We introduce the concept of an underdog brand biography to describe an emerging trend in branding in which firms author a historical account of their humble origins, lack of resources, and determined struggle against the odds. We identify two essential dimensions of an underdog biography:...

Brands rushed into social media, viewing social networks, video sharing, online communities, and microblogging sites as the panacea to diminishing returns for traditional brand building routes. But as more branding activity moves to the Web, marketers are confronted with the stark realization...

Purpose – We introduce the concept of a brand biography to describe an emerging trend in branding in which firms author a dynamic, historical account of the events that have shaped the brand over time. Using a particular type of brand biography, “the underdog,” we empirically show how...

Prior research hypothesizes managers use "real actions," including the reduction of discretionary expenditures, to manage earnings to meet or beat key benchmarks. This paper examines this hypothesis by testing how different types of marketing expenditures are used to boost earnings for a durable...

This article introduces a newly discovered property of discrete-choice models, which I call the invariant proportion of substitution (IPS). Like the independence from irrelevant alternatives (IIA) property, IPS implies individual behavior that is counterintuitive in the context of choice among...

We introduce the idea of a massively categorical variable, a variable such as zip code that takes on too many values to treat in the standard manner. We show how to use a massively categorical variable directly as an explanatory variable. As an application of this concept, we explore several of...