2020 - Reprints: Marketing
Making-the-product-happen: A driver of crowdfunding participation, Journal of Interactive Marketing, 41, 81-93, 2018
D. Zvilichovsky, S. Danziger and Y. Steinhart
(Reprint no. 362)
Crowdfunding campaigns, where entrepreneurs seek consumer funding to develop new products, foster dynamics that go beyond traditional seller–buyer transactions. This research studies how consumers increase their participation when they believe their contribution is pivotal to product creation. Utilizing controlled experiments we find that making-the-product-happen motivates participation above and beyond the desire to help the entrepreneurs. Moreover, we show how this motivation, which increases when an all-or-nothing campaign is drawing to a close and its financing target is within reach, is driven by future product availability. Furthermore, we identify conditions where making-it-happen dominates herding and an increase in the backing actions of others decreases one's willingness to back. Lastly, consistent with the notion that individual backers can determine campaign success, an analysis of over 200,000 Kickstarter projects shows that 33% of all successful campaigns hinge on the marginal support of no more than three average backers.
Salient volunteering behavior increases monetary risk-taking, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 30 (3), 525-533, 2020.
M. Blekher, S. Danziger and A. Grinstein
(Reprint no. 363)
Research finds that engaging in prosocial behavior has many positive psychological outcomes (e.g., enhanced well-being, optimism, perceived control, and a boost in self-concept), and research on monetary risk-taking reveals these psychological outcomes are associated with increased risk-taking. Merging these findings, we propose that when people’s volunteering behavior is made salient in their minds, they take more monetary risks. Making research participants’ volunteering behavior salient by having them recall an act of prior volunteering (studies 1 and 3), choosing whether to volunteer (study 2), or choosing one of two volunteering activities (study 4), four experiments (and a fifth reported in the Appendix S2) reveal increased risk-taking across several monetary-risk outcomes (incentive-compatible gambles, allocation of a windfall gain, and a behavioral risk-taking measure involving escalating risk). Lastly, when the decision maker attributes a decision to volunteer to an external source, the effect of salient volunteering on monetary risk-taking attenuates.
Donʼt call us, weʼll call you: Considering cognitive and physical effort in designing effective response systems to manage extended in‐process wait, Psychology & Marketing, 37(3), 398-407, 2020.
S. Danziger, E. Garbarino and S. Moran
(Reprint no. 364)
People must often wait for days or weeks to receive test results, price quotes, products, etc. Service providers may manage user experience during such in‐process waits using notification systems that inform users when a response is available or inquiry systems that require users to inquire about response availability, thereby imposing prospective memory requirements on users. Based on the prospective memory and wait time literature, we make predictions regarding how response system (notification vs. inquiry) moderates the effects of waits that are shorter or longer than the provider promised on user evaluation of the wait. We find that users of a notification system evaluate a wait more positively and are less sensitive to deviations of actual from promised wait time than are users of an inquiry system. This advantage was more pronounced for a wait that was longer (vs. shorter) than promised. These effects of system and expectation on evaluation were fully mediated by their impact on the cognitive and physical effort of navigating the system. Finally, a week after having experienced a wait, users of an inquiry system who had waited longer (vs. shorter) than promised cooperated less on a follow‐up task, highlighting another downside of using an inquiry system.
The “Commitment Projection” effect: When multiple payments for a product affect defection from a service, Journal of Marketing Research, 56(5) 842-861, 2019
I. Nitzan and D. Ein-Gar
(Reprint no. 367)
Many service providers offer supplementary products related to their ongoing services (e.g., fitness centers offer fitness smartwatches). In seven studies, the authors show that the payment method for such supplementary products (multiple payments vs. a single lump sum) affects customers’ tendency to defect from the provider’s core service over time. Specifically, when customers pay for add-ons in multiple payments—provided that (1) they perceive the add-on as being bundled with the core service and (2) the payment period has an end point—they are initially less likely to defect from the service provider than when they pay in a single payment. Over time, however, as payments are made, this gap closes, such that defection intentions under the two payment methods eventually become similar. The authors propose that this phenomenon reflects “commitment projection,” wherein a decrease in customers’ commitment to the add-on product over time is projected onto their commitment to the service provider. These findings carry important managerial implications, given that many service providers offer add-on products in multiple-payment plans and that customers’ defection decisions substantially affect firms’ profitability.
