Consumers are often skeptical of social innovation (e.g., CSR), thinking that firms undertake such innovations to increase profit rather than to “do the right thing.” How can firms convey the social and monetary benefits of investing in social innovations to consumers and stakeholders to best improve their brand image?…Read More
Technological innovation is changing the landscape of many industries, and automotive telematics devices are perhaps the most disruptive technology for the auto insurance industry and most automotive manufacturers have plans to develop telematics. Moreover, a number of startup companies use telematics devices in various applications. …Read More
We study the demand for one-to-one customization in the computer hardware industry. Using household browsing, transaction, and demographic data from the comScore database, we uncover evidence that geographically isolated households that are technologically savvy are more likely to buy and customize computer hardware online. …Read More
Wharton professor Serguei Netessine finds that even as consumers are deluged with a growing array of choices, they tend to remain loyal to familiar brands and products.…Read More
We describe the effect of social media advertising content on customer engagement using data from Facebook. We content-code 106,316 Facebook messages across 782 companies, using a combination of Amazon Mechanical Turk and Natural Language Processing algorithms.…Read More
The ability to predict consumer preferences for new fashions by clothing manufacturer executives seems rather low. This is confirmed by secondary data on inventory markdowns and our pilot interviews with major manufacturers. …Read More
We empirically examine the impact of expanded product variety on demand concentration using large data sets from the movie rental industry as our test bed. We find that product variety is likely to increase demand concentration.…Read More
We investigate the impact of several different recommender algorithms (e.g., Amazon.com’s “Consumers who bought this item also bought”), commonly used in ecommerce and online services, on sales volume and diversity, using field experiment data on movie sales from a top retailer in North America. …Read More
This project aims to investigate industrial organization issues related to adoption of health information exchange (HIE) technology. The paper proposes a novel model of providers’ decisions to participate in HIE. This paper focuses on an unexplored and potentially important barrier – a first-mover disadvantage from lower switching costs.…Read More
There is a growing trend among consumers to serially consume small, incomplete “chunks” of multiple media types—television, radio, Internet, and print—within a short time period. We refer to this behavior as media multiplexing and note the key challenges for integrated marketing communications media planners.…Read More
Consumer reviews may reflect not only perceived quality but also the difference between quality and price (perceived value). In markets where product prices change frequently, these price-influenced reviews may be biased as a signal of product quality when used by consumers possessing no knowledge of historical prices.…Read More
Companies in a variety of industries (e.g., airlines, hotels, theaters) often use last-minute sales to dispose of unsold capacity. Although this may generate incremental revenues in the short term, the long-term consequences of such a strategy are not immediately obvious.…Read More
