People pursuing important goals are known to prefer means that are highly instrumental (those most likely to facilitate goal pursuit). The self-handicapping literature demonstrated an important caveat to this principle—that people instead prefer impediments (rather than instrumental means) to their most important, identity-central goals when they anticipate goal failure. Such...
The US yogurt market has been volatile in the last decade, marked by striking sales increases and dramatic market structure changes. According to an industry report, dollar sales of yogurt in 2017 reached $8.8 billion---a more than 80% increase from 2007. Such remarkable sales growth can be attributed to the...
As many retailers are extending their channels to both online and offline, consumers nowadays are increasingly buying products across different shopping platforms, ranging from traditional catalog and retail channels to Internet stores. Thus, it is important to understand how the purchasing experiences and the factors surrounding the multichannel shopping environment...
Firms are facing reputational crises with increasing regularity. Despite this, relatively little is known about what types of firm actions consumers will judge to be reprehensible, and how firms should respond once a reputational crisis has occurred. In this dissertation I focus on two specific topics related to firm reputational...
This dissertation investigates two different decision-making strategies, which I label “sub-dimensioning” versus “integration” that individuals employ to cope with feelings of ambivalence. “Sub-dimensioning” is defined as a strategy that involves lower-level construals where an ambivalent decision-maker represents and evaluates an attitude object in terms of its dimensions of evaluation, whereas...
Legitimation is a fundamental social process that describes the solidification of disparate practices, meanings, and material structures into a coherent, stable institution.
In this dissertation, I study the legitimation of casino gambling as it expanded from 1976 to 2006. While scholars have tended to approach the legitimation process from one...
The main objective of this research is to enhance our understanding of consumer behavior in retailing. This objective is accomplished through the analysis of retailers' customer database. This research provides methodologies for retailers to process the large amount of readily available customer data and make more effective marketing decisions.
This...
This dissertation develops and estimates a dynamic model of consumer choice behavior in markets for seasonal (short lifecycle) goods where products have a finite selling season, consumer valuations change over time and availability is limited. In these markets, retailers often use dynamic markdown policies in which an initial retail price...
Consumers often base their decisions on impressions of the overall price level of a store. For example, decisions of where to shop, whether to buy an item or keep looking for a better price, and whether to buy a more or less expensive option can all be influenced by whether...
There is a growing interest in both marketing and economics in the dynamics of decision-making. Researchers have proposed richer behavioral models of consumers and firms with the purpose of learning behavioral primitives that static models cannot capture. In these studies, models move away from stylized views of decision-making by explicitly...