Consumer Research - Publications - Faculty & Research

08 Sep 2015
First Look

September 8, 2015

high-level positions in organizations. While a great deal of research has provided evidence that bias and discrimination give rise to and perpetuate this gender disparity, in the current research, we explore another explanation: men and... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

27 Mar 2012
First Look

First Look: March 27

joint evaluation, making joint evaluation the money-maximizing evaluation procedure. Our findings are compatible with a behavioral model of information processing and with the System 1/System 2 distinction in behavioral decision research... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

28 Sep 2020
Working Paper Summaries

What Can Economics Say About Alzheimer's Disease?

Keywords: by Amitabh Chandra, Courtney Coile, and Corina Mommaerts; Health; Pharmaceutical

January 2020
Article

The Long-Run Dynamics of Electricity Demand: Evidence from Municipal Aggregation

By: Tatyana Deryugina, Alexander MacKay and Julian Reif

We study the dynamics of residential electricity demand by exploiting a natural experiment that produced large and long-lasting price changes in over 250 Illinois communities. Using a flexible difference-in-differences matching approach, we estimate that the price... View Details

Keywords: Electricity Demand; Consumption Dynamics; Energy; Policy; Demand and Consumers; Price; Mathematical Methods

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21 Jun 2011
First Look

First Look: June 21

by Beijing is unlikely to suffice. Product Positioning in a Two-Dimensional Vertical Differentiation Model: The Role of Quality Costs Authors: Dominique Lauga and Elie Ofek Publication: Marketing Science (forthcoming) Abstract We study a duopoly model where View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

10 Apr 2006
Research & Ideas

Lessons from the Browser Wars

In a famous example of how first movers can lose their advantage, second-mover Microsoft won the Web browser wars from Netscape and continues to dominate the market today. But that competition was the subject of another "war," this one among View Details

Keywords: by Sara Grant; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products

19 May 2020
Research & Ideas

Why Privacy Protection Notices Turn Off Shoppers

safe.” If companies do provide a notice, however, they must abide by it. For that reason, companies often make them as broad and sweeping as possible—perhaps triggering customers to worry about what the company might do with their data. How privacy statements backfire... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Retail

26 May 2003
Research & Ideas

What Your Competition is Telling You

Competition keeps you hungry. It forces you to continually find new and more cost-effective solutions to business problems. Although there's nothing new in this insight, recent research suggests some often-overlooked ways in which... View Details

Keywords: by David Stauffer

June 2005 (Revised March 2006)
Case

E Ink in 2005

By: David B. Yoffie and Barbara Mack

Explores the challenges of commercializing a bleeding-edge technology. After seven years, E Ink has spent more than $100 million to commercialize electronic ink. With business momentum picking up, but resources running out, the case examines the key trade-offs in... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Commercialization; Mathematical Methods; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry

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24 Jun 2013
Research & Ideas

Is Your iPhone Turning You Into a Wimp?

monitor? The answer may determine whether you'll play the wimp or the hero in your next office meeting. The body posture inherent in operating everyday gadgets affects not only your back, but your demeanor, reports a new experimental study entitled iPosture: The Size... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Consumer Products; Consumer Products

27 Jul 2011
Research & Ideas

Customer Loyalty Programs That Work

Aldo Sesia, a research associate at HBS, discuss how loyalty schemes evolved, what they look like today, why so many retailers aren't using them effectively, and how they can be improved to win customer business in an uncertain... View Details

Keywords: by Maggie Starvish; Retail

01 Oct 2008
Research & Ideas

How Much Time Should CEOs Devote to Customers?

versus the inside. Marketing expertise depends on customer insights. These insights cannot be gleaned from looking at market research data on a computer screen. Just like politics, all marketing is retail. The customer votes every day at... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch

12 Sep 2012
Research & Ideas

The Unexpected Link Between Cadavers and Careers

occupations are more likely to bequeath their corpses to medical research than those in male-dominated occupations. “There's a lot of discussion in the field of donation on how to morally increase the supply.” The finding is important... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Education; Health

16 Feb 2004
Research & Ideas

Marketing Wine to the World

"The Changing Structure of the Global Wine Industry," won the Best Paper award at the 2003 European Applied Business Research Conference. Roberto recently shared his thoughts on wine for HBS Working Knowledge in an e-mail... View Details

Keywords: by Manda Salls; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products

July 2012
Article

Discrete Choice Cannot Generate Demand That Is Additively Separable in Own Price

By: Sonia Jaffe and Scott Duke Kominers

We show that in a unit demand discrete choice framework with at least three goods, demand cannot be additively separable in own price. This result sharpens the analogous result of Jaffe and Weyl (2010) in the case of linear demand and has implications for testing of... View Details

Keywords: Discrete Choice; Unit Demand; Separable Demand; Linear Demand; Demand and Consumers; Market Design; Mathematical Methods; Economics

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January 2014 (Revised January 2017)
Supplement

Nivea (B)

By: Karim R. Lakhani, Johann Fuller, Volker Bilgram and Greta Friar

This supplementary case follows up on an innovative R&D approach by Beiersdorf,a skin care and cosmetics company. The case relates what happened to the product launched by Beiersdorf, to its Nivea line, following the events of the A case, and how the commercial success... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Innovation Management; Marketing; Innovation Strategy; Innovation and Management; Research and Development; Product Design; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry

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2013
Working Paper

Where do the Most Active Customers Originate and How Can Firms Keep Them Engaged?

By: Clarence Lee, E. Ofek and Thomas Steenburgh

In this paper, we study how firms offering Web services can acquire and develop an active customer base. We focus on two basic questions. First, how does the method of customer acquisition affect the way customers use the service to meet their own needs and to interact... View Details

Keywords: Customer Engagement; Adoption Routes; Hidden Markov Models; Search; Word-of-Mouth; Digital Media; Customer Relationship Management; Internet and the Web; Mathematical Methods; Consumer Behavior; Entrepreneurship; Marketing Reference Programs; Web Services Industry

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05 Aug 2010
What Do You Think?

What Is Customer Opinion Good For?

and how. It's about understanding consumer needs, not asking them what they want." Several questioned the way some think about the development of products of any type in a rapidly changing business environment. As V. P. Kochikar put it,... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett; Technology

21 Mar 2011
Research & Ideas

Are We Thinking Too Little, or Too Much?

inducing people into believing they can expertly control the ball will affect the way they perceive themselves as business influencers. In fact, Norton spends most of his time thinking about thinking. So it's somewhat ironic that his latest line of View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

August 1993 (Revised April 1994)
Case

Flanders of Springfield

By: Arthur Schleifer Jr.

Flanders is a catalog merchandiser. Various decisions on catalog distribution policy, ordering and inventory policy, and catalog format design are considered. This was a final examination, and serves as a review for a number of topics in the course. View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Policy; Distribution; Product Design; Supply Chain; Mathematical Methods; Consumer Products Industry

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