Publications

Find at Harvard

April 2014 (Revised June 2015)
Case

Making stickK Stick: The Business of Behavioral Economics

By: Leslie John, Michael Norton and Michael Norris

Email mking@hbs.edu for a courtesy copy.

stickK.com, a website that uses behavioral economics to help users achieve their goals, must choose between a direct-to-consumer or business-to-business model. The case... View Details

Keywords: Behavioral Economics; Behavior Change; B2B Vs. B2C; Human Resource Management; Marketing Of Innovations; Health ＆ Wellness; Weight Loss; Charitable Giving; Marketing; Consumer Behavior; Entrepreneurship; Internet and the Web; Health; Business Model; Sales; Human Resources; Health Industry; United States

Research Summary

Consumer Habituation

This paper examines how consumers willingness to pay for goods is determined by past patterns of consumption. The central result is a theorem of interior maximum, which states that willingness to pay for a good is maximized at a moderate level of habitual... View Details

June 2020
Case

Agile Consumer Product Innovation with Alibaba's Tmall Innovation Center

By: William R. Kerr, Daniel O'Connor and James Palano

Consumer products companies were beset by changes on all sides during the 2010s. Customers were increasingly turning to ecommerce platforms rather than shopping in-store. Meanwhile, nimble, digitally-savvy competitors were gaining market share by capitalizing on the... View Details

Keywords: Future Of Work; Retail; Ecommerce; Alibaba; Consumer Products; Innovation; Innovation and Invention; Product Development; Consumer Behavior; E-commerce; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; China

24 Apr 2014
News

Creating a mathematical method to understand consumer behavior in a digital world

Sunil Gupta, Edward W. Carter Professor of Business Administration, focuses on understanding customers and how they make decisions in a digital world. Gupta has tackled one of the most vexing questions in studies of consumer behavior:... View Details

2021
Working Paper

The Situational Samaritan: How and Why Marketplace Conditions Shape Prosocial Consumer Behaviors

By: Julia von Schuckmann, Lucia S.G. Barrios, Grant E. Donnelly and Marco Bertini

2023
Working Paper

Rising Markups and the Role of Consumer Preferences

By: Hendrik Döpper, Alexander MacKay, Nathan H. Miller and Joel Stiebale

We characterize the evolution of markups for consumer products in the United States from 2006 to 2019. We use detailed data on prices and quantities for products in more than 100 distinct product categories to estimate demand systems with flexible... View Details

Keywords: Market Power; Markups; Demand Estimation; Consumer Products; Retailers; Product; Price; Demand and Consumers; Consumer Behavior

SSRN

May 1999
Background Note

Note on Behavioral Pricing

By: John T. Gourville

The note introduces the behavioral or psychological aspects of consumer price acceptance. Begins by reviewing the traditional economic approach to product pricing and consumer price acceptance--namely, that consumers should be willing to purchase anytime a product's... View Details

Keywords: Customer Satisfaction; Decisions; Fairness; Price; Marketing Strategy; Behavior; Perspective; Public Opinion

2021
Article

Consumer Disclosure

By: Tami Kim, Kate Barasz and Leslie John

As technological advances enable consumers to share more information in unprecedented ways, today’s disclosure takes on a variety of new forms, triggering a paradigm shift in what “disclosure” entails. This review introduces two factors to conceptualize consumer... View Details

Keywords: Disclosure; Passive Disclosure; Information; Internet and the Web; Consumer Behavior; Situation or Environment

2022
Working Paper

Product2Vec: Leveraging Representation Learning to Model Consumer Product Choice in Large Assortments

By: Fanglin Chen, Xiao Liu, Davide Proserpio and Isamar Troncoso

We propose a method, Product2Vec, based on representation learning, that can automatically learn latent product attributes that drive consumer choices, to study product-level competition when the number of products is large. We demonstrate Product2Vec’s... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Choice; Consumer Behavior; Competition; Product Marketing

SSRN

23 Jul 2021
Blog Post

Trends in Consumer Products

show the range of consumer product companies’ experience, I interviewed alumni from three companies to share their stories from the last year of Covid. Their experiences underscore the importance of being an agile marketer and staying... View Details

October 1994
Article

When Worlds Collide: The Implications of Panel Data-Based Choice Models for Consumer Behavior

By: R. S. Winer, R.E. Bucklin, J. A. Deighton, J. Erdem, P.S. Fader, J.J. Inman, H. Katahira, Katherine N. Lemon and A. Mitchell

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior; Decision Choices and Conditions

Find at Harvard

2021
Working Paper

Consuming Contests: Outcome Uncertainty and Spectator Demand for Contest-based Entertainment

By: Patrick J. Ferguson and Karim R. Lakhani

Contests that are designed to be consumed for entertainment by non-contestants are a fixture of economic, cultural and political life. In this paper, we examine whether individuals prefer to consume contests that have more uncertain outcomes. We look to... View Details

Keywords: Contest Design; Information Preferences; Consumer Demand; Sports; Entertainment; Games, Gaming, and Gambling; Demand and Consumers; Outcome or Result

SSRN

2 Mar 2023 - 4 Mar 2023
Conference Presentation

Speedy Activists: Firm Response Time to Sociopolitical Events Influences Consumer Behavior

By: Maya Balakrishnan, Julian De Freitas and Alison Wood Brooks

February 2015 (Revised September 2016)
Teaching Note

Making stickK Stick: The Business of Behavioral Economics

By: Leslie K. John and Michael Norton

Email mking@hbs.edu for a courtesy copy.

This Teaching Note explains the theory of the case and teaching plan for the case: Making sticK Stick: The Business of Behavioral Economics (514019). The case focuses on a... View Details

Keywords: Behavioral Economics; Behavior Change; B2B Vs. B2C; Human Resource Management; Marketing Of Innovations; Health ＆ Wellness; Weight Loss; Charitable Giving; Marketing; Consumer Behavior; Entrepreneurship; Internet and the Web; Health; Business Model; Sales; Human Resources; Health Industry; United States

November 2017
Teaching Note

Predicting Consumer Tastes with Big Data at Gap

By: Ayelet Israeli and Jill Avery

CEO Art Peck was eliminating his creative directors for The Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic brands and promoting a collective creative ecosystem fueled by the input of big data. Rather than relying on artistic vision, Peck wanted the company to use the mining of big... View Details

January 2014
Technical Note

Learning From Extreme Consumers

By: Jill Avery and Michael Norton

Traditional market research methods focus on understanding the average experiences of average consumers. This focus leads to gaps in our knowledge of consumer behavior and often fails to uncover insights that can drive revolutionary, rather than evolutionary... View Details

Keywords: Market Research; Ethnography; Design Thinking; Innovation; New Product Development; Research; Marketing; Consumer Behavior; Innovation and Invention