Publications

31 May 2007
Working Paper Summaries

Extremeness Seeking: When and Why Consumers Prefer the Extremes

Keywords: by John T. Gourville & Dilip Soman

16 Apr 2018
Research & Ideas

Can Consumers Be Saved From Their Misguided Decisions?

choice exists, or think about it the wrong way, like Advil buyers. In a friction analysis, researchers theorize people are overwhelmed, and don’t take the time to investigate before making a decision. Too many things going on in a... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Consulting; Retail

01 Jun 2002
News

Ads Improve Consumer Decisions

in 1995. Linking this with Nielsen viewer panel data on over fifteen hundred individuals, Anand and Shachar developed a model to determine how well TV viewers' choices of programming “matched” their likely viewing preferences (based upon... View Details

Keywords: Laura Singleton (MBA 1988)

01 Dec 2017
News

2017 in Finance: Helping Consumers Improve Their Financial Life

Large consumer banks have historically collected a lot of data on their customers, which they have used to sell standardized products. Increasingly, however, we have seen new entrants using customer data to help the View Details

Keywords: Omer Ismail (MBA 2007), chief commercial officer, Marcus by Goldman Sachs, the firm’s digital consumer financial services business; Finance

06 Dec 2020
Working Paper Summaries

'Repayment-by-Purchase' Helps Consumers to Reduce Credit Card Debt

Keywords: by Grant E. Donnelly, Cait Lamberton, Stephen Bush, Zoe Chance, and Michael I. Norton

29 Aug 2023
News

Helping Consumers Decarbonize their Purchases

This episode of Climate Rising features a conversation between Professor and host Mike Toffel and Sanchali Pal (MBA 2018), founder and CEO of Commons, an app designed to help consumers make more climate-friendly purchasing decisions by... View Details

02 Nov 2016
Blog Post

Career and Internship Choices for the Classes of 2016 and 2017

consumer packaged goods, with the later appearing to be driven by interest in smaller, early-stage companies. View a complete analysis of the career and internship choices for the MBA Classes of 2016 and... View Details

Keywords: All Industries

12 Nov 2015
Research & Ideas

Can Consumers be Trusted with Their Own Health Care?

supermarket, stopping to linger as long as they wanted or moving as quickly as they wished. A one-size-fits-all approach to health care doesn’t work. ©iStock/AndreyPopov “There is more choice available to the View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Health

Research Summary

Consumer Response to Online Ratings and Recommendations

Jolie is currently conducting several laboratory and field experiments to assess the tendency of individuals to employ predictable heuristics in complex information aggregation tasks, thus leading to search and choice behavior that is suboptimal relative to the fully... View Details

05 Aug 2002
Research & Ideas

Are Consumers the Cure for Broken Health Insurance?

reduces prices, improves quality, and expands choices. The essential problem with the health care industry is that it has been shielded from consumer control—by employers, insurers, and the government. As a result, costs have exploded as... View Details

Keywords: by Regina E. Herzlinger

April 2022
Article

Consumers Value Effort over Ease When Caring for Close Others

By: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Mary Steffel, Elanor F. Williams and Michael I. Norton

Many products and services are designed to make caregiving easier, from premade meals for feeding families to robo-cribs that automatically rock babies to sleep. Yet, using these products may come with a cost: consumers may feel they have not exerted enough effort.... View Details

Keywords: Effor; Caregiving; Close Relationships; Symbolic Meaning; Signaling; Relationships; Consumer Behavior; Perception

2023
Working Paper

Who Invests in Crypto? Wealth, Financial Constraints, and Risk Attitudes

By: Darren Aiello, Scott R. Baker, Tetyana Balyuk, Marco Di Maggio, Mark J. Johnson and Jason Kotter

We provide a first look into the drivers of household cryptocurrency investing. Analyzing consumer transaction data for millions of U.S. households, we find that, except for high income early adopters, cryptocurrency investors resemble the general population. These... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Finance; Cryptocurrency; Fintech; Inflation; Portfolio Choice; Stimulus; Consumer Behavior; Risk and Uncertainty; Investment

SSRN

November 2007
Article

Measuring Consumer and Competitive Impact with Elasticity Decompositions

Marketing investments are designed to change consumer behavior in ways that help goods compete in the marketplace. Previous research has focused on using elasticity decompositions to measure how these investments affect either consumer decision making or competing... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment Return; Marketing Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Measurement and Metrics; Mathematical Methods; Competitive Advantage

06 Jun 2016
News

Know the Job Your Product Was Hired to Do

Keywords: innovation; customer relationship management; consumer choice

2016
Book

Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

By: Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan

The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services that customers want to buy and are willing to purchase at a premium price.... View Details

Keywords: Disruptive Innovation; Consumer Behavior

Purchase

02 Apr 2015
Research & Ideas

Digital Initiative Summit: Big Messages, Small Screens, Many Choices

is, if the app is the way we interact with the brands, how do you get me to be one of your favorite apps?" Gupta said that a successful app must provide obvious, unique value—and meet consumers where they live. As an example, he cited the... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Advertising

October 1999 (Revised March 2000)
Case

HP Consumer Products Business Organization: Distributing Printers via the Internet

By: Rajiv Lal, Kirthi Kalyanam, Shelby Mc Intyre and Edie Prescott

In spring 1998, Pradeep Jotwani, vice president and general manager of the Consumer Products Business Organization of the Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), was contemplating the increasing success of e-commerce and its implications for his division. The consumer products group... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Marketing Channels; Business Processes; Problems and Challenges; Partners and Partnerships; Sales; Business Strategy; Information Technology; Consumer Products Industry

Educators

Purchase

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

2024
Working Paper

Platform Information Provision and Consumer Search: A Field Experiment

By: Lu Fang, Yanyou Chen, Chiara Farronato, Zhe Yuan and Yitong Wang

Despite substantial efforts to help consumers search in more intuitive ways, text search remains the predominant tool for product discovery online. In this paper, we explore the effects of visual and textual cues for search refinement on consumer search and purchasing... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; E-commerce; Decision Choices and Conditions; Learning; Internet and the Web