Working Papers

We estimate advertising effects in the context of presidential elections. This setting overcomes many data challenges in previous advertising studies, while arguably providing one of the most interesting empirical settings to study advertising’s…

Gambling and gaming is a very large industry in the United States with about one-third of all adults participating in it on a regular basis. Using novel and unique behavioral data from a panel of casino gamblers, this paper investigates three…

Discrete games of complete information have been used to analyze a variety of contexts such as market entry, technology adoption and peer effects. They are extensions of discrete choice models, where payoffs of each player are dependent on…

Although a substantial amount of research has examined the constructs of warmth and competence, far less has examined how these constructs develop and what benefits may accrue when warmth and competence are cultivated. Yet there are positive…

Consumers want to be happy, and marketers are increasingly trying to appeal to consumers’ pursuit of happiness. However, the results of six studies reveal that what happiness means varies, and consumers’ choices reflect those differences. In some…

We discuss how regression discontinuity designs arise naturally in settings where firms target marketing activity at consumers, and discuss how this aspect may be exploited for econometric inference of causal effects of marketing effort. Our main…

We examine a duopoly where one of the firms does not maximize profit, but instead maximizes customer surplus subject to a profit constraint. (Customer surplus for a firm is the sumo f its customers individual consumer surpluses, i.e., the dollar…

We show how to use micro-level survey data from a tracking study on brand awareness in conjunction with data on sales and advertising expenditures to improve the specification, estimation, and interpretation of aggregate discrete choice models of…

Although a substantial amount of research has examined the link between money and happiness, far less has examined the link between time and happiness. This paper argues, however, that time plays a critical role in understanding happiness, and it…

Marketing researchers have used models of consumer demand to forecast future sales; to describe and test theories of consumer behavior; and to measure the response to marketing interventions. The basic framework typically starts from…

Consumers use warmth and competence, two fundamental dimensions that govern social judgments of people, to form perceptions of firms. Three experiments showed that consumers perceive non-profits as being warmer than for-profits, but as less…

Under pressure, people often prefer what is familiar, which can seem safer. We show that such familiarity-favoring can lead to choices precisely contrary to the source of felt pressure, thus exacerbating, rather than mitigating, its negative…

We measure the revenue and cost implications to supermarkets of changing their price positioning strategy in oligopolistic downstream retail markets. Our approach formally incorporates the dynamics induced by the repositioning in a model with…

We present an empirical framework to analyze real-world sales-force compensation schemes and report on a multi-million dollar, multi-year project involving a large contact lens manufacturer in the U.S., where the model was used to improve sales-…

An examination of emotions reported on 12 million personal blogs along with a series of surveys and laboratory experiments show that the meaning of happiness is not fixed; instead, it systematically shifts over the course of ones lifetime.…

We present a demand system for tied goods incorporating dynamics arising from the tied-nature of the products and the stockpiling induced by storability and durability. We accommodate competition across tied good systems and competing downstream…

Companies constantly seek to enhance customer satisfaction by improving product or service features. Two methods are commonly used to assess customer priorities for product or service features from individual customers: ratings and constant-sum…

An experiment was conducted to determine if the decision-making process for choosing between alternative job offers by Stanford MBA’s is affected by a task requiring an individual to evaluate hypothetical combinations of a limited number of job…

Despite the very long history of research on heritable traits, we still know very little about genetic effects on judgment and choice, including consumer decision making. Building on recent advances in epigenetics, we hypothesize that people…

An examination of emotions reported on 12 million personal blogs along with the results of three experiments reveal that the meaning of happiness is not fixed; instead, it shifts as people age. Whereas younger people are more likely to associate…