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- February 2022
- Article
Borrowing to Save? The Impact of Automatic Enrollment on Debt
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and William L. Skimmyhorn
Does automatic enrollment into a retirement plan increase financial distress due to increased borrowing outside the plan? We study a natural experiment created when the U.S. Army began automatically enrolling newly hired civilian employees into the Thrift Savings Plan....
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- Article
Financial Shame Spirals: How Shame Intensifies Financial Hardship
By: Joe J. Gladstone, Jon M. Jachimowicz, Adam Eric Greenberg and Adam D. Galinsky
Financial hardship is an established source of shame. This research explores whether shame is also a driver and exacerbator of financial hardship. Six experimental, archival, and correlational studies (N = 9,110)—including data from customer bank account histories and...
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- November 2021
- Article
Ratings, Reviews, and the Marketing of New Products
By: Itay P. Fainmesser, Dominique Olié Lauga and Elie Ofek
We study how user-generated content (UGC) about new products impacts a firm's advertising and pricing decisions and the effect on profits and market dynamics. We construct a two-period model where consumers value quality and are heterogeneous in their taste for the new...
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- Article
Using Fresh Starts to Nudge Increased Retirement Savings
By: John Beshears, Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman and Shlomo Benartzi
We conducted a field experiment to study the effect of framing future moments in time as new beginnings (or “fresh starts”). University employees (N=6,082) received mailings with an opportunity to choose between increasing their contributions to a savings plan...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Rising Markups and the Role of Consumer Preferences
By: Hendrik Döpper, Alexander MacKay, Nathan H. Miller and Joel Stiebale
We characterize the evolution of markups for consumer products in the United States from 2006 to 2019. We use detailed data on prices and quantities for products in more than 100 distinct product categories to estimate demand systems with flexible consumer preferences....
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- October 2021
- Article
Fintech Borrowers: Lax Screening or Cream-Skimming?
By: Marco Di Maggio and Vincent Yao
Personal credit is the fastest-growing segment of the consumer credit market, mainly driven by fintech lenders' staggering expansion. We study this market using a unique individual-level data, which covers most of the top fintech and traditional lenders, and provides...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Loan Officers Impede Graduation from Microfinance: Strategic Disclosure in a Large Microfinance Institution
By: Natalia Rigol and Benjamin N. Roth
One of the most important puzzles in microfinance is the low rate of borrower graduation to larger, more flexible loans. Utilizing observational and experimental data from a large Chilean microfinance institution, we demonstrate that loan officers impede borrower...
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- Article
The Pitfalls of Pricing Algorithms: Be Mindful of How They Can Hurt Your Brand
By: Marco Bertini and Oded Koenigsberg
More and more companies are relying on pricing algorithms to maximize profits. The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning enables real-time price adjustments based on supply and demand, competitors’ activities, delivery schedules, and so forth. But...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Consumer Choice and Corporate Bankruptcy
By: Samuel Antill and Megan Hunter
Using an incentivized randomized experiment, we estimate the causal effect of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing on consumer demand for the bankrupt firm's products. Knowledge of Hertz's Chapter 11 bankruptcy reduces consumers' willingness-to-pay for Hertz by 35%. We show...
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- July 2021
- Article
The Effect of Price on Firm Reputation
By: Michael Luca and Oren Reshef
While a business's reputation can affect its pricing, prices can also affect its reputation. To explore the effect of prices on reputation, we investigate daily data on menu prices and online ratings from a large rating and ordering platform. We find that a price...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Once Bitten, Twice Shy: Learning from Corporate Fraud and Corporate Governance Spillovers
By: Trung Nguyen
This paper finds that investors learn from their experience with corporate fraud and financial misconduct and modify their investment behavior to avoid suspicious firms and increase corporate governance efforts. More specially, mutual funds that experienced corporate...
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- June 23, 2021
- Article
Research: When A/B Testing Doesn't Tell You the Whole Story
By: Eva Ascarza
When it comes to churn prevention, marketers traditionally start by identifying which customers are most likely to churn, and then running A/B tests to determine whether a proposed retention intervention will be effective at retaining those high-risk customers. While...
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Keywords:
Customer Retention;
Churn;
Targeting;
Market Research;
Marketing;
Investment Return;
Customers;
Retention;
Research
- May 2021 (Revised September 2021)
- Case
Headspace vs. Calm: A Mindful Competition
By: Ayelet Israeli and Anne Wilson
By 2021, the mindfulness app wars reached their apex. Over 2,000 meditation apps were available to consumers, but two apps, Headspace and Calm, dominated the space, jointly holding about 70% of the total market. Headspace had established itself as the approachable...
