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.

Customer retention under imperfect information, 2022.  R&R, QME.

Many multi-product firms see new customers churning quickly after limited product experiences. The paper examines whether early churn is solely driven by customers' low preferences for a given firm or is affected by incomplete information about available products, using individual-level ticket purchases of classical music concerts at a major U.S. symphony center. The data exhibit patterns consistent with consumer learning, which not only suggest incomplete information about products (concerts) among first-time customers but also give a rationale for estimating true consumption utilities of concerts using experienced customers' choices. Descriptive analyses show a significant impact of experienced utility at the initial visit on subsequent churn, implying that the initial visit affects a customer’s expectations about all future concerts. To explore marketing strategies to reduce such information-driven customer attrition, the paper runs counterfactual analyses on policies that offer targeted marketing to second-time customers after their initial visit. The results suggest that it is challenging to earn back customers with targeted offers after their low-utility initial experiences, emphasizing the importance of introductory marketing and choice architecture in customer relationship management. 

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.

Supply and Demand for Sustainability Features: Drivers and Deterrents under Voluntary Labeling, with Kristina Brecko, 2024.
- 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
- Previously presented under the title of "Voluntary provision of sustainability claims: Evidence from Consumer Packaged Goods"
- Funded by Stanford BGS grant ($50,000)

This paper investigates the economic forces behind the market share of sustainable products in consumer packaged goods (CPG) markets where sustainable features are voluntary. Analyzing product-level label and sales data in health and beauty care product categories from 2013 to 2019, we document 1) a slow increase in the market share of sustainable products with significant heterogeneity across brands and product categories and 2) distinct differences in the provision of sustainable features and sustainability price premia by brand size. To distinguish among potential drivers of sustainable market shares and brands' decisions, we estimate heterogeneous demand and marginal costs across products. We find that an average consumer puts positive but much smaller weight on sustainable features than on other product attributes like price or brand. Without regulations, brands sort into different types and qualities of sustainable features: large brands offer lower-cost, lower-quality sustainable products, while fringe brands provide higher-cost, higher-quality options. Negative preferences for sustainable features are linked to low-cost products from brands not fully committed to sustainability. Our results help understand the drivers and barriers to sustainable product growth and inform regulations promoting sustainable markets.

Sustainable Technology in the Lemons Market: The Case of Battery Choices by Electric Vehicle Owners in Bangladesh, with Amrita Kundu and Erica Plambeck, 2024.

- Invited to present at 2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting
- Presented at 2024 China-India Insights Conference (plenary session)
- Funded by Asian Development Bank ($77,000 grant) 

Ad Content and Customer Engagement: Theory and Evidence from a Field Experiment, with Kirthi Kalyanam, 2024.

In collaboration with a semiconductor company, we conducted a field experiment to test the impact of two types of ad content (transaction-related information vs. quality-related information) across two different online placements (a display ad vs. a sidebar on the landing page). We monitored customer ad clicks and their decisions to "bounce" (leave the website after viewing only the landing page) under these experimental conditions.  Our findings reveal that changing ad content has significant and heterogeneous effects on ad clicks and bounce rates across products and geographic markets for the same company, which can lead to a misleading conclusion of precise null effects when such heterogeneity is ignored.  The variation in effects is well predicted by product- and geographic-market-level proxies of latent customer intent to search and purchase that are derived from pre-experiment data: higher latent intent to purchase correlates with more negative effects of switching from transaction-related to quality-related information, and vice versa. Given the carryover effect of display ad content on downstream engagement, the match and sequence of content significantly influence overall customer engagement. Our results demonstrate that the company can increase the total number of non-bouncing customers by 56% without increasing ad impressions through content choices at the product level. The results highlight the opportunity cost of ad content on customer engagement, elucidate the mechanism behind the heterogeneous effects of ad content, and offer guidance for designing targeted advertising campaigns for specific products and regional markets.