Understanding and measuring social inter-correlations among consumers are important for marketing researchers as consumers form social networks and their behavior and preference are likely to be interdependent. In this paper, we show that the estimation of consumers' social inter-correlations...

Rural consumers may face not only the challenge of affordability but also the problem of limited accessibility. Can a government's subsidy program effectively address these issues? This paper examines the impact of a large-scale subsidy program, “Household Electrical Appliances Going to the...

Although consumers increasingly use online communities for various activities, little is known regarding how participation in them affects individuals' decision making strategies. Through a series of field and laboratory studies, we demonstrate that participation in an online community increases...

Signs of the gender gap are ubiquitous in society. Psychological theory suggests that when gender stereotypes are associated with competition, men exert greater effort against women (dominance effect) and women exert less effort against men (submissive effect), which implies that women are at a...

This paper examines the effects of sequential movie releases on the dilution and the enhancement of celebrity brands. The authors use favorability ratings collected over a 12-year period (1993 to 2005) to capture movement in the brand equity of a panel of actors/actresses. A dynamic panel data...

A common dilemma a consumer faces during product return pertains to the decision of exchanging the product or obtaining a refund. This issue becomes even more salient for durable goods, when the initial purchase involves complementary products from different categories. This research examines...

We develop a structural dynamic demand model that examines how brand preferences evolve when consumers are uncertain about product quality and their needs change periodically. We allow for strategic sampling behavior of consumers under quality uncertainty and allow for strategic sampling to...

This paper investigates the economic value of online reviews for consumers and restaurants. We use a dataset from Dianping.com, a leading Chinese website providing user-generated reviews, to study how consumers learn from reading online reviews the quality and cost of dining a restaurants. We...

This paper empirically investigates how marketers can retarget consumers who have searched online but did not purchase, based on their search behaviors. To infer the relationship between search activities and preferences, we estimate a structural search model that characterizes the consumer...