Upcoming Talks

Tuesday March 1; 14:00-15:00 (CET): Ana Martinovici  (RSM)

Utility Accumulation during Decision Making: Attention Trajectories Predict Brand Choice

Trajectories of attention during complex decision-making capture the accumulation of brand utility and predict final choice before consumers implement it. This is due to an emergent “double attention lift” of the ultimately chosen brand: it receives progressively more attention than other brands do, and more of that attention is devoted to integrating information about the brand rather than to comparing it with other brands. In contrast, brand ownership produces immediate attention lifts to the owned brand which persist for brand loyals and shift for switchers. Attention trajectories correctly predict brand choice of 52% of consumers already one quarter of the time before (29 secs.), and 85% after the final quarter that they expressed their choice. These findings were obtained from a new multivariate attention-and-choice model, using K-fold out-of-sample and ahead-of-period Cross-Validation, and data from an eye-tracking experiment among 325 regular consumers. The findings are new and reveal the tight, potentially neurological, link between attention trajectories and utility accumulation for brands, and have implications for choice theory and managerial practice.

Tuesday April 12; 14:00-15:00 (CET): Irene Scopelliti  (Bayes)

Big Data Biases

The term big data denotes datasets characterized by unprecedented volume, variety, and velocity. Advocates of the big data revolution tend to believe that “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves” (Anderson, 2008). This may be a dangerously misleading belief. We know human decision-makers interpret data patterns, and often make mistakes in their inferential judgments. We argue that the availability of big data exacerbates some of these mistakes, because decision makers believe that increasing data quantity also necessarily increases data quality. In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that participants are more likely to interpret correlation as causation (cum hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy) as the sample size of studies increase. We conclude by discussing potential debiasing techniques to help decision-makers avoid the misleading influence of large samples. 

Tuesday May 5; 14:00-15:00 (CET): Irene Consiglio  (Nova)

Creatives’ Brand Attitudes Affect the Type of Ads They Produce

We investigate how creatives’ brand attitudes influence the type of executional elements they feature in advertisements that they produce for a brand. We found that both professional creatives and non-professional participants are more likely to include functional elements in their ad, and less likely to include emotional elements, when they have negative (vs. positive) attitudes toward this brand. We propose that this occurs because creatives who dislike a brand try to be rational and suppress their emotions to correct for a perceived bias. Consistent with this mechanism, creatives who dislike a brand believe that their attitudes toward the brand might impact their work negatively and that they should be rational and suppress their emotions to produce a good ad. We rule out that the effect is driven by the mere presence of positive emotions among creatives who like the brand or by negative emotions among creatives who dislike the brand. 

Past Talks

Tuesday September 1; 18:00-19:00 (CET): Donna Hoffman (GWU) 

Object-Oriented Metaphorism as a Mechanism for Understanding AI

In this research, we apply an object-oriented approach to rendering AI more transparent to humans (Hoffman and Novak 2018; Novak and Hoffman 2019). If we can understand AI from its own perspective, will it still be undermined and overtrusted, compared to understanding it from our own human-centric experience?  The results of three recently completed studies demonstrate how manipulating the metaphors we use to describe AI can stimulate an object-oriented vs anthropomorphic process of evaluation that significantly impacts perceptions of AI capacities.

Tuesday October 6; 14:00-15:00 (CET): Marcel Zeelenberg (Tilburg & VU Amsterdam)

Recent developments in the psychology of greed

In the last decade we have been examining the workings of greed (the insatiable desire for more). In this talk I will review our research on the development of the dispositional greed scale, and our research that reveals both the positive and negative consequences of greed. Finally, I will also discuss new research that disentangles greed from self-interest, and that examines the role of harm to others.

Tuesday November 3; 14:00-15:00 (CET): Rhonda Hadi (Oxford)

A Feast for the Eyes: How Augmented Reality Influences Food Desirability

Augmented reality (AR) has generated enormous industry investment and buzz, and the food and beverage industry has been quick to embrace the technology in hopes of augmenting the customer experience. However, limited research had empirically explored how this nascent technology might actually influence consumer judgements and behaviors. Our research demonstrates, for the first time, that because AR visually superimposes objects into a consumer’s real-time environment, it increases the ease with which consumers mentally simulate consuming a pictured food, which can in turn increase their desire for the food, purchase likelihood, and consumption enjoyment. Through two field studies and a laboratory experiment, we demonstrate the effect of AR presentation on these outcomes, support the mediating role of mental simulation, and explore boundary conditions. 

Tuesday December 8; 14:00-15:00 (CET): Amit Bhattacharjee (Insead)

Motivated Moral Decoupling among Liberals and Conservatives 

How does political ideology affect the way people reason in support of public figures caught in scandals? Three studies show that political liberalism is associated with greater moral decoupling, or selective separation of individuals’ immoral actions from evaluations of their professional performance. This effect persists for violations across all five moral foundations, including those that liberal respondents perceive as more severe. This disparity is rooted in conservatives’ greater belief that character is global and drives behavior across contexts. We find evidence of motivational biases in moral decoupling judgments across the political spectrum, and this evidence appears more robust among liberal respondents.

