Marketing

Is the perceived value of things an absolute measurable quantity, as in economists’ notion of “cardinal utility,” or a relative assessment of the various objects being evaluated, as in economists’ notion of “ordinal utility”? We believe that the answer depends in part upon which judgment system underlies the evaluation. Specifically, we advance the proposition that due to its distant evolutionary roots, the affective system of judgment is inherently more ordinal (less cardinal) than the cognitive system.

We present an end-to-end text mining methodology for relation extraction of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) from medical forums on the Web. Our methodology is novel in that it combines three major characteristics: (i) an underlying concept of using a head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) based parser; (ii) domain-specific relation patterns, the acquisition of which is done primarily using unsupervised methods applied to a large, unlabeled text corpus; and (iii) automated post-processing algorithms for enhancing the set of extracted relations.

The authors explore how firms can enhance consumer performance in online idea generation platforms. Most, if not all, online idea generation platforms offer all consumers identical tasks in which (1) participants are granted access to ideas from other participants and (2) ideas are classified into categories, but consumers can navigate freely across idea categories. The former is linked to stimulus ideas, and the latter may be viewed as a first step toward problem decomposition.

I view the research articles presented here as prototypical examples of what may be called “the new wave” in studying Asian markets and consumers. This emerging “new wave” has a different focus than research done over the last few decades. Research is shifting from an emphasis on traditional Asian culture toward a focus on consumer culture and how this consumer culture manifests itself in various Asian markets. The “new wave” research also focuses less on general concepts and more on uniquely Asian phenomena. Finally, methodologically research is shifting from “East” vs.

We develop and test hypotheses regarding the role of social contagion in customer adoption of new sales channels. We examine two aspects of social contagion (local contagion and homophily) and two channels (Internet and bricks-and-mortar store). Drawing on diffusion theory, we propose a conceptual framework that identifies the factors associated with new channel adoption.

It is becoming increasingly easier for researchers and practitioners to collect eye tracking data during online preference measurement tasks. We develop a dynamic discrete choice model of information search and choice under bounded rationality, that we calibrate using a combination of eye-tracking and choice data. Our model extends the directed cognition model of Gabaix et al. (2006) by capturing fatigue, proximity effects, and imperfect memory encoding and by estimating individual-level parameters and partworths within a likelihood-based, hierarchical Bayesian framework.

This paper studies the competition between Web 2.0 communities in a game theoretic framework. We model three important features of these institutions: (i) firms' content is usually user-generated; (ii) consumers' content preferences are governed by local network effects, and (iii) consumers have strong tendencies to multi-home. Our analyses reveal that ex-ante identical community sites can acquire differentiated market positions that spontaneously emerge from user-generated content.

During the 2014 EPIC Conference, Allen Batteau and Robert J. Morais led a workshop entitled “Toward Conceptual, Methodological, and Ethical Standards of Practice in Business Anthropology.” This article summarizes the objectives and results of the workshop.

The paper investigates the long-run consequences of multichannel shopping on customers' spending. Using data from a major US catalog company which introduced an online channel, our results validate previous findings that multichannel customers spend more than mono-channel customers in the short run. However, the difference in spending dissipates over time with multichannel customers reverting to their regular consumption pattern in 3 years.