Marketing Letters最新文献

Since 1994, marketing academics have accumulated a wealth of empirical evidence on product recall. However, the findings have not been integrated into a framework that can summarize the evidence and elicit theoretically interesting and managerially relevant questions for future research. The authors address this shortcoming. Specifically, they create a framework that summarizes the causes, consequences, and strategies of product recall. Next, they use the framework to identify descriptive facts and empirical generalizations that pave the path for a meta-analysis. Lastly, the framework helps the authors suggest six questions—two each on causes, consequences, and strategies—that future research can consider answering.

This paper examines the effects of handmade (vs. machine-made) gifts on social relationships. Across three studies, we find that handmade gifts promote social relationships. This effect can be explained by the perceived uniqueness of such gifts. Furthermore, these effects are moderated by social class (upper vs. lower). Specifically, membership in the upper class enhances the recipient’s perceived uniqueness of handmade gifts, which in turn enhances the recipient’s evaluation of social relationships. However, for members of the lower class, their perception of the uniqueness of handmade gifts becomes weaker, to the detriment of social relationships. These novel findings have both theoretical and practical significance for establishing harmonious interpersonal relationships and the consumption of handmade gifts.

Blockchain technology (BT) represents a chance to bolster consumer responses toward retailers due to its ability to ensure transparency in each transaction within supply chain. Relying on signaling theory, we propose and test a theoretical model to examine BT effects. We test our theorizing in three experiments involving a total of 1995 participants. Our results suggest that retailer transparency elicited by BT fosters enhanced quality perceptions and retailer trust. As a result, consumers display higher future intentions toward the retailer. The findings illustrate that information quantity moderates the effects of transparency. Furthermore, the studies rule out interactivity and mental imagery as two possible alternative explanations of the effects of BT transparency. Our findings shed light on the importance of transparency in the supply chain in influencing consumer responses toward retailers and encourage retailers to consider in-store technologies such as BT that enable consumers to access such information.

The current research constructs a framework to understand how subjective socioeconomic status (SES) affects consumers’ AI aversion in the evaluation context. Three experiments show that subjective SES has a negative impact on consumers’ willingness to accept AI evaluation. Consumers with higher subjective SES are more likely to resist AI evaluation because they perceive that AI agents are not as capable as human agents of identifying their talents. This effect is moderated by the agent type–the impact of subjective SES on resistance to the AI agent is attenuated when the AI agent is non-evaluative. This research is of great significance in enriching research on improving AI services efficiency across various social classes.

This study investigates how CEO-related events covered in news media affect consumer evaluations. The conceptual model proposes six CEO-related news categories and details their impact on consumer evaluations as well as the degree to which these responses determine firms’ stock prices. The authors analyze a rich sample of 725 CEO-related events of 125 firms covered in leading US news outlets from 2009 to 2019. Using an econometric approach and an event study, they find that stories about CEO scandals detrimentally affect consumer evaluations, which translates to an immediate loss of more than US$500 million on stock markets, whereas stories about CEO altruism and CEO political ideologies have a positive impact on consumer evaluations. The authors provide insights into short and long-term effects and formulate actionable implications.

This paper examines a monopolist platform’s data strategy comprising of data collection and data protection under two different data ownership regimes: one, where users have no control over the amount of data shared with the platform, and the other, where users can set privacy controls. Moreover, we also consider the welfare implications of introducing a minimum data protection regulation under the two data ownership regimes. Our analysis yields novel insights: (i) empowering users leads to a sub-optimal level of data collection and protectionIndian Institute of Management Bangaloreith empowering users to control data can better achieve the regulator’s objective of enhancing consumer welfare.

Abstract

Do online research participants complete studies as continuous tasks, or do they switch back and forth between the study and other online activities? While researchers generally prefer for participants to complete online studies continuously, participants may choose to multitask and complete other activities simultaneous to the study, potentially impacting their responses. This research directly measures the prevalence of online participant multitasking across three studies, examines the impact of multitasking on participant responses, and explores solutions for reducing multitasking. Findings indicate that multitasking is common, is dramatically understated in participant self-reports, can be observed unobtrusively, significantly affects participant responses, and is difficult to reduce. I also find age and gender differences in the frequency of multitasking. The appendices include new code, making it easy for other researchers to measure multitasking on multiple platforms.

Consumers often face uncertainty in decision-making while assessing options presented as attribute-bundles as they are unable to assess their utility. This confusion is exacerbated by the presence of a “decoy,” or an inferior option, which leads to the phenomenon of attraction effect, while the presence of an equally attractive alternative leads to the compromise effect. In this study, we show that if functional attribute values are converted into ratings on a common scale, consumers do not depend on attribute-based processing but choose an option by considering appropriate attribute-bundles based on the attribute ratings. This shift in decision-making process attenuates both attraction and compromise effects.