HEC Paris Marketing Research Camp 2023 HEC Paris Marketing Research Camp 2023

The HEC Marketing Research Camp is our annual gathering at HEC designed to enhance scientific collaboration among our Ph.D. students and faculty, both internally and with neighboring institutions in the greater Paris area. In pursuit of this objective, we have extended invitations to esteemed researchers from leading U.S. institutions such as Wharton, Columbia, and UCLA. (Pedro Gardete is now at Nova (Lisabon) but used to be at Stanford for many years).

Our goal is to not only absorb the latest scientific breakthroughs shared by these distinguished speakers but also to engage in meaningful discussions, exchange idea, explore new projects, and foster interactions that could pave the way for future collaborations.

Program

9:30     Welcome coffee

10:00    Talk 1: Pedro Gardete

Multiattribute Search: Empirical Evidence and Information Design

The search literature has relied on parsimonious models to recover consumer fundamentals and characterize market outcomes. We investigate simple online search patterns that suggest that the dualistic view of fixed sample vs. sequential search modes is the likely result of coarse data combined with methodological convenience. In contrast with these paradigms, we find consumers are selective about the product attributes they inspect, they revisit items to acquire additional information, and often convert without collecting all available data about the selected alternatives.

Our substantive motivation is the problem of providing information to consumers in a market with differentiated products. We propose a new model of gradual consumer search based on simulated beliefs that allows us to characterize the full search problem. In contrast with the existing literature, we find that the seller's incentives to engage in search design activities tend to match the consumers'

11:00    Coffee break

11:30    Talk 2: Gita Johar

Combating Misinformation: A Consumer Psychology Perspective

The spread of misinformation, claims that contradict or distort verifiable facts, poses significant risks in multiple contexts across politics, public health, climate change, and advertising. Misinformation operates in an ecosystem made up of publishers of news who provide the content, platforms that are media channels, and people who share the news/act on it. The spread of misinformation is amplified because of the ease with which information can be shared on social media. Once posted to social media, information can propagate to friends then strangers within seconds. Engagement with misinformation can be a lot higher than engagement with other information, resulting in perpetuation of misinformation by algorithms built for optimizing on engagement. Given this background, understanding why people share information and how to reduce sharing of misinformation are keys to reducing the spread and potential impact of misinformation. My research program answers these questions.

What motivates consumers to share misinformation? In a recent paper on the spread of Covid-19 (mis)information titled “Social Marginalization Motivates Indiscriminate Sharing of COVID-19 News on Social Media” (Journal of the Association of Consumer Research 2022), we find that people who feel marginalized in society are particularly likely to share news and one reason they do so is to find meaning in their lives. In other ongoing research titled “What makes fake-news sharers tick? Textual cues extracted from language can help predict and mitigate fake-news sharing,” we mine all the tweets of people who share misinformation, and find using text analysis that anger, anxiety, and a need for power may provoke sharing of news. These findings can help social platforms to identify, prioritize, and scrutinize messages posted by potential misinformation sharers before false messages are widely disseminated, and to design interventions such as lowering anxiety online to reduce sharing.

What are other mechanisms to reduce sharing of misinformation? Encouraging fact-checking is one way

to reduce belief in, and sharing of, misinformation. We find, however, that consumers are less likely to fact check ambiguous news headlines when they feel they are in the presence of others (e.g., on social media) compared to when they are alone (“Perceived Social Presence Reduces Fact-Checking” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 2017). This reluctance to fact check is caused by reduced vigilance in group settings such as on social media. Another problem with the fact-checking solution is the paucity of available fact-checks. In a working paper titled “Fact-Checking Matters: A Novel Crowdsourcing Approach for Improving the Information Ecosystem,” we propose crowdsourcing as a solution to scale up fact-checking. We also develop a methodology to debias individuals so that their fact-checks are more accurate. Taken together, my research program aims to understand and address the misinformation crisis.

12:30    End of morning sessions

12:45    Lunch Petit Gustave
 

14:30    Talk 3: Pinar Yildirim

Automation, Career Values, and Political Preferences
Maria Petrova, Gregor Schubert, Bledi Taska, and Pinar Yildirim

In this paper, using a novel data set of resumes from approximately 16 million individuals from the United States, we study the career implications of automation and robotization. We calculate the lifetime career value of various occupations, combining (1) the likelihood of future transitions to other occupations, and (2) earning potential of these occupations. We document a downward trend in the growth of career values in the U.S. between 2000 and 2016. We find that while wage growth is slower, the decline in the average career value growth is mainly due to reduced upward occupational mobility. Automation and robotization are factors contributing to the decline of average local labor market career values. In commuting zones that have been more exposed to automation, the average career value has declined further between 2000 and 2016. Moreover, the decline in career values is not confined to manufacturing occupations—which are more subject to automation—but also impacts retail and service occupations. Local labor markets with greater exposure to robots show lower upward occupational mobility. Changes in career values are predictive of investment in long-term outcomes, such as investment into schooling and housing, and voting in the 2016 general elections. We find further evidence that automation affected both the demand-side and supply-side of politics.
 

15:30    Coffee break

 16:00    Talk 4: Hal Hershfield

Back to the Present: How the Direction of Mental Time Travel Affects Thoughts and Behavior  

Many consumers fail to save for the future at the rates they say they desire. This research examines this savings behavior problem from a persuasive messaging standpoint. With the goal of helping people take better care of their future selves, we build on a stream of research that suggests the ways people view their identities over time affect the savings decisions they make. Although past research on future self similarity judgments across time has started in the present and moved forward to the future, such judgments could theoretically start at any point in time. Here, we explore the possibility of backward mental time travel, by asking people to start in the future and return to the present. A series of 16 studies show that mentally traveling from the future to the present—rather than the present to the future—increases perceived similarity between selves across time by reducing the uncertainty of the destination self. Large-scale field studies indicate that, as an important outcome of this novel intervention, mentally traveling from the future to the present has a positive impact – albeit a small one – by increasing both savings intentions and actual savings behavior.   

17:00    End of afternoon sessions 

17:30   Cocktail and dinner at Le Château HEC

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Organizers:  Klaus MILLER & Anastasia BUYALSKAYA

Contact: facultyevents@hec.fr