Government policy, strategic consumer behavior, and spillovers to retailers: The case of demonetization in India, with Pradeep Chintagunta and Bhuvanesh Pareek. Marketing Science 41(6), 2022.

This paper studies strategic consumer shopping behavior in response to a macroeconomic policy in the case of currency reform, and quantifies its unintended consequences for retailers vis-a-vis the policy goal. Using transaction-level data from a large retail chain in India, we document consumer strategies that leverage the presence of retailers to avoid costs associated with the country's currency reform policy. We observe both an increase in returns of cash-purchased items that were bought before demonetization (strategic returns) and a spike in final (unreturned) cash purchases with soon-to-be-illegal notes (strategic purchases). Both practices serve consumer incentives either to receive legal notes from the retailer or to avoid depositing cash in formal bank accounts. Our analysis suggests that strategic consumers benefited the retail chain overall while partly hindering the intended effect of the policy, leaving more than 20 million INR (0.3 million USD) of demonetized notes outside the formal tax network through this retail chain only; when we scale up the estimates to the country's market size, the estimated total impact is at least 100 billion INR (1.5 billion USD). Our findings (i) offer implications for policy makers by quantifying a wide spillover effect of government interventions that goes beyond the target group, and (ii) document a new role of the retail industry - of absorbing, and facilitating a response to, macro shocks.

Sustainability and Strategic Differentiation in Unregulated Consumer Goods Market, with Kristina Brecko, 2025. R&R, JMR.  

- Presented at 2022 Stanford-Berkeley IO Fest, 2023 Marketing for Sustainability Conference, 2023 VQMS, 2023 Choice Symposium, 2024 INSEAD Marketing  seminar, 2024 Cornell Marketing seminar, 2024 Bass FORMS Conference, 2024 Stanford Human Behavior and Sustainability Conference, 2024 Stanford BGS FlashTalks, 2024 Yale InsightsOn Conference, 2025 International Conference at CUHK, 2025 CityU (Hong Kong) Marketing seminar
- Previously presented under the title of "Voluntary provision of sustainability claims: Evidence from Consumer Packaged Goods", and "Supply and Demand for Sustainability Features: Drivers and Deterrents under Voluntary Labeling"
- Funded by Stanford BGS grant ($50,000)

Using large-scale field data from the U.S.  personal care categories from 2012 to 2019, we find that sustainability remains a relatively low-priority feature for the average consumer, leading to firms' strategic differentiation in the absence of regulation. Descriptive and structural analysis reveal that sustainability features are primarily offered by smaller brands through premium-priced products with high marginal cost, while dominant brands tend to offer fewer and lower-cost sustainable alternatives. This pattern reflects underlying consumer demand. Mass-market brands -- serving a broad, price-sensitive consumer base that places low value on sustainability -- have limited incentives to invest in high-cost sustainable products. In contrast, fringe brands -- including those owned by large multi-brand manufacturers -- use sustainability to differentiate and target a niche but growing segment of consumers who value it more highly. Implications for brands and policymakers are discussed. 

When, Why, and Which Ad Content Increases Customer Acquisition: A Field Experiment, with Kirthi Kalyanam, 2025.

- Presented at 2025 Workshop in Management Science, 2025 Marketing Dynamics Conference, 2025 Bay Area Marketing Symposium

We examine when, why, and which online ad content drives customer acquisition through the lens of search and learning theory. With a semiconductor firm, we conducted a field experiment that varied ad headlines across eight markets (four products $\times$ two regions) and two sequential placements (display ads and landing page ads). Drawing on search theory, headlines emphasized vertical quality, the likelihood of finding a horizontal match, or transactional ease. To assess the role of prior knowledge, we use features of pre-experiment organic traffic as proxies of prior information. We find strong interaction effects between ad content and prior information on both click-through and conversion rates: Content emphasizing vertical quality and match likelihood outperformed transactional ease content in low-information markets, while the reverse held in high-information markets. Not accounting for this information heterogeneity leads to the misleading conclusion that ad content has no effect. Among the ad types, match-likelihood content had the highest average effect on conversion with the greatest sensitivity to prior knowledge, suggesting that uncertainty about finding a match is a major barrier to engagement. Our findings show that even coarse market-level tailoring of ad content based on inferred priors can significantly improve customer acquisition.

Customer retention under imperfect information, 2025.  R&R, QME. (Draft available upon request)

- Presented at 2019 Stanford Marketing seminar, 2019 NYU Marketing seminar, 2019 Columbia Marketing seminar, 2019 Minnesota Marketing seminar, 2019 UT Dallas Marketing seminar, 2021 Yale Marketing seminar, 2021 KAIST Marketing seminar, 2021 QME Conference, 2022 Emory Marketing seminar, 2022 Berkeley Marketing seminar, 2022 Northwestern Marketing Seminar

Firms often see customers churning quickly after limited product experiences. This paper examines whether such early churn is solely driven by customers' low preferences for a given firm or influenced by incomplete information about available products. Using ticket purchase data from a major U.S. symphony center, I find that concert choices exhibit within-customer changes over time that align with predictions under consumer learning. These patterns suggest that 1) first-time customers have incomplete information about concerts and 2) the choices of experienced customers reflect a concert's true average consumption utility  ("concert value"). Reduced-form analyses show that the estimated concert values inferred from experienced customers' choices are not correlated with first-timers' initial concert choices but are strongly correlated with their subsequent churn, indicating that an initial visit made under imperfect information shapes a customer's expectations about future concerts.  Counterfactual analyses using a structural model highlight the challenge of regaining customers after an initial low-value experience, emphasizing the importance of pre-visit interventions (e.g., introductory marketing, assortment design for first-time customers) in reducing early churn.

Valuing brand collaboration: Evidence from a natural experiment, with Sanjog Misra and Bradley Shapiro, 2020. 

We study complementarities between brands in the context of collaborations across museums. Over the course of our sample, one major museum with a highly recognized brand closed temporarily and sequentially collaborated with two established local museums. With individual panel data on museum memberships around these events, we measure how collaborations affect demand using an empirical framework of complementarities that are newly applied to the branding context. We observe two counter-acting demand patterns. First, customers with no history of buying membership from either museum enter the market, suggesting brand complementarities. Second, a sub-group of customers who previously purchased from either or both of the museums display decreased demand, consistent with brand dilution. Any structural approach that models the demand for collaboration with existing preferences for separate brands fails to create accurate demand predictions. The magnitude of the offsetting forces varies between collaboration events, which makes demand prediction even more challenging. These results call for a theory of brand being beyond a fixed utility primitive and have implications for counterfactuals that involve combining or altering of brands.

Promoting Durable and Sustainable Technologies in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: The case of electric three-wheeler batteries in Bangladesh, with Amrita Kundu and Erica Plambeck, 2025.

- Presented at 2024 China-India Insights Conference (plenary session) and 2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting
- Funded by Asian Development Bank ($77,000 grant) and Stanford BGS Research Grant ($20,000)
- Field experiment completed in June 2025

Information Interventions to Reduce Food Waste: A Field Experiment, with Samina Lutfeali and Szu-chi Huang, 2025.

- On-campus field experiment completed in June 2025
- In collaboration with Stanford Food Institute and Residential & Dining Enterprises 

Syncing Preferences: Dynamic Reference Formation in Digital Service Platforms, with Abhishek Deshmane, Noah Askin, and Khwan Kim, 2025.