Publications

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02 Sep 2008
Research & Ideas

Indulgence vs. Regret: Investing in Future Memories

being toovirtuous and hard-working. She also presents a strategy to correct this behavior. Aside from influencing how people choose to live their lives, Keinan's findings have implications for marketers hoping to convince consumers to... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

August 2009
Case

Global Wine War 2009: New World versus Old

By: Christopher A. Bartlett

The case contrasts the tradition-bound Old World wine industry with the market-oriented New World producers, the battle for the US market, the most desirable export target in 2009 due to its large, fast-growing, high-priced market segments. The case allows analysis of... View Details

Keywords: Trade; Global Strategy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Consumer Behavior; Market Entry and Exit; Competition; Food and Beverage Industry

05 May 2003
Research & Ideas

Sharing the Responsibility of Corporate Governance

resolved it. Since past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior, the board should ask candidates what concrete steps they took in their prior job to ensure that senior and lower-level managers were conducting the business with... View Details

Keywords: by Carla Tishler

December 2019
Article

The Impact of Increasing Search Frictions on Online Shopping Behavior: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By: Donald Ngwe, Kris J. Ferreira and Thales Teixeira

Many online stores are designed such that shoppers can easily access any available discounted products. We propose that deliberately increasing search frictions by placing small obstacles to locating discounted items can improve online retailers’ margins and even... View Details

Keywords: Online Retailing; Friction; Effor; Search Costs; Price Discrimination; Marketing; Consumer Behavior; Strategy; Price; E-commerce; Retail Industry; Fashion Industry

June (Jiwoon) Park is a doctoral student in Marketing at Harvard Business School.

Her research interests include consumer behavior, judgment and decision-making, and human-machine interaction (HMI). Prior to joining HBS, June received her M.S. in Marketing... View Details

Article

Unhealthy Consumerism: The Challenge of Trading Off Price and Quality in Healthcare

By: Kate Barasz and Peter A. Ubel

Over the last decade, healthcare in many parts of the world has shifted toward a more patient-centric, consumeristic model, marked by an emphasis on choice and a proliferation of typical consumer-facing information (e.g., price and quality data). However, while the... View Details

Keywords: Medical Decision-making; Choice; Health Care and Treatment; Quality; Price; Consumer Behavior; Decision Making

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January 1996 (Revised February 1997)
Case

Exploring Brand-Person Relationships: Three Life Histories

The idea that "relationships" exist between consumers and products has implicitly occupied a central place in brand marketing thought and practice. Now as relational (one-on-one) marketing is said to be replacing transactional (mass) marketing as the dominant paradigm... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Relationships; Brands and Branding

03 Mar 2008
Research & Ideas

Marketing Your Way Through a Recession

weakening both consumer confidence and the consumer spending—much of it on credit—that has been buoying the U.S. economy. Companies should bear eight factors in mind when making their marketing plans for... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch

2024
Working Paper

The Operational Impact of Customer Location in On-Demand Services

By: Natalie Epstein, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno

The rapid growth of on-demand delivery services, particularly in the food and grocery sectors, has driven the expansion of hyperlocal fulfillment centers (FCs). This paper uses data from an on-demand grocery delivery platform in Latin America to assess how customer... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Logistics; Geographic Location; Service Delivery; Quality; Retail Industry; Latin America

SSRN

01 Dec 2015
First Look

December 1, 2015

Meaningful Relationships Between Brain and Consumer Behavior By: Plassmann, Hilke, and Uma R. Karmarkar Abstract—The goal of this chapter is to give an overview of the nascent field of View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Article

Productivity Orientation and the Consumption of Collectable Experiences

By: Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz

This research examines why consumers desire unusual and novel consumption experiences and voluntarily choose leisure activities, vacations, and celebrations that are predicted to be less pleasurable. For example, consumers sometimes choose to stay at freezing ice... View Details

Keywords: Experience and Expertise; Innovation and Invention; Marketing Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Performance Productivity

August 1978 (Revised October 1979)
Case

Grey Advertising/Canada Dry Account

After taking over Canada Dry's mixers account in 1966, Grey Advertising assembled a successful ad campaign that increased ginger ale sales significantly. But Canada Dry's market share for ginger ale and its other mixer products had remained the same or declined during... View Details

Keywords: Marketing Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Advertising Campaigns; Advertising Industry; Food and Beverage Industry

March 2011 (Revised December 2012)
Case

Demand Media

By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld

Google search had helped Demand Media grow to be a $1.9 billion online publisher. Then, social media and smartphone apps began to change the way people navigated the Internet. How should Demand Media respond? The business ran on a radically new model in which a stable... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Information Publishing; Consumer Behavior; Customization and Personalization; Internet and the Web; Publishing Industry

September 2011
Module Note

Orientation to Leadership Intelligence Days, 2011

By: Joshua D. Margolis and Anthony J. Mayo

Julie Bornstein, senior vice president of Sephora Direct, is seeking to double her budget for social media and other digital marketing initiatives for 2011. A number of digital efforts implemented in the past two years seem to be bearing fruit and there is a desire to... View Details

Keywords: Budgets and Budgeting; Borrowing and Debt; Investment Return; Resource Allocation; Marketing Communications; Marketing Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Online Technology; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry

2017
Article

Frictions or Mental Gaps: What's Behind the Information We (Don't) Use and When Do We Care?

By: Benjamin Handel and Joshua Schwartzstein

Consumers suffer significant losses from not acting on available information. These losses stem from frictions such as search costs, switching costs, and rational inattention, as well as what we call mental gaps resulting from wrong priors/worldviews, or relevant... View Details

Keywords: Information; Consumer Behavior

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Research Summary

Social Learning

One major area of my research is social learning: the ways and extent to which people discover what they want and need from the behavior and opinions of others. Social learning takes many forms. Probably most obvious is word of mouth—the advice and... View Details

05 Jul 2006
Working Paper Summaries

The Presentation of Self in the Information Age

Keywords: by John A. Deighton; Advertising

March 2021
Article

Assortment Rotation and the Value of Concealment

By: Kris J. Ferreira and Joel Goh

Assortment rotation—the retailing practice of changing the assortment of products offered to customers—has recently been used as a competitive advantage for both brick-and-mortar and online retailers. We focus on product categories where consumers may purchase multiple... View Details

Keywords: Assortment Optimization; Retailing; Imperfect Information; Sales; Strategy; Consumer Behavior

2023
Working Paper

Saving and Consumption Responses to Student Loan Forbearance

By: Justin Katz

How do households adjust savings and consumption in response to liquidity from debt relief? I study this question using policy variation induced by federal student loan forbearance in the 2020 CARES Act and an individual-level panel of daily financial transactions for... View Details

Keywords: Saving; Consumer Behavior; Borrowing and Debt; Interest Rates; Financial Liquidity; Personal Finance; Government Legislation