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• Teaching Note | HBS Case Collection | September 2019

  Commonwealth Bank of Australia: Unbanklike Experimentation

  Ryan W. Buell and Leslie K. John

  Citation:

  Buell, Ryan W., and Leslie K. John. "Commonwealth Bank of Australia: Unbanklike Experimentation." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 620-041, September 2019.  View Details

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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

  Improving Customer Compatibility with Operational Transparency

  Ryan W. Buell and MoonSoo Choi

  Through a large-scale field experiment with 389,611 customers considering opening a credit card account with a nationwide retail bank, we investigate how providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs affects subsequent rates of customer acquisition and long-run engagement. Although we find transparency to have an insignificant effect on acquisition rates, customers who were shown each offering’s tradeoffs selected different products than those who were not. Moreover, prospective customers who experienced transparency and subsequently chose to open an account went on to exhibit higher quality service relationships over time. Monthly spending was 9.9% higher and cancellation rates were 20.5% lower among those who experienced transparency into each offering’s tradeoffs. Increased product usage and retention accrued disproportionately to customers with prior category experience—more experienced customers who were provided transparency spent 19.2% more on a monthly basis and were 33.7% less likely to defect after nine months. Importantly, we find that these gains in engagement and retention do not come at the expense of customers’ financial wellbeing—the probability of making late payments was reduced among customers who experienced transparency. We further find that the positive effects of transparency on engagement and retention were attenuated in the presence of a promotion that provided financial incentives to choose particular offerings. Taken together, these results suggest that providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs may be an effective strategy for informing customer choices, leading to better outcomes for customers and firms alike.

  Keywords: behavioral operations; operational transparency; customer compatibility; customer behavior; Consumer Behavior; Decision Making; Operations; Strategy;

  Citation:

  Buell, Ryan W., and MoonSoo Choi. "Improving Customer Compatibility with Operational Transparency." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-013, July 2019.  View Details

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• Article | Journal of Consumer Psychology

  The Feeling of Not Knowing It All

  Haiyang Yang, Ziv Carmon, Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton

  How do consumers assess their mastery of knowledge they have learned? We explore this question by investigating a common knowledge consumption situation: encountering opportunities for further learning. We argue and show that such opportunities can trigger a feeling-of-not-knowing-it-all (FONKIA), which lowers consumers’ confidence in their mastery of the knowledge they already possess. Specifically, listing optional follow-up readings at the conclusion of a course lowered students’ confidence in their mastery of the course material they had already learned (Study 1). Encountering an optional learning opportunity increased the FONKIA, which mediated the decreased confidence (Studies 2 and 3). We also document two moderators consistent with our conceptualization. First, participants primed with mastery (vs. instrumental) motivation were more negatively impacted when they encountered optional learning opportunities. Second, the more related the optional opportunities were to the target topic, the lower participants’ confidence in their mastery of what they had already learned. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings, such as encouraging further learning or harming teaching evaluations.

  Keywords: Knowledge consumption; Consumption of learning; Judgment of knowledge; Feeling ofknowing; Confidence in knowledge; WYSIATI; FONKIA; Knowledge Acquisition; Learning; Perception;

  Citation:

  Yang, Haiyang, Ziv Carmon, Dan Ariely, and Michael I. Norton. "The Feeling of Not Knowing It All." Journal of Consumer Psychology 29, no. 3 (July 2019): 455–462.  View Details

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