Publications

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Faculty & Research

consumer prices using a unique integration of high-frequency retail pricing data, product-level country-of-origin information, and detailed tariff classifications. By linking daily prices from major U.S. retailers to Harmonized System... View Details

March 2000
Article

Consumer Researchers: Take a Hike!

By: Gerald Zaltman

Keywords: Research

06 Mar 2008
News

Marketing Can Serve Citizens as Well as Consumers

October 2009
Article

Shaping Online Consumer Choice by Partitioning the Web

By: Jolie M. Martin and Michael I. Norton

This research explores how partitioning attributes in online search interfaces changes the valuations of those attributes-and impacts subsequent choice-such that attributes that are displayed as separate categories tend to receive greater decision weight than... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Information Management; Demand and Consumers; Research; Internet and the Web; Valuation

28 Jul 2010
News

Wrongful dismissal; consumers like underdogs, too

17 Jun 2017
Research & Ideas

Amazon, Whole Foods Deal a Big Win for Consumers

Source: 400tmax Editor's Note. Online retailing behemoth Amazon announced June 16 that it would acquire upscale grocery chain Whole Foods Market in a deal valued at more than $13 billion. Though the company has dabbled with the idea of a brick-and-mortar footprint in... View Details

Keywords: by Jose Alvarez and Len Schlesinger; Retail

05 Jul 2006
Working Paper Summaries

Measuring Consumer and Competitive Impact with Elasticity Decompositions

Keywords: by Thomas J. Steenburgh; Advertising

2024
Working Paper

Using LLMs for Market Research

By: James Brand, Ayelet Israeli and Donald Ngwe

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly gained popularity as labor-augmenting tools for programming, writing, and many other processes that benefit from quick text generation. In this paper we explore the uses and benefits of LLMs for researchers and practitioners... View Details

Keywords: Large Language Model; Research; AI and Machine Learning; Analysis; Customers; Consumer Behavior; Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry

SSRN

01 Sep 2009
News

Consumer Finance Makes HBS Debut

TUFANO: His new consumer finance elective is part of a broader effort to legitimize the field as an important area for research and teaching. Last spring HBS became the first top-ranked U.S. business school... View Details

Keywords: Roger Thompson; Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services; Finance

31 May 2007
Working Paper Summaries

Extremeness Seeking: When and Why Consumers Prefer the Extremes

Keywords: by John T. Gourville & Dilip Soman

09 Mar 2020
Research & Ideas

Warring Algorithms Could Be Driving Up Consumer Prices

antitrust authorities, who fear they could ultimately harm consumers by raising prices above typical competitive levels. It doesn’t seem too long ago when a price change was a major strategic decision for companies, requiring extensive... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Retail

Research Summary

Research and Publication Interests

Michelle Craig McDonald is currently writing a Harvard Business School case study on the impact of the International Coffee Act on small producers. She is interested in early American economic development, especially the role of foreign trade and re-exported... View Details

12 Nov 2015
Research & Ideas

Can Consumers be Trusted with Their Own Health Care?

Consumers today have more control than ever over the way they choose goods and services—from browsing freely at grocery stores to managing their own financial assets. Perhaps consumers should also have a... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Health

01 Jun 2015
News

Five-Star Research

When Assistant Professor Michael Luca began studying online consumer reviews in 2008, then four-year-old Yelp.com, cofounded by Jeremy Stoppelman (MBA 2005), had 10 million reviews. Today, it has more than 71 million reviews, and the... View Details

Keywords: April White; News, Library, Internet, and Other Services; Information

02 Sep 2010
News

Disputing wrongful dismissal; consumers like underdogs, too

September 2018
Article

Aggregation of Consumer Ratings: An Application to Yelp.com

By: Weijia Dai, Ginger Jin, Jungmin Lee and Michael Luca

Because consumer reviews leverage the wisdom of the crowd, the way in which they are aggregated is a central decision faced by platforms. We explore this "rating aggregation problem" and offer a structural approach to solving it, allowing for (1) reviewers to vary in... View Details

Keywords: User Generated Content; Crowdsourcing; Yelp; Social and Collaborative Networks; Information; Internet and the Web; Learning; Mathematical Methods; E-commerce