Economics Insights @ CBS

Perhaps because of its importance, brand performance has been approached in several different ways by several different researchers employing several different measures. Lehmann, Keller, and Farley examine a broad range of these measures to explore their overlap and to uncover core underlying dimensions and the structure of brand performance metrics that balance parsimony and completeness. They also examine how different dimensions of brand performance and profiles of leading brands vary by country (i.e., the United States and China).

Scientific inquiry often advances in triadic waves of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. We concur with Simonson (this issue) that BDT's antithesis of preference construction, positioned against the normative utility thesis, may have swung the pendulum too far. Contrary to BDT's focus on constructed preference, inherent preferences—or what may be considered dispositions—are ubiquitous and critical determinants of choice.

Product discussion boards are a rich source of information about consumer sentiment about products, which is being increasingly exploited. Most sentiment analysis has looked at single products in isolation, but users often compare different products, stating which they like better and why. We present a set of techniques for analyzing how consumers view product markets. Specifically, we extracted relative sentiment analysis and comparisons between products, to understand what attributes users compare products on, and which products they prefer on each dimension.