Tuesday March 9; 14:00-15:00 (CET): Bart de Langhe (Esade)

Can Consumers Learn Price Dispersion? Evidence for Dispersion Spillover Across Categories 

Price knowledge is a key antecedent of many judgments and decisions. I will present the results of multiple studies examining consumers’ knowledge of price dispersion—the beliefs that consumers have about the minimum, the maximum, and the overall variability of prices in a product category. The studies provide evidence for a phenomenon we call dispersion spillover: Seeing more (vs. less) dispersed prices in one category inflates people’s perception of price dispersion in another category. This dispersion spillover is consequential. It influences judgments of price attractiveness, the likelihood that consumers will search for (and find) better options, and how much people bid in auctions. 

Tuesday April 13; 14:00-15:00 (CET): Adam Greenberg (Bocconi)

Undersum Bias 

We demonstrate robust evidence for a phenomenon we call undersum bias. When intuitively evaluating sequences of numbers, people substantially underestimate their sums. Undersum bias arises for many combinations of numbers (i.e., different variances, sums, and sequence lengths) and across multiple contexts (i.e., calories, money, or simple numbers). The bias arises as an online process and withstands both incentives for accuracy as well as for overestimation. We show that undersum bias is both a sizable and consequential cause of overconsumption and overspending behaviors. 

Tuesday May 11; 14:00-15:00 (CET): Barbara Briers (Vlerick)

Intergenerational Effects of the Unhealthy = Taste Intuition: An Exploration of Food Beliefs, Parenting Practices, and Outcomes

Childhood obesity is a major problem worldwide and a key contributor to adult obesity. This research explores parents’ lay beliefs and food practices, and their long-term, inter-generational, effects on their children’s food consumption and physiology. First, two surveys show that adults who believe that tasty food is unhealthy (the Unhealthy = Tasty Intuition, or “UTI”; Raghunathan, Naylor and Hoyer 2006) are likely to use extrinsic rewards to encourage their children to eat healthfully. However, this strategy backfires, as providing extrinsic rewards ironically reduces children’s healthy food consumption, which in turn leads to an increase in their BMI. Two follow-up experiments demonstrate the causal link between adults’ UTI beliefs and their likelihood to stimulate healthy eating by providing external rewards. For food that is perceived as unhealthy, however, parents’ UTI beliefs do not trigger the use of extra external rewards. Implications for public policy and health practitioners are discussed.

EMAC CONFERENCE 2021

EMAC SIG: Research with Purpose: Providing Answers to Substantive Phenomena in Consumer Behavior

Wed, May 26

16:30 - 18:00

Room 14

Session Discussant:

Stacy Wood (stacy_wood@ncsu.edu) is the Langdon Distinguished University Chair in Marketing, executive director of the Consumer Innovation Collaborative, North Carolina State University. Editor, Journal of Consumer Research.

Session Description:

The Journal of Consumer Research new editorial leadership and the consumer behavior field, in general, has been calling for a larger representation of papers focusing on providing answers to substantive phenomena.  These are papers which provide evidence for and insights into an important and relevant contemporary consumer behavior phenomenon. They richly describe and conceptualize the phenomenon, provide empirical evidence for it, and show that it is real and consequential.

This session defines and clarifies what is considered important, contemporary and relevant substantive consumer phenomena and the type of research questions that tend to be connected to it.  Essentially, this is research that could generate findings that have the capability to significantly change what is currently done in the consumer marketplace.  Papers that offer actionable implications for consumers, managers, or policy makers.

Stacy Wood, editor of the Journal of Consumer Research, will introduce the concept of research with purpose and will provide examples of research questions which could be considered substantive. She will differentiate between substantive research that could or could not be published in the Journal of Consumer Research. Three other seasoned researchers will present their work and explain how they were drawn to providing answers to substantive domains of importance.

Session Participants:

Simona Botti is Professor of Marketing & Department Chair, London Business School | Regent's Park | London NW1 4SA | UK, sbotti@london.edu

Joe Gladstone is Assistant Professor of Marketing and Faculty of the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado, Boulder, Joe.Gladstone@Colorado.edu

Giana Eckhardt is Professor of Marketing, Kings' Business School, King's College London, giana.eckhardt@kcl.ac.uk

EMAC CONFERENCE 2024

EMAC SIG: IJRM/ Consumer Behavior CIG Special Session

Consumer + Technology Dialogue:  A Conversation on How Technology affects Consumers and Society

This session will bring together marketing researchers from several European institutions interested in studying technology-related issues.   The line-up of (4) presentations should work as a starting point for a conversation about the current state of the topic.  We will leave ample time for discussing joint research interests and directions for future research.  This session would be particularly relevant for faculty interested in technology-related research in the context of marketing and consumer behavior; topics span issues such as automation, robots, generative AI, algorithmic recommender systems, augmented and virtual reality, among others.

IJRM (The International Journal of Research in Marketing), positioned at the forefront of innovation within the marketing field, sponsors this session. The Editor-in-chief, Martin Schreier, will provide an introduction about how this field of research fits well the concept of novel and potentially disruptive research championed by the journal. 

Presenters:

Anne-Kathrin Klesse, Erasmus University, Netherlands

Emanuel de Bellis, St. Gallen University

Martin Schreier, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria, Editor in Chief International Journal of Research in Marketing

Ana Valenzuela, ESADE & Baruch College, Barcelona

Johannes Boegershausen, Erasmus University, Netherlands

Acknowledgements

This online seminar series is associated with the European Marketing Academy (EMAC) and its Special Interest Group (SIG) on Consumer Behavior. We acknowledge the support by EMAC and Tammo Bijmolt, Vice-President Conferences.

Enjoy this seminar? Send an e-mail to daniel.fernandes[at]ucp.pt to be included on the e-mail list to receive the zoom link.