Marketers often employ a variety of positive emotions to encourage consumption or promote a particular behavior (e.g., to buy, donate, or recycle) benefiting an organization or cause. We show that specific positive emotions do not universally increase prosocial behavior but rather encourage...

We demonstrate that brand relationships affect perceptions of a brand’s closeness to the self, resulting in mindset congruency effects when matched with an appropriate construal level. Brand relationships that are closer (distal) to the self yield improved evaluations when brand information is...

Do we praise altruistic acts because they produce social benefits or because they entail a personal sacrifice? Across five studies, we find that people mainly rely on personal cost rather than social benefit when evaluating prosocial actors. This occurs because sacrifice, but not benefit, is...

The effects of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the information economy and society is an issue that is attracting increasing attention. Marketing and brand management scholarship is exploring the implications of ICTs for brand proliferation and product differentiation....

A core proposition in economics is that voluntary exchanges benefit both parties. We show that people often deny the mutually beneficial nature of exchange, instead using zero-sum thinking. Participants read about simple exchanges of goods and services, judging whether each party to the...

Personalized and social commerce are becoming increasingly prevalent and are transforming how businesses operate and how consumers make choices. The primary goal of this paper is to review the existing literature relating to personalized and social commerce. To accomplish this goal, we first...

Standard economics omits the role of narratives (the stories that people tell themselves and others) when they make all kinds of decisions. Narratives play a role in understanding the environment; focusing attention; predicting events; motivating action; assigning social roles and identities;...