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Working Papers

These papers are working drafts of research which often appear in final form in academic journals. The published versions may differ from the working versions provided here.
 

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2014
We evaluate the effectiveness of television advertising in the setting of the NFL’s Super Bowl telecast. The Super Bowl is the largest advertising event of the year and is well suited for measurement. The event...
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Wesley Hartmann
2013
Presidential candidates choose advertising strategically across markets based on each state's potential to tip the election. The winner-take-all rules in the Electoral College concentrate advertising in battleground states, ignoring most voters. We estimate an equilibrium...
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2013
This paper aims to understand the impact of temporal spacing between ad exposures on the likelihood of a consumer purchasing the advertised product. I create an individual-level data set with exogenous variation in the spacing...
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Jennifer Lynn Aaker
2013
Across six field and laboratory experiments, participants given a concretely-framed prosocial goal (e.g., making someone smile, increasing recycling) felt happier after performing a goal-directed act of kindness than did those who were assigned a functionally...
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Jennifer Lynn Aaker
2012
When do people feel as if they are rich in time? Not often, research and daily experience suggest. However, three experiments showed that participants who felt awe, relative to other emotions, felt they had more...
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Jennifer Lynn Aaker
2012
Being happy and finding life meaningful overlap, but there are important differences. A large survey revealed multiple differing predictors of happiness (controlling for meaning) and meaningfulness (controlling for happiness). Satisfying ones needs and wants increased...
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Wesley Hartmann
2011
We estimate advertising effects in the context of presidential elections. This setting overcomes many data challenges in previous advertising studies, while arguably providing one of the most interesting empirical settings to study advertising's effects. The...
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Sridhar Narayanan
2011
Gambling and gaming is a very large industry in the United States with about one-third of all adults participating in it on a regular basis. Using novel and unique behavioral data from a panel of...
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Sridhar Narayanan
2011
Discrete games of complete information have been used to analyze a variety of contexts such as market entry, technology adoption and peer effects. They are extensions of discrete choice models, where payoffs of each player...
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Jennifer Lynn Aaker
2011
Although a substantial amount of research has examined the constructs of warmth and competence, far less has examined how these constructs develop and what benefits may accrue when warmth and competence are cultivated. Yet there...
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Harikesh S. Nair, Sridhar Narayanan
2011
New empirical models of consumer demand that incorporate social preferences, observational learning, word-of-mouth or network effects have the feature that the adoption of others in the reference group - the installed-base - has a causal...
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Jennifer Lynn Aaker
2011
Consumers want to be happy, and marketers are increasingly trying to appeal to consumers pursuit of happiness. However, the results of six studies reveal that what happiness means varies, and consumers choices reflect those differences...
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Wesley Hartmann, Harikesh S. Nair, Sridhar Narayanan
2011
We discuss how regression discontinuity designs arise naturally in settings where firms target marketing activity at consumers, and discuss how this aspect may be exploited for econometric inference of causal effects of marketing effort. Our...
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Harikesh S. Nair
2011
We use variation in wind speeds at surfing locations in Switzerland as exogenous shifters of users' propensity to post content about their surfing activity onto an online social network. We exploit this variation to test...
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2011
We examine a duopoly where one of the firms does not maximize profit, but instead maximizes customer surplus subject to a profit constraint. (Customer surplus for a firm is the sumo f its customers individual...
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Harikesh S. Nair
2010
We present an empirical framework to analyze real-world sales-force compensation schemes, and report on a multi-million dollar, multi-year project involving a large contact lens manufacturer at the US, where the model was used to improve...
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2010
We show how to use micro-level survey data from a tracking study on brand awareness in conjunction with data on sales and advertising expenditures to improve the specification, estimation, and interpretation of aggregate discrete choice...
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Jennifer Lynn Aaker
2010
Although a substantial amount of research has examined the link between money and happiness, far less has examined the link between time and happiness. This paper argues, however, that time plays a critical role in...
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Harikesh S. Nair
2010
Marketing researchers have used models of consumer demand to forecast future sales; to describe and test theories of consumer behavior; and to measure the response to marketing interventions. The basic framework typically starts from microfoundations...
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Baba Shiv
2010
Under pressure, people often prefer what is familiar, which can seem safer. We show that such familiarity-favoring can lead to choices precisely contrary to the source of felt pressure, thus exacerbating, rather than mitigating, its...