Technology that processes text, audio and video, as well as location data, has revolutionized many industries by enabling innovative operations for customer retention. To retain transactions for a platform and viewers for advertisers, this dissertation leverages novel digital tools to analyze consumer behavior, proposes original economic frameworks to guide platform...
Cuteness is a popular aesthetic in product design, yet there is a lack of understanding of who is most likely to engage in cute consumption and, more importantly, why. In this dissertation, I consider the role of sex and gender identity in cute consumption, proposing a strong mental association between...
Policymakers and public entities work to make decisions that benefit society. Their choices, though, do not go into effect in a vacuum. Instead, the benefit they provide relies on the underlying consumer behavior that drives responses to those choices. This dissertation studies three different settings in which either policy is...
This dissertation present a Compound Poisson Mixture Regression model of the distribution of transaction frequency and monetary value, and apply it to study donations at a private university in the Midwestern United States. The model captures the joint effect of covariates, recognizing that both response variables emanate from one statistical...
Stories and fantasy represent an important aspect of consumer life and comprise a huge marketing enterprise within consumer entertainment. Each year, upwards of $82 billion is spent on books, games, and other fantasy industries in the United States alone. Likewise, fantasy has important implications for consumers’ sense of identity. In...
Stories and fantasy represent an important aspect of consumer life and comprise a huge marketing enterprise within consumer entertainment. Each year, upwards of $82 billion is spent on books, games, and other fantasy industries in the United States alone. Likewise, fantasy has important implications for consumers’ sense of identity. In...
With the global rise of surveillance technology, contentious episodes may be captured on video from multiple perspectives. These perspectives include the third-person visual perspective such as red-light cameras and dashboard cameras, the first-person visual perspective such as body-worn cameras, and perspectives from written descriptions such as police reports and witness...
Pharmaceutical companies pay more than $2 billion to physicians every year. Most of these payments are for food and beverage, speaking, honoraria, consulting, and travel and lodging, which are termed “general payments.” These payments have come under increased scrutiny as critics of pharmaceutical promotion argue that they influence prescribing in...
Digitization has led to dramatic cost reductions and reshaped both what and how products are sold. This dissertation examines the impact of digitization on the behavior of market intermediaries that bring together producers and consumers. Our empirical context is the transition from 35mm film to digital cinema technologies in the...
Affect infusion occurs when feelings elicited by one stimulus (an affect-laden cue) influence reactions to a different stimulus (an attitude object). This effect often happens when the two stimuli are experienced closely in time and space. According to Gestalt principles, a spatial/temporal covariation of the two stimuli can make them...