Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Using the results of 1068 different golf, tennis, and track and field (in particular: running) events, this paper examines the relation between athlete performance and stock returns of firms endorsed by athletes. We find that a tournament victory is associated with significant and positive market-adjusted stock returns for the endorsed clothing brand. Regression analysis reveals that winning is associated with a more positive price reaction than finishing as runner-up. In addition, we find that returns after a victory are significantly higher for endorsed clothing brands than for equipment brands. We did not detect return differences between superstars and regular athletes, nor between frequently endorsed brands and less commonly endorsed brands.

In this paper, we study the impact of customer stochasticity on firm price discrimination strategies. We develop a new model termed the Bayesian Mixture Scale Heterogeneity (BMSH) model that incorporates both parameter heterogeneity and customer stochasticity using a mixture model approach, and demonstrate model identification using extensive simulations. We estimate the model on yogurt scanner data and find that compared to the benchmark mixed logit and multinomial probit models, our model shows that markets are less price elastic, and that a majority of customers exhibit stochasticity in purchases; our model also obtains better prediction and more profitable targeting strategies.

In this paper we study such pricing practices like MCI's Friends and Family Program that employ price discriminations on the basis of callers' social ties. We characterize a consumer's personal communication network by the number of strong and weak ties that the consumer has. We then derive a consumer's demand for communication service from the structure of the consumer's personal communication network. A monopoly firm's social network-based discriminatory pricing strategy consists of a menu of price plans, each plan targeting at one type of social networks. Our paper provides useful guidelines for the design of optimal social network-based discriminatory pricing strategies. We show that a firm may offer price discounts to communications between “friends and family members” in order to extract a larger profit from communications between callers with weak ties.

Social media listening has become an integral part of many companies marketing strategies. Using a unique dataset of social media comments to 413 movie trailers, we document the systematic differences in sentiments expressed on Facebook and YouTube. First, Facebook comments are less likely to involve sentiments. Second, when sentiments are expressed, Facebook comments tend to be more positive than those on YouTube. Third, on both platforms, comments are more likely to express sentiments after a movie’s release than before it. Furthermore, the sentiment gap between Facebook and YouTube diminishes after a movie’s release. We propose a behavioral explanation for our findings based on network structure and social desirability bias and test our hypothesis with an experiment. Finally, we demonstrate that cross-platform sentiment divergence is significantly associated with box office revenue.

Our study offers a novel approach to investigating whether and when culturally customized websites are an effective way to influence consumers in their online purchase decisions. In particular, informed by extant studies on metacognitive experiences and processing fluency, we examine the underlying mechanism whereby increased cultural congruence derived from a culturally customized website may influence the subjective experience and increase willingness to pay (WTP) online. In order to address these issues, we have conducted two empirical studies that (1) identify cultural differences between the websites of Korean and U.S. travel agencies and (2) investigate the influence of culturally customized websites on WTP in these two markets. The results show that the cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance is associated significantly with processing fluency, which mediates the consumers’ WTP. In particular, culturally customized websites are more likely to be effective for Korean consumers who have high uncertainty avoidance compared with U.S. consumers who have low uncertainty avoidance. We found that when Korean consumers experience cultural incongruence, they feel a need to exert increased effort in order to process information, which mediates their WTP. However, cultural congruence does not have a significant effect on U.S. consumer WTP. The study has important implications for both academics and managers when developing and employing culturally customized websites to communicate with their consumers.

Four studies demonstrate that people are more likely to buy (but not to buy more) when directly asked how much to buy in response to a set of purchase quantities (0, 1, 2 … n) than when first asked whether to buy in response to a seemingly innocuous yes/no purchase-interest question. This finding is explained in terms of response-scale partitioning. A purchase-quantity scale has a single negative (0) and multiple (n) positive response options. In contrast, a dichotomous yes/no purchase-interest question has an equal proportion of negative (“no”) and positive (“yes”) response options, the latter of which subsumes all positive quantity options into one partition. Ascertaining purchase interest using a single negative and multiple positive response options (“no,” “mildly,” “somewhat,” “likely,” “very,” and “definitely”) eliminated the effect.

We consider customer influences on market structure, arguing that market structure should explain the extent to which any given set of market offerings are substitutes or complements. We describe recent additions to the market structure analysis literature and identify promising directions for new research in market structure analysis. Impressive advances in data collection, statistical methodology and information technology provide unique opportunities for researchers to build market structure tools that can assist “real-time” marketing decision-making.

This article presents a study designed to investigate and map the trajectories of brand love. Consumers described experiences related to the initiation and evolution of their relationships with their most loved brand. Participants were asked to graphically trace the course of their feelings toward their currently most loved brand and to recall the events that influenced those feelings. The paths toward brand love followed five distinct trajectories, labeled as “slow development,” “liking becomes love,” “love all the way,” “bumpy road,” and “turnabout.” The formative experiences shaping these trajectories often include individual, personal, and private experiences that are largely outside any marketer’s control.

The visible trace of online communications has given rise to research on their effect on firm outcomes. The literature has established a link between online communication about a product and the product’s sales and price performance. On the assumption that financial markets understand this link, we conjecture financial markets consider the amount of online communication, or chatter, about a firm to be an indication of the firm’s performance in the marketplace. Our results confirm this conjecture. The relationship between stock returns and chatter are robust to alternative specifications of the model and to alternative measures of stock returns. We also investigate the issues of reverse causality and omitted variable bias driving a spurious relationship between stock returns and chatter. The data are not consistent with any of these alternative explanations for our results.