Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Manage Your Money Wisely: How Consumers And Marketers Can Effectively Communicate Money Issues, Alexander Park

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Consumers and marketers find it challenging to communicate money matters. For example, consumers experience discomfort and uneasiness when discussing financial issues with their social relationships. Firms often receive backlash when sharing their good financial deeds (e.g., charitable efforts) with consumers. Because financial matters can be a sensitive topic, in my research, I explore the difficulties consumers and marketers experience when communicating money issues and how they can better navigate these problems.In Chapter One, I investigate a particularly uneasy interaction that consumers often face with their friends and acquaintances: the need to ask for money back. Seven fully preregistered studies (N …

Peer Interactions In Decision Making, Yijun Chen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The broad research topic of my dissertation is individual’s decision making in the presence of peer interactions. I focus on empirical settings where individuals are connected with others in the peer network, and through peer interactions, their decisions are interdependent. Peer network structures in terms of who is connected with whom and the mechanisms of peer interactions convey valuable information on the decision making process. I employ quantitative empirical methods to uncover the information embedded in peer networks, provide insights on the mechanisms of peer interactions, and generate peer-network based managerial implications.

Chapter 1 studies how participants collaborate to compete …

Essays On Consumer Online Search And Digital Content Consumption, Shuo Zhang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation, I apply empirical quantitative methods to marketing research and investigate consumer online search and purchase patterns, as well as digital consumption behaviors and the potential implication for marketing managers. This dissertation consists of two chapters. Chapter 1 studies the consumer shopping channel choice when they search and shop for products online. Mobile phones have emerged as a major channel for online shopping as an alternative to PCs. Despite more consumers using mobile phones, the conversion rate on the mobile channel is lower than that on the PC channel. In this study, we propose a structural consumer search-and-purchase …

Essays On Marketing Strategy, Chang Liu

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I apply game-theoretical methods in the context of marketing research and investigate the effects of stylized facts in behavioral economics. Chapter 1 studies the effects of managerial optimism on firms’ performance. Research has shown that many managers and entrepreneurs tend to be optimistic and are inclined to believe that negative shocks happen to them less frequently than to others. However, there is also evidence suggesting that such optimism is often inaccurate in reality and managerial optimism can lead to the failure of a company. We develop a game-theoretic model to investigate the impact of managerial optimism on …