purchase intent for the target.

Shadow bank market share in residential mortgage origination nearly doubled from 2007 to 2015, with particularly dramatic growth among online "fintech" lenders. We study how two forces, regulatory differences and technological advantages, contributed to this growth.

We study the intertemporal properties of accounting conservatism with a focus on managerial incentives. In our main model, conservatism results in smaller expected payouts to the manager (agent) in early periods and larger expected payouts in later periods. Conservatism shifts (ambiguous) evidence that might be used to recognize good performance in early periods to later periods. In later periods, good performance is less informative, since good news might mean good current period performance and might also mean good prior period performance whose recognition was delayed.

This paper studies how hedge fund activism impacts corporate innovation. Firms targeted by activists improve their innovation efficiency over the five-year period following hedge fund intervention. Despite a tightening in research and development (R&D) expenditures, target firms increase innovation output, as measured by both patent counts and citations, with stronger effects among firms with more diversified innovation portfolios. Reallocation of innovative resources, redeployment of human capital, and change to board-level expertise all contribute to improve target firms' innovation.