Helge Thorbjørnsen

• Dr.Oecon
• Professor at NHH Norwegian School of Economics

Psychological well‐being is remarkably stable over time. However, people may still believe that the future will deviate from the past. Across four experiments in Norway and the United States ( N = 1,827), participants were randomly assigned to report their well‐being in the past or predict their future well‐being. In line with a “bright‐future hypo...

Psychological well-being is remarkably stable over time. However, people may still believe that the future will deviate from the past. Across four experiments in Norway and USA (N=1,827), participants were randomly assigned to report their well-being in the past or predict their future well-being. In line with a "bright-future hypothesis", people p...

Individuals are often biased in their judgments about AI, especially when it comes to customer-support-oriented service interactions. With three preregistered experiments (and three supplementary studies), the current research examines how marketplace status creates systematic differences in customer biases against chatbot-delivered services, and w...

Beliefs about the dishonesty of other people can shape our collective behavior in powerful ways. How accurate are these beliefs? And do we believe that other people are similarly, more, or less dishonest than they truly are? In a research program on moral decision-making consisting of 31 different effects (N = 8,127), initially designed to test a b...

What version of the good life do people want the most, and when do they want it? This paper investigates the relative valuation of happiness, meaning, and psychological richness across time. We predicted that people value a happy life consistently high, but express lower valuation of meaning and psychological richness in their ideal present than in...

Commercial advertisements are intended to persuade consumers to purchase products, but their influence can often extend unintentionally and uninvitedly to noncommercial domains. Researchers have uncovered many such unintended ad effects—from lowered self‐esteem to increased empathy. This paper adds to the research on unintended ad effects by examin...

Despite the potential for market domination and power abuse, it is also true that big businesses enhance consumer choice, job benefits, and welfare. Yet, big businesses are sometimes portrayed as inherently bad. Why? And does it matter for how we treat these organizations as decision-makers? Informed by moral typecasting theory, we suggest people a...

Clear-cut lying for personal gain is widely considered immoral. But does it matter whom one is lying to? As individual decisions naturally occur in social context, acceptability of dishonesty may depend on the group identity of the interaction partner -- posing a serious challenge for intergroup cooperation and societal polarization. Providing an e...

This paper reports on four exploratory online studies of how wellbeing and welfare are valued and perceived from a subjective, individual perspective. Study 1 (n = 707) compares individuals’ subjective ratings and correlations of the importance of the three wellbeing dimen- sions happiness, meaning in life, and a psychologically rich life, as well...

There is already a large body of research on the dramatic negative effects of COVID-19 on peoples' mental and physical health. Millions of people have died, and the pandemic has negatively influenced the lives of billions of people. Luckily however, the vast majority of people infected with the virus, recovers. The happiness and wellbeing of these...

This paper draws from the recent literature on psychological richness of life (PRL), conceptualized as a third dimension of a good life which would be particularly desirable when happiness or meaning in life cannot be satisfactory attained, to investigate whether recovering from a COVID infection could be associated with PRL. We hypothesize that pe...

Businesses want their customers to self‐report information honestly. One increasingly popular way to stimulate desired behavior is by using nudge interventions. But can customers be nudged to self‐report information more honestly? This is currently a debate in the literature, where empirical results are inconclusive. Building on related literature...

Although a COVID-19 infection can be fatal, the vast majority of people infected by the virus have, fortunately, survived. In this paper we investigate how recovering from this potentially fatal infection is associated with people’s perceived meaning in life. Can contracting and recovering from COVID-19 also have positive effects on people’s wellbe...

Virtual reality can influence consumer behavior in powerful ways, but in the domain of tourism marketing, less is known about the psychological process. One possibility is that VR has stronger impact on mental imagery than traditional channels, creating vivid simulations of what it would be like to visit destinations. This process might create hedo...

Societal crises and personal challenges are often followed by substantial changes in physical activity. Is there a link between such changes and psychological well-being? Seeking to answer this question, we conducted a correlational study on a representative sample in Sweden during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 1035). About 49% of th...

The rise of peer-to-peer platforms has represented one of the major economic and societal developments observed in the last decade. We investigated whether people engage in racial discrimination in the sharing economy, and how such discrimination might be explained and mitigated. Using a set of carefully controlled experiments (N = 1,599), includin...

The movie industry benefits financially from creating sequels with links to previous movies. Sequels build on the success of the original movie and generally attain high box office revenues and generate positive word-of-mouth. In the current study, however, the converse effect is investigated; namely how preadvertising a sequel may lead to bigger s...

According to longitudinal research, psychological well-being is remarkably stable over time. However, people may still believe that the future will deviate from the past. Across three experiments in two different countries (N=1,130; two pre-registered), participants were randomly assigned to report their well-being in the past or predict their futu...