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Keywords:
Marketing Communication;
Integrated Strategy;
Brand;
Brand ＆ Product Management;
Brand Communication;
Brand Differentiation;
Brand Building;
Brand Management;
E-commerce;
E-Commerce Strategy;
Ecommerce;
App;
App Development;
Applications;
COVID;
COVID-19;
Pandemic;
Pricing;
Pricing Strategy;
Subscription Model;
Subscription;
Partnerships;
Strategic Partnerships;
B2B Vs. B2C;
B2B;
Health ＆ Wellness;
Wellbeing;
Digitization;
Commoditization;
Mobile App;
Mobile App Industry;
Mobile Healthcare;
Mobile Marketing;
Digital Brand;
Digital Health;
Digital Marketing;
Consumer Health;
Apps;
Online Business;
Online Competition;
Online Community;
Online Entertainment;
Entertainment And Leisure;
Meditation;
Marketing;
Marketing Communications;
Brands and Branding;
Price;
Strategy;
Competition;
Competitive Strategy;
Competitive Advantage;
Partners and Partnerships;
Health;
Well-being;
Mobile Technology;
Communication;
Communication Strategy;
Disruption;
Consumer Behavior;
Online Advertising;
Health Industry;
Technology Industry;
Communications Industry;
United States;
North America;
United Kingdom
- May 2021
- Article
The Firm Next Door: Using Satellite Images to Study Local Information Advantage
By: Jung Koo Kang, Lorien Stice-Lawrence and Forester Wong
We use novel satellite data that track the number of cars in the parking lots of 92,668 stores for 71 publicly listed U.S. retailers to study the local information advantage of institutional investors. We establish car counts as a timely measure of store-level...
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- April 2021 (Revised July 2021)
- Case
StockX: The Stock Market of Things (Abridged)
By: Chiara Farronato, John J. Horton, Annelena Lobb and Julia Kelley
Founded in 2015 by Dan Gilbert, Josh Luber, and Greg Schwartz, StockX was an online platform where users could buy and sell unworn luxury and limited-edition sneakers. Sneaker resale prices often fluctuated over time based on supply and demand, creating a robust...
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Keywords:
Markets;
Auctions;
Bids and Bidding;
Demand and Consumers;
Consumer Behavior;
Data and Data Sets;
Market Design;
Market Platforms;
Two-Sided Platforms;
Multi-Sided Platforms;
Market Transactions;
Marketplace Matching;
Supply and Industry;
Analysis;
Price;
Product Marketing;
Product Launch;
Apparel and Accessories Industry;
Fashion Industry;
North and Central America;
United States;
Michigan;
Detroit
- April 2021
- Article
A Model of Multi-Pass Search: Price Search Across Stores and Time
By: Navid Mojir and K. Sudhir
In retail settings with price promotions, consumers often search across stores and time. However, the search literature typically only models one pass search across stores, ignoring revisits to stores; the choice literature using scanner data has modeled search across...
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- Spring 2021
- Article
Corporate Resilience and Response During COVID-19
By: Alex Cheema-Fox, Bridget LaPerla, George Serafeim and Hui (Stacie) Wang
The coronavirus pandemic caused a sharp market decline while raising heterogeneous responses across companies related to their employees, supply chain, and repurposing of operations to provide needed products and services. We study whether during the 2020 COVID-19...
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Keywords:
ESG;
COVID-19;
Coronavirus;
Crisis Response Plans;
Crisis;
ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance;
ESG Ratings;
Leadership & Corporate Accountability;
Big Data;
Machine Learning;
Investor Behavior;
Institutional Investors;
Corporate Performance;
Health Pandemics;
Crisis Management;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Human Capital;
Supply Chain;
Operations;
Leadership;
Corporate Accountability;
Institutional Investing;
Performance
- 2021
- Working Paper
Information Spillovers in Experience Goods Competition
By: Zhuoqiong Charlie Chen, Christopher Stanton and Catherine Thomas
When experience goods compete, consuming one product can be informative about value for similar untried products. We study a two-period model of duopoly competition in markets that have this feature and where firms can price discriminate between consumers based on...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
The Health Costs of Cost-Sharing
By: Amitabh Chandra, Evan Flack and Ziad Obermeyer
We use the design of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit program to demonstrate three facts about the health consequences of cost-sharing. First, we show that an as-if-random increase of 33.6% in out-of-pocket price (11.0 percentage points (p.p.) change in...
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- January 2021
- Case
Value-Based Insurance Design at Onex
By: Joshua Schwartzstein, Amitabh Chandra and Amram Migdal
The operating executives of Health and Benefits for Onex Partners, Megan Jackson Frye and Sam Camens, faced a challenge: Healthcare costs for employees of Onex’s portfolio companies were continuing to rise above the consumer price index, reflecting broader trends...
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Keywords:
Decision Making;
Cost vs Benefits;
Decision Choices and Conditions;
Decisions;
Finance;
Behavioral Finance;
Insurance;
Health;
Health Care and Treatment;
Human Resources;
Compensation and Benefits;
Markets;
Demand and Consumers;
Consumer Behavior;
Social Psychology;
Behavior;
Interests;
Motivation and Incentives;
Perception;
Health Industry;
Insurance Industry;
North America;
United States