Business 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 …

Essays On Customer Relationship Management, Nan Zhao

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The general topic of my dissertation is customer relationship management. Specifically, I use quasi-experimental causal inference methods, randomized field experiments, and machine learning methods to study and measure consumer response to co-branded credit cards and email communications promoting subscriptions.

In Chapter 1, “The Impact of Co-branded Credit Card Adoption on Customer Loyalty”, we estimate the treatment effects of adopting a co-branded credit card on spending and loyalty behaviors using a comprehensive longitudinal dataset from a North American airline. Our data set contained detailed records of both airline credit card adopters and non-adopters, including their travel and loyalty program activities over …

Refund Psychology, Tianjiao Yu

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Consumers frequently receive refunds from prior purchases. In this research, I examine if money refunded from previous purchases is more likely to be spent than money that does not go through a refund process. Across eight fully pre-registered studies, I test how consumers’ willingness to spend depends on the transaction history of their money. I find that money refunded from a previous purchase is more likely to be spent on items unrelated to that purchase than non-refunded money that is otherwise identical in its source. I suggest that this pattern arises because the refunded money is earmarked as “spending money” …