Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Automated and personalized interactions may increase the relevance of marketing offers, but they also have less positive economic and psychological consequences for consumers. Machine learning-based prediction algorithms can approximate individuals' preferences and their willingness to pay at ever greater levels of precision, and companies can use this knowledge to charge higher individual prices. Typically, consumers freely hand over all the information necessary to reveal their preferences and it seems that they underestimate the value of their personal data. And there is another discomforting aspect of giving away personal data. It means giving up privacy and as a result loosing autonomy.
Preventing negative outcomes is typically a task for regulators but finding solutions can be difficult. Therefore, companies need to address consumer concerns in their policies as well. To avoid dystopia, managers need to take consumer psychology into account and resist the temptation to maximize short-term profits at the cost of consumers. Avoiding marketing dystopia is in the best interest of all market participants – at least with a longer-term perspective.

Abstract
When consumers compare a worse product to a better product, negative contrast can make the worse product less attractive, and positive contrast can make the better product more attractive. We show that positive contrast is relatively scope insensitive: the size of the difference between products affects negative contrast but not positive contrast. Even when the difference between products is small enough to make negative contrast negligible, positive contrast remains strong. This means that when consumers compare a product to a slightly worse product, contrast makes the better product more attractive without making the worse product any less attractive. The asymmetry occurs because consumers are less likely to consider the size of the difference between products when evaluating the better product than when evaluating the worse product, such that nudging consumers to consider the size of the difference eliminates the asymmetry.

Abstract
Collective layoffs can occur for many reasons, often related to a firm's pursuit of greater efficiency and cost reduction, and they tend to trigger negative reactions among the public. Anecdotal evidence suggests that offshoring, one of the most controversial and politicized aspects of globalization, evokes particularly negative reactions. We propose a social contract account of consumer reactions to collective layoffs and demonstrate differential consumer responses to collective layoffs due to offshoring versus other reasons, such as automation. Layoffs due to offshoring are perceived as an especially egregious violation of the normative expectation that firms should support members of their society. Data from nine experimental studies (N = 5,568; seven reported in the main paper and two in the General Discussion), public consumer responses to layoffs in a large online community (N = 29,045), and layoff announcements in the European Union (N = 1,261) show that consumers react more negatively to collective layoffs due to offshoring compared to other reasons. Supporting our social contract account, the negative effect of offshoring is stronger when offshoring affects workers in the consumers' home (vs. foreign) country, when the firm is domestic (vs. foreign), and when most customers are domestic (vs. foreign).

Abstract
Many firms are beginning to replace customer service employees with bots, from humanoid service robots to digital chatbots. Using real human–bot interactions in lab and field settings, we study consumers' evaluations of bot-provided service. We find that service evaluations are more negative when the service provider is a bot versus a human—even when the provided service is identical. This effect is explained by consumers' belief that service automation is motivated by firm benefits (i.e., cutting costs) at the expense of customer benefits (such as service quality). The effect is eliminated when firms share the economic surplus derived from automation with consumers through price discounts. The effect is reversed when service bots provide unambiguously superior service to human employees—a scenario that may soon become reality. Consumers' default reactions to service bots are therefore largely negative but can be equal to or better than reactions to human service providers if firms can demonstrate how automation benefits consumers.