Attraction to similar options: The Gestalt law of proximity is related to the attraction effect, PLoS ONE, 15(10): e0240937, 2020
L. Izakson, Y. Zeevi and D.J. Levy
(Reprint no. 368)
Research no. : 04690100
Previous studies have suggested that there are common mechanisms between perceptual and value-based processes. For instance, both perceptual and value-based choices are highly influenced by the context in which the choices are made. However, the mechanisms which allow context to influence our choice process as well as the extent of the similarity between the perceptual and preferential processes are still unclear. In this study, we examine a within-subject relation between the attraction effect, which is a well-known effect of context on preferential choice, and the Gestalt law of proximity. Then, we aim to use this link to better understand the mechanisms underlying the attraction effect. We conducted one study followed by an additional pre-registered replication study, where subjects performed a Gestalt-psychophysical task and a decoy task. Comparing the behavioral sensitivity of each subject in both tasks, we found that the more susceptible a subject is to the proximity law, the more she displayed the attraction effect. These results demonstrate a within-subject relation between a perceptual phenomenon (proximity law) and a value-based bias (attraction effect) which further strengthens the notion of common rules between perceptual and value-based processing. Moreover, this suggests that the mechanism underlying the attraction effect is related to grouping by proximity with attention as a mediator.
Cross-decision social effects in product adoption and defection decisions, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 37, 213-235, 2020
V. Landsman and I. Nitzan
(Reprint no. 369)
Research no. : 03940100 & 04740100
Researchers and practitioners have long been aware of the capacity to use information on consumers' product adoptions and defections to forecast the adoption and defection behavior of others in their social networks. Yet, herein, we suggest that such information still holds substantial untapped predictive potential. Specifically, this paper is the first to define and investigate cross-decision social effects, i.e., the effects of customer defections on network neighbors' adoption decisions, and the effects of customer adoptions on network neighbors' defection decisions. We incorporate these effects into a conceptual framework that enables us to explore them concurrently with same-decision social effects (the effects of adoptions on adoptions and of defections on defections), which have been researched extensively. We develop a multi-event hazard model to describe this framework, and estimate it using two unique data sets on a communication network and on adoption and defection dates for a mobile add-on.We obtain strong empirical evidence for negative cross-decision social effects that are larger for strong ties than for weak ties.
When and why consumers “accidentally” endanger their products, Management Science, 66, 5757–5782, 2020
Y. Shani, G. Appel, S. Danziger and R. Shachar
(Reprint No. 370)
Research no. : 00310100
In this article, we examine whether consumers may “accidentally” endanger a product they own when a new version of the product is introduced. We propose that owners endanger their product when they want to upgrade to a new version but have difficulty justifying the upgrade and that owners find justification more difficult when a new version offers an improved design but does not offer a significant technological improvement. Owners endanger their product hoping that it will be fortuitously damaged. Product damage provides owners with a good reason to upgrade. Focusing on iPhone as a case study, field data and experiments provide evidence for product endangering, and they support the role of justification in three ways. First, as hypothesized, endangering occurs when the new product offers an improved design but does not offer a significant technological improvement. Second, owners are less likely to endanger a product that is under warranty; therefore, damage to it will not enable upgrading. Third, owners are more likely to endanger their product when their justification concerns are heightened.
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2019.3509
Influence of the “benefit of the doubt” in online auctions, Marketing Letters, 30, 245-260, 2019
Y. Steinhart, M. Kamins and D. Mazursky
(Reprint no. 372)
Research no. : 01590100
In online auctions, as well as in other purchase settings, there are conditions when consumers embrace uncertainty instead of avoiding it. In these cases, consumers prefer not to know the true value of a product they are purchasing, thereby enjoying the “benefit of the doubt” that they may have come across an incredible buy. We demonstrate in a field study on eBay and in lab experiments that consumers are more likely to prefer a state of uncertainty regarding the likelihood of knowing an item’s true value (the Benefit-of-the-Doubt effect) when the seller has low rather than high categorical expertise and when it is more difficult to determine the item’s true value. We show that optimism about the true value of the item drives the Benefit-of-the-Doubt effect.
