Working Papers

We present an approach to automate the bidding and budgeting of multi-unit digital advertising campaigns. Such campaigns typically involve groups of ad-units that span multiple user segments, ad-delivery channels and media that together are meant…

New products are the lifeblood of many sellers, who increasingly reach consumers via e-commerce platforms. Yet, search engines and e-commerce platforms have substantial difficulty exposing new products to their users on account of an information…

Over half of all shopping journeys start with the mobile channel. In particular, the presence of a branded mobile app significantly influences shopping across channels. However, a majority of app users decrease app usage or even abandon an app,…

In e-commerce platforms, sponsored and non-sponsored content are jointly displayed to users and both may interactively influence their engagement behavior. The former content helps advertisers achieve their marketing goals and provides a stream…

Conditionally accepted at Journal of Marketing Research.

This paper studies the impact of business modernization on the sales performance of traditional retailers. We define modernization as adopting tangible structures and…

The Affordable Care Act substantially increased the share of farmworkers with medical insurance, but it had little effect on employer-provided benefits, including health care insurance. Eligible workers with pre-existing health conditions…

Comparison Lift is an experimentation-as-a-service (EaaS) application for testing online advertising audiences and creatives at JD.com. Unlike many other EaaS tools that focus primarily on fixed sample A/B testing, Comparison …

An increasingly popular trend is for consumers to get paid more often, resulting in more frequent, yet smaller paychecks. However, surprisingly little is known about whether and how payment frequency impacts consumer behavior. The current work…

As households reduce discretionary spending in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns are high that a resulting fall in aggregate demand can lead to a lasting recession post-COVID-19. Consequently, policies aimed at stimulating consumer…

It is widely understood that scarcity focuses people on “here and now” problems, causing myopic, impulsive decisions. Our work challenges this basic premise and asks whether scarcity can ever lead to increased patience. We suggest that existing…

Advertisers that engage in real-time bidding (RTB) to display their ads commonly have two goals: learning their optimal bidding policy and estimating the expected effect of exposing users to their ads. Typical strategies to accomplish one of…

This chapter presents a selective review of a literature in marketing that analyzes diffusion and pricing over the product life-cycle. I primarily focus on empirical work, and on papers that deal with the dynamics of pricing over time. I discuss…

The “freemium” model for digital goods involves selling a base version of the product for free, and making premium product features available to users only on payment. The success of the model is predicated on the ability to profitably convert…

This paper describes a practical system for Multi Touch Attribution (MTA) for use by a publisher of digital ads. We developed this system for JD.com, an eCommerce company, which is also a publisher of digital ads in China. The approach has…

In this conceptual paper, we review three decades of research on time and meaning in consumer research and psychology to identify key themes that have emerged, build frameworks that integrate past research, and reveal areas of potential for…

Abstract coming soon.

People seek to spend time in positive experiences, enjoying and savoring. Yet there is no escaping negative experiences, from the mundane (e.g., arguing) to the massive (e.g., death of a child). Might negative experiences confer a hidden benefit…

Crowdsourced innovation platforms that enable organizations to outsource ideation to parties external to the firm are proliferating. In many cases, the platforms use open contests that allow the free exchange of ideas with the goal of improving…

In this paper we explore the determinants of profitability for coalition loyalty programs. We consider a setting in which each of two firms competing in one market may form a coalition loyalty program with one of two firms in a different market.…

Research shows that optimism can positively impact health, but when and why people feel optimistic when confronting health challenges is less clear. Findings from six studies show that the frames people adopt when thinking about health challenges…