NOVEMBER 2006
Extra Credit
Here are introductions to other interesting research information available online. Each includes keywords that, when used together in Google or Yahoo, should lead to the proper link.
Print Ads Still Drive Grocery Shoppers
Grocery retailers spend $8 billion featuring product specials in print advertising each year. In a study of those ads and supermarket receipts for some product categories, Professor V. “Seenu” Srinivasan and Anand Bodapati, PhD ’99, found that at least 10 percent of shoppers chose their store based on the week’s ads. If meat and fresh produce receipts had been analyzed also, Srinivasan says, the study most likely would have shown even more shoppers rely on the ads. [Details]
You Can Auction That Rembrandt Online
If your grandfather’s Panama hat or his original Dick Tracy sketch didn’t bring the cash you expected on eBay, perhaps you didn’t show bidders its quality. Sotheby’s got an excellent price for an early copy of the Declaration of Independence in an online auction because full information on the document’s quality and authenticity was easy to establish, say GSB Professor John McMillan and Eiichiro Kazumori of the University of Tokyo. The key to getting good prices for expensive art and artifacts online, they say, is to rein in the valuation variance of bidders. [Details]
Villains and Saints: Beware of Typecasting
Individuals on work teams can get stereotyped over time, which limits their effectiveness and that of the team, says organizational behavior Professor Margaret Neale. She suggests managers publicly assign roles such as “devil’s advocate” and “cheerleader” to team members and occasionally switch the assignments to keep the team from falling into a rut. A large body of research on work team performance reveals a paradox, Neale reports. Fostering a diversity of views actually fosters cooperation by creating an atmosphere in which dissenting views can be freely aired. [Details]
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Additional Reading
Can Where People Vote Influence How They Vote? The Influence of Polling Location Type on Voting Behavior
Jonah Berger, Marc Meredith, and S. Christian Wheeler
GSB Research Paper #1926, February 2006.
Idea Habitats: How the Prevalence of Environmental Cues Influences the
Success of Ideas
Jonah Berger and Chip Heath
Cognitive Science,
2005
Material Priming: The Influence of Mundane Physical Objects on
Situational Construal and Competitive Behavioral Choice
A.C. Kay, S.C.
Wheeler, J.A. Bargh, and L.D. Ross
Organizational Behavior and Human
Decisions Processes, 2004