Marketing

Uncertainty is an unavoidable part of human life. How do states of uncertainty influence the way people make decisions? We advance the proposition that states of uncertainty increase the reliance on affective inputs in judgments and decisions. In accord with this proposition, results from six studies show that the priming of uncertainty (vs. certainty) consistently increases the effects of a variety of affective inputs on consumers' judgments and decisions.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) campaigns have traditionally focused on maximizing the profitability of the targeted customers. In this paper we investigate the social effects of CRM campaigns. We demonstrate that, in business settings that are characterized by network externalities, a CRM campaign that is aimed at changing the behavior of specific customers propagates through the social network, thereby also affecting the behavior of non-targeted customers.

We make three points in response to Boyce, Daly, Hounkpatin, and Wood (2017). First, we clarify a misunderstanding of the goal of our analyses, which was to investigate the links between life satisfaction and spending patterns, rather than spending volume. Second, we report a simulation study we ran to demonstrate that our results were not driven by the proposed statistical artifact. Finally, we discuss the broader issue of why, in a world of big data, small but reliable effect sizes can be valuable.

Ethics in business is a major topic both in the social sciences and in business itself. Anthropologists, long attendant to the intersection of ethics and practice, are particularly well suited to offer vital insights on the subject.

In this paper we show how simple text mining and semantic network analysis may be used to (i) improve our theoretical understanding of idea generation, (ii) help people improve the creativity of their ideas. From a theoretical perspective, we contribute to the cognitive idea generation literature by establishing a link between the set of concepts used to form an idea and the creativity of the idea. Each idea contains a subset of the semantic network of concepts related to the topic.

Ethics in business is a major topic both in the social sciences and in business itself. Anthropologists, long attendant to the intersection of ethics and practice, are particularly well suited to offer vital insights on the subject. This timely collection considers a range of ethical issues in business through the examination of anthropologically informed theory and case examples.

In this chapter, we discuss both the criticisms and benefits of advertising and address ethical concerns for anthropologists involved in the creation of advertising. We examine how ethical complexities range from the question of advertising as a necessary form of consumer-brand engagement to socially responsible advertising as a necessary form of consumer-brand engagement to socially responsible advertising, to professional ethics surrounding the objects or brands being advertised, and to the work of anthropologists in advancing advertising campaigns.