Psychological well-being is remarkably stable over time. However, people may still believe that the future will deviate from the past. Across four experiments in Norway and USA (N=1,827), participants were randomly assigned to report their well-being in the past or predict their future well-being. In line with a "bright-future hypothesis", people p...

Nudging, eller «dulting» på norsk, er en sekkebetegnelse for virkemidler og valgdesign som skal hjelpe folk til å ta bedre beslutninger – som å spise sunnere, spare mer eller forurense mindre. I konsumentatferd observerer vi ofte stor avstand mellom intensjoner og faktisk atferd på disse områdene. Psykologisk forskning viser at holdningskampanjer o...

Forbrukere har verken evne eller motivasjon til å evaluere all tilgjengelig informasjon og foreta rasjonelle valg. I stedet er de emosjonelle og impulsive og tar ofte irrasjonelle valg gjennom bruk av heuristikker eller «tommelfingerregler». Det er på dette grunnlaget at ideen om dulting (nudging på engelsk) har vokst frem. Gjennom å designe en såk...

The chapter looks in detail at tactical launch decisions and suggests concrete marketing strategies to overcome barriers to innovation adoption. As the majority of innovations do not make it through even the first year after launch, marketing decisions during this period are essential and deserve extra attention. The chapter focuses particularly on...

The chapter focuses on why customers do and do not switch. Switching is when a customer leaves a service provider for another one. The research presented looks at how customers perceive equity-related aspects, such as economic fairness, on the one hand, and more psychological determinants, such as cognitive and affective aspects, on the other hand....

Purpose Previous research suggests that firms should articulate incongruent sponsorships to provide a rationale for the relationship between sponsor and sponsorship object. Fit articulation is a strategy that communicates shared associations between sponsor and object. Based on conclusion explicitness theory, this paper aims to conceptualize and te...

The purpose of this study is to test effects of risk dimensions on customers' attitude toward using e-services, and to investigate whether risk effects are moderated by utilitarian and hedonic benefits associated with the service. A survey of 436 users of a digital mailbox system, where citizens securely receive mail from the public sector, was und...

Some firms preannounce new products long before they are actually available on the market. Previous research has investigated the effects of such new product preannouncements (NPPs) on consumer and competitor responses. This paper examines how NPPs affect consumers' construal of and preferences for the new product and, in turn, how these evaluation...

Purpose – Prior research has examined ad avoidance in relation to several socio-demographic variables. This study explores how religiousness influences ad avoidance, in relation to trustworthiness. Design/methodology/approach – We conducted an online survey of 4984 participants from five countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, S...

Accession Number: 101743236; THORBJøRNSEN, HELGE 1; Email Address: helge.thorbjornsen@nhh.no; KETELAAR, PAUL 2; Email Address: p.ketelaar@ru.nl; VAN 'T RIET, JONATHAN 2; Email Address: j.vantriet@maw.ru.nl; DAHLÉN, MICAEL 3; Email Address: micael.dahlen@hhs.se; Affiliations: 1: Norwegian School of Economics; 2: Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherla...

Consumers perceive forthcoming products as more (positive) uncertain and interesting than currently available products. Therefore, teaser ads and product pre-announcements are likely effective in increasing consumers’ interest in products and services. This research demonstrates that such future-framed marketing tools are effective in generating po...

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate how marketing leakage to undesired audiences, a common phenomenon in today's globally connected world of consumers, impacts on the target audience, and how marketers can mitigate the negative effects of leaked marketing. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conduct three studies in line with research o...

Previous studies on corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication suggest that firms’ social initiatives should be communicated through third-party, non-corporate sources because they are perceived as unbiased and therefore reduce consumer skepticism. In this article, we extend existing research by showing that source effects in the communica...

Formålet med denne artikkelen er å se på betydningen av samspillet mellom kunder og organisasjoner som kilde til innovasjon – samskaping. Vi tar først et tilbakeblikk på utviklingen av dette samspillet og presenterer deretter kort tre perspektiver på samskaping. Hoveddelen av artikkelen drøfter ulike tilnærminger til innovasjon gjennom samskaping i...

I denne artikkelen presenterer vi et rammeverk for å forstå merkeopplevelsesdimensjoner og effekter av merkeopplevelser. Vi gir deretter en kort diskusjon av mulige forskjeller mellom produkter og tjenester og diskuterer relevansen av rammeverket for tjenester. Ut fra dette presenterer vi resultatene av tre studier der rammeverket anvendes på tjene...

Abstract: This article investigates consumer reactions to acquirer-dominant mergers and acquisitions (M&As) from the perspective of the (smaller) target brand and explores how marketing actions can mitigate negative effects. The findings from five studies show that consumers tend to react negatively to M&As by devaluing the acquirer brand, increasi...

