Working Papers

We use variation in wind speeds at surfing locations in Switzerland as exogenous shifters of users’ propensity to post content about their surfing activity onto an online social network. We exploit this variation to test whether users online…

When do people feel as if they are rich in time? Not often, research and daily experience suggest. However, three experiments showed that participants who felt awe, relative to other emotions, felt they had more time available (Experiments 1, 3)…

New empirical models of consumer demand that incorporate social preferences, observational learning, word-of-mouth or network effects have the feature that the adoption of others in the reference group - the installed-base - has a causal effect…

Being happy and finding life meaningful overlap, but there are important differences. A large survey revealed multiple differing predictors of happiness (controlling for meaning) and meaningfulness (controlling for happiness). Satisfying ones…

Marketing researchers have used models of consumer demand to forecast future sales; to describe and test theories of behavior; and to measure the response to marketing interventions. The basic framework typically starts from microfoundations of…

We estimate advertising effects in the context of presidential elections. This setting overcomes many data challenges in previous advertising studies, while arguably providing one of the most interesting empirical settings to study advertising’s…

Gambling and gaming is a very large industry in the United States with about one-third of all adults participating in it on a regular basis. Using novel and unique behavioral data from a panel of casino gamblers, this paper investigates three…

Discrete games of complete information have been used to analyze a variety of contexts such as market entry, technology adoption and peer effects. They are extensions of discrete choice models, where payoffs of each player are dependent on…

Although a substantial amount of research has examined the constructs of warmth and competence, far less has examined how these constructs develop and what benefits may accrue when warmth and competence are cultivated. Yet there are positive…

Consumers want to be happy, and marketers are increasingly trying to appeal to consumers’ pursuit of happiness. However, the results of six studies reveal that what happiness means varies, and consumers’ choices reflect those differences. In some…

We discuss how regression discontinuity designs arise naturally in settings where firms target marketing activity at consumers, and discuss how this aspect may be exploited for econometric inference of causal effects of marketing effort. Our main…

We examine a duopoly where one of the firms does not maximize profit, but instead maximizes customer surplus subject to a profit constraint. (Customer surplus for a firm is the sumo f its customers individual consumer surpluses, i.e., the dollar…

We show how to use micro-level survey data from a tracking study on brand awareness in conjunction with data on sales and advertising expenditures to improve the specification, estimation, and interpretation of aggregate discrete choice models of…

Although a substantial amount of research has examined the link between money and happiness, far less has examined the link between time and happiness. This paper argues, however, that time plays a critical role in understanding happiness, and it…

Marketing researchers have used models of consumer demand to forecast future sales; to describe and test theories of consumer behavior; and to measure the response to marketing interventions. The basic framework typically starts from…

Consumers use warmth and competence, two fundamental dimensions that govern social judgments of people, to form perceptions of firms. Three experiments showed that consumers perceive non-profits as being warmer than for-profits, but as less…

Under pressure, people often prefer what is familiar, which can seem safer. We show that such familiarity-favoring can lead to choices precisely contrary to the source of felt pressure, thus exacerbating, rather than mitigating, its negative…

We measure the revenue and cost implications to supermarkets of changing their price positioning strategy in oligopolistic downstream retail markets. Our approach formally incorporates the dynamics induced by the repositioning in a model with…

We present an empirical framework to analyze real-world sales-force compensation schemes and report on a multi-million dollar, multi-year project involving a large contact lens manufacturer in the U.S., where the model was used to improve sales-…

An examination of emotions reported on 12 million personal blogs along with a series of surveys and laboratory experiments show that the meaning of happiness is not fixed; instead, it systematically shifts over the course of ones lifetime.…