Technology that processes text, audio and video, as well as location data, has revolutionized many industries by enabling innovative operations for customer retention. To retain transactions for a platform and viewers for advertisers, this dissertation leverages novel digital tools to analyze consumer behavior, proposes original economic frameworks to guide platform...
Cuteness is a popular aesthetic in product design, yet there is a lack of understanding of who is most likely to engage in cute consumption and, more importantly, why. In this dissertation, I consider the role of sex and gender identity in cute consumption, proposing a strong mental association between...
Pharmaceutical companies pay more than $2 billion to physicians every year. Most of these payments are for food and beverage, speaking, honoraria, consulting, and travel and lodging, which are termed “general payments.” These payments have come under increased scrutiny as critics of pharmaceutical promotion argue that they influence prescribing in...
People pursuing important goals are known to prefer means that are highly instrumental (those most likely to facilitate goal pursuit). The self-handicapping literature demonstrated an important caveat to this principle—that people instead prefer impediments (rather than instrumental means) to their most important, identity-central goals when they anticipate goal failure. Such...
As many retailers are extending their channels to both online and offline, consumers nowadays are increasingly buying products across different shopping platforms, ranging from traditional catalog and retail channels to Internet stores. Thus, it is important to understand how the purchasing experiences and the factors surrounding the multichannel shopping environment...
Firms are facing reputational crises with increasing regularity. Despite this, relatively little is known about what types of firm actions consumers will judge to be reprehensible, and how firms should respond once a reputational crisis has occurred. In this dissertation I focus on two specific topics related to firm reputational...