Operations Research, 69(5): 1349-1650, 2021

The authors propose a model that allows publishers of online advertising to balance the trade-off between short-term profit and long-term benefit.

Online publishers sell their advertising resources via either an upfront market or a spot market. In the upfront market, the publisher enters into a contract with each advertiser, guaranteeing an agreed number of impressions over a specified period at a fixed price. These contracts often vary in length, so the publisher has many contracts at any given time, each with a varying time span. In the spot market, the publisher auctions off its remaining advertising resources in real time among advertisers who want to display their ads during the current period.

This practice of ad delivery suffers from two major inefficiencies. First, the upfront market and the spot market are often managed separately. This ignores the value of coordination and integration and thus misses potential profit. The second inefficiency is related to how advertising is sold in the spot market: simple auction mechanisms are theoretically appealing, but have many drawbacks in practice.

The authors propose integrating ad delivery planning for guaranteed ads and spot market ads. They study how an online advertising publisher should allocate its advertising resources to different guaranteed ads and to spot market ads, considering the uncertain supply of ad resources, the requirement of guaranteed ads, and the bids submitted from advertisers in the spot market.

The proposed integrated planning of guaranteed and non-guaranteed ads is shown to be capable of achieving higher profit and also ensuring effective delivery of guaranteed ads.

Journal of Applied Psychology, advance online publication, 2022

Despite the universal norm of reciprocity that one ought to reciprocate what they have received, help recipients do not always return the favour.,

Organisational life requires that employees help each other, supporting their co-workers and thus enhancing work relationships and work performance. Yet an employee who benefits from a supportive relationship might sabotage the person who supports them in the relationship. The authors propose an explanation for this “biting the hand that feeds” phenomenon.

Their results show that help recipients develop negative perceptions of help givers if they perceive the help givers as more competent than they are. This causes them to experience a threat to their status and feelings of envy towards the help givers. The more envy that help recipients experience toward help givers, the more likely they are to undermine those who help them. In this way, help givers are sometimes even punished for helping. Help recipients are even more likely to respond negatively if are motivated by a desire for higher status.

The authors’ findings are in contrast to social exchange theory, which suggests that after receiving help, people reciprocate by helping the original help giver. Instead, these findings underscore the importance of status dynamics in helping interactions by highlighting that help recipients, especially those motivated by a desire for higher status, may paradoxically undermine help givers when they perceive help givers as a threat to their own status.

Journal of Marketing, 86(6), 95-115 (2022)

The authors shed new light on how marketers can design influencer marketing campaigns to maximise their effectiveness. They reveal how the effectiveness of engaging social-media influencers to promote a firm’s offerings depends on factors related to the influencers themselves, their followers, and the content of sponsored posts.

Many marketers have turned to online influencers to promote their brands and products on social media as consumers grow increasingly skeptical toward traditional marketing. This has propelled the growth of influencer marketing, a communication strategy in which a firm selects and incentivises online influencers to engage their followers on social media in an attempt to promote the firm’s offerings. A firm selects and pays online influencers who have built networks of followers on social media. Influencers share content while weaving brand endorsements into their personal stories and posts. This results in content that appears authentic and provides consumption value.

However, limited research has considered the costs of paying influencers to promote a firm’s offerings. When might such a marketing strategy woo potential customers, and when might it put them off?

The authors examine how the effectiveness of using influencers to market a firm’s offerings is determined by factors related to the sender of a message (the influencer), the receiver of the message (the influencer's followers), and the message itself (the influencer's posts).

Their findings show that the effectiveness of paying influencers to promote a firm’s offerings is enhanced by influencer originality, follower size, and sponsor salience; while effectiveness is diminished by posts that announce new product launches. They also find that tensions arise when firms select influencers and manage their content. The effectiveness of influencer marketing is affected in an inverted U-shaped pattern by the frequency of influencer activity, follower–brand fit, and the degree of positivity of a post. This suggests that firms that adopt a balanced approach towards these variables can achieve greater marketing effectiveness.

Management Science, advance online publication, 2022

Operating under both supply-side and demand-side uncertainties, a mobile-promotion platform conducts advertising campaigns for individual advertisers. Campaigns arrive dynamically over time, which is divided into seasons; each campaign requires the platform to deliver a target number of mobile impressions from a desired set of locations over a desired time interval. The platform fulfills these campaigns by procuring impressions from publishers, who supply advertising space on apps via real-time bidding on ad exchanges. Each location is characterized by its win curve, that is, the relationship between the bid price and the probability of winning an impression at that bid. The win curves at the various locations of interest are initially unknown to the platform, and it learns them on the fly based on the bids it places to win impressions and the realized outcomes. Each acquired impression is allocated to one of the ongoing campaigns. The platform’s objective is to minimize its total cost (the amount spent in procuring impressions and the penalty incurred due to unmet targets of the campaigns) over the time horizon of interest. Our main result is a bidding and allocation policy for this problem. We show that our policy is the best possible (asymptotically tight) for the problem using the notion of regret under a policy, namely the difference between the expected total cost under that policy and the optimal cost for the clairvoyant problem (i.e., one in which the platform has full information about the win curves at all the locations in advance): The lower bound on the regret under any policy is of the order of the square root of the number of seasons, and the regret under our policy matches this lower bound. We demonstrate the performance of our policy through numerical experiments on a test bed of instances whose input parameters are based on our observations at a real-world mobile-promotion platform.

MIS Quarterly, 46(2), 1135-1164

A herding cue is a lean information signal that an individual receives about the aggregate number of others who have engaged in a behavior that may result in herd behavior. Given the ease with which they can be leveraged as implementation interventions or design features on online sites, herding cues hold the promise to provide a means to influence adoption behaviors. Yet, little attention has been devoted in the IS adoption literature to understanding the effects of herding cues. Given that herding cues are just one of several forms of social influence on adoption behaviors and are relatively lean in nature, understanding their viability as an implementation intervention necessitates understanding their effects in the presence of (1) other forms of social influence, which also serve to reduce uncertainty and signal the appropriateness of technology adoption, and (2) an individual’s own beliefs about adopting. In this vein, we conducted a randomized field experiment to examine the use of a herding cue as an implementation intervention to hasten adoption behaviors. The research model was evaluated using survival analysis by combining the data from the field experiment with two waves of surveys, and archival logs of adoption. Our results show that a herding cue (1) directly impacts the time it takes an individual to adopt a technology, (2) amplifies the effects of peer behaviors (another type of informative social influence), but has no impact on the effect of subjective norm (a form of normative social influence), and (3) dampens the effects of an individual’s private beliefs about the usefulness of a technology. Our paper disentangles herding information signals to define a herding cue as distinct from other herd behavior triggers, explores how it may interact with other forms of social influences and private beliefs to influence adoption behaviors, and, on a practical level, provides evidence of how a herding cue can be a tangible intervention to accelerate technology adoption.

Journal of Marketing Research, 58(5), 968–980

Consumption of used products has the potential to symbolically connect present and previous users of these products, something that may appeal to lonely consumers. Accordingly, across seven studies, feeling lonely increased consumers’ preference for previously owned products. Specifically, the authors found that the proportion of lone shoppers was higher in a used versus a regular bookstore, lone individuals (vs. those sitting in pairs) were more likely to select a used over a new product, people without (vs. with) a date on Valentine’s Day expressed stronger preference for used products, and individual differences in loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic predicted interest in used products. Other studies documented that the desire to symbolically connect underlies the effect of loneliness on consumption. At a time when loneliness is on the rise, the authors discuss implications for the marketing of used products and how loneliness might motivate consumers to reduce waste.