In mature markets, heavy competition has a commoditizing effect, and customers become increasingly fixated on price. When marketers refer to “commoditization,” they typically mean diminishing differences among offerings. But it's also a psychological state: Consumers fall into a mind-set...

The benefits of customization are not always self-evident to consumers who seek to minimize decision costs or are generally uncertain of what they really want. We argue that the mere posting of a starting price can increase a consumer's readiness to appreciate customized goods. We discuss this...

Tim O'Shaughnessy, the 29-year-old CEO of LivingSocial, is growing a revolutionary worldwide business of "daily deals" - in which retailers offers a heavily-discounted product or service available for purchase for brief (often 24-hour) windows. The case explores the complicated sharing of risks...

We explore the interaction between fairness attitudes and reference dependence both theoretically and experimentally. Our theory of fairness behavior under reference-dependent preferences in the context of ultimatum games, defines fairness in the utility domain and not in the domain of dollar...

This paper investigates situations where a sizable sub-set of consumers prefer an inferior (dominated) offer made by an established brand to a superior (dominating) offer made by a less-established brand. Established brands are those for which consumers hold more confident beliefs concerning...

This paper questions the notion that expatriates should adjust to their host country, by showing that adjustment and its consequences are affected by cosmopolitanism and expected assignment duration. A study of 260 expatriates in the U.S. reveals that cosmopolitans expecting shorter (longer)...

Consumers confronted with a product that offers an unexpected benefit are often uncertain whether the benefit is relevant to them. They might choose (or not) to reduce this uncertainty by thinking more about the offered benefit's relevance to their life. This paper argues that such heightened...

Conventionally, information acquisition is motivated by its instrumental value – the value derived from adapting action to new knowledge. In this paper, we explore the notion of reassurance, whereby people seek to acquire information in order to remove lingering doubts or fears. We formulate...

The stream of customers who visit Flanagan Theme Parks has started to dwindle. The fictional Australian company must decide, with the help of consultant Allie James, whether to try to attract a whole new crop of customers using DailyDilly, a fast-growing social-coupon venture. Allie and Ruth...