This paper investigates consumer response to advertising for future, to-be-released products. Drawing on recent consumer psychology research on the optimism bias, positive uncertainty, and affective (mis-)forecasting, we explore consumers' positive bias for "the next product." A first experimental study of responses to car ads investigates how adve...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of employees' core value behavior. For service brands, employees are most likely the most important vehicle in building and communicating brand core values. The paper aims to draw on two related theories on motivation to understand the basic psychological mechanisms involved, and...

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the properties and attributes of networked services and to propose a general categorization scheme for such services. Design/methodology/approach Two separate studies were conducted to test the validity and applicability of the categorization scheme. First, industry experts categorized a set of pre‐selected m...

Many studies have proposed the use of the relationship metaphor to enhance the understanding of the relationship between consumers and brands. However, few studies have empirically tested consumer–brand relationship models. In this paper, the authors argue that the success of developing empirical models of consumer–brand relationships depends on th...

ABSTRACT: Research on the effects of personalized messages on consumers’ behavioral responses has yielded mixed findings. We explore how e-mail personalization influences click-through intentions. Our results suggest that consumers experience personalization reactance in response to highly personalized messages when the fit between the offer in the...

This paper explores the role of self-identity expressiveness and social identity expressiveness in the context of Multimedia Messaging (MMS) adoption. An extended version of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) including a wider array of identity and social influences is developed and tested. As hypothesized, self-identity expressiveness and social...

The purpose of this article is to study how WebTV channel additions influence the following relationship dimensions between a broadcasting company and its consumers: brand knowledge, brand satisfaction, direct relationship investments, and indirect relationship investments. A survey of broadcast consumers indicated positive effects of WebTV channel...

Purpose In this article the authors aim to investigate the moderating effects of gender in explaining intention to use mobile chat services. Design/methodology/approach An extended adoption model based on the technology acceptance model and theory of reasoned action is applied for pin‐pointing the antecedents of intention to use mobile chat servic...

This article develops and tests a model to explain consumers’ intention to use mobile services. Through triangulating theories from the diverse fields of information systems research, uses and gratification research, and domestication research, the authors put forth an integrated model that explains intention to use mobile services. The model propo...

Purpose The aim of this research is to examine the effects of congruent and incongruent brand concept extensions on consumer attitudes towards the extended product and feedback effects on the parent brand. Moreover, brand familiarity is proposed as an important moderator variable in determining feedback effects on attitude to the parent brand. Des...

Mobile devices and services are proposed to be powerful channels for both distribution and marketing communication. In this article, the authors study the effects of mobile channel additions on consumer-brand relationship dimensions. Surveys of three different brands reveal positive effects of mobile channel addition (SMS/MMS) usage on brand satisf...

Mobile and interactive media are proposed as powerful channels for both distribution and marketing communication. A vast stream of academic literature focuses on the potential positive effects of utilizing Internetand mobile-based services for strengthening consumer–brand relationship ties and maximizing firm revenues. This paper deals with the top...

A number of previous studies have investigated determinants of brand website usage. Variables such as internet experience, goal-directedness and type of motivation (entertainment/information) have been found to influence consumer behaviour on a given web page. This study focuses on websites for well-known brands. For such websites, it is hypothesis...

Since the advent of the market economy in the former Soviet Union, the trade between old union members has developed gradually. However, the scant market research from this area has focused exclusively on the trade between Western countries and selected former members of the Union, typically Russia. Very little is known about the nature and dynamic...

Broadcast companies are now facing fierce competition due to an increased number of players distributing information and entertainment on-air and online. To retain their competitive position, we argue for the importance of strengthening consumer-brand relationships through channel addition. The focus of this article is to study effects of webTV cha...

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This study investigates the adoption of mobile services across four different service categories. The adoption model underlying the study includes analysis of the motivational, attitudinal, social and resource-related influences on adopters' intention to use mobile services. Overall, the model explains 62-75 percent of the variance in "intention to...

Due to its potential for interactive communication, the Internet is considered a promising tool for relationship marketing. However, the effects of interactive communication on marketing effectiveness may depend on several factors related to each individual consumer, such as Internet experience. In this study, two of the most common applications fo...

In the literature on mobile commerce service adoption, aggregate diffusion issues or technology issues are usually the focus. However; a comparison of the slow adoption of WAP services in Europe with the successful adoption of comparable I-mode services in Japan and technologically simple SMS-based services in Scandinavia, suggests that aggregate a...

This report is one of a series of papers and reports on telecommunication economics published by the Institute for Research in Economics and Business Administration (SNF) as part of its telecommunication economics program. The main focus of the research program is to study the deregulation process of the telecommunication industry, and the economic...