J. Wesley Hutchinson

University of Pennsylvania | UP · The Wharton School

Online educational platforms increasingly allow learners to consume content at their own pace with on-demand formats, in contrast to the synchronous content of traditional education. Thus, it is important to understand and model learner engagement within these environments. Using data from four business courses hosted on Coursera, we model learner...

A wealth of literature suggests individuals use feelings in addition to facts as sources of information for judgment. This paper focuses on a manipulation in which participants list either a few or many examples of a given type, and then make a judgment. Instead of using the number of arguments or evidence strength, participants are hypothesized to...

A common assumption made in structural approaches to empirical strategy research in marketing is that firms and consumers satisfy the assumptions of dynamic optimality when making decisions. When faced with problems of how best to allocate resources, firms are assumed consider the future consequences of different strategic options and, in each poin...

In this paper, we examine aesthetic color combinations in a realistic product self-design task using the NIKEiD online configurator. We develop a similarity-based model of color relationships and empirically model the choice likelihoods of color pairs as a function of the distances between colors in the CIELAB color space. Our empirical analysis re...

Managers use numerical data as the basis for many decisions. This research investigates how data on prior advertising expenditures and sales outcomes are used in budget allocation decisions and attempts to answer three important questions about data-based inferences. First, do biases exist that are strong enough to lead to seriously suboptimal deci...

he implications of Salisbury and Feinberg's (2009) paper (Salisbury, L. C., F. M. Feinberg. 2009. Alleviat- ing the constant stochastic variance assumption in decision research: Theory, measurement, and experi- mental test. Marketing Sci., ePub ahead of print November 3, http://mktsci.journal.informs.org/cgi/content/ abstract/mksc.1080.0464v1) for...

Recent trends in marketing have demonstrated an increased focus on in-store expenditures with the hope of “grabbing consumers” at the point of purchase: but does it make sense? To help answer this question, the authors examine the interplay between in-store and out-of-store factors on consumer attention to and evaluation of brands displayed on supe...

Abstract Recent trends in marketing have demonstrated an increased focus on in-store expenditures with the hope of “grabbing consumers” at the point of purchase, but does this make sense? To help answer this question, the authors examine the interplay between in- ...

Choice models in marketing and economics are generally derived without specifying the underlying cognitive process of decision making. This approach has been successfully used to predict choice behavior. However, it has not much to say about such aspects of decision making as deliberation, attention, conflict, and cognitive limitations and how thes...

Choice models in marketing and economics are generally derived without specifying the underlying cognitive process of decision making. This approach has been successfully used to predict choice behavior. However, it has not much to say about such aspects of decision making as deliberation, attention, conflict, and cognitive limitations and how thes...

Our research explores new implicit measures of cognitive responses to advertisements that focus on detecting the effects of specific thoughts. We first demonstrate that consumers' thoughts about persuasive messages can be assessed by both a thought recognition task and a belief verification task. We also show that performance on these tasks (i.e.,...

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The article discusses a parsimonious decision-path model of visual attention and brand consideration to demonstrate how eye-tracking data can be utilized to drive a brand's consideration into its memory-based baseline and its visual lift. It also provides insights into the decision-making process of consumers at the point of purchase, specifically...

In this article, the authors examine the costs and benefits of action-based learning (i.e., learning that occurs as a by-product of making repeated decisions with outcome feedback). The authors report the results of three experiments that investigate the effects of different deci-sion goals on what is learned and how transferable that learning is a...

The purpose of this article is to describe our efforts to create a test of basic computer proficiency, examine its properties using parametric test scoring methods, and identify some antecedents and consequences that accompany differences in performance. We also consider how much insight people have into their level of knowledge by examining the re...

Marketing channel interactions typically feature three characteristics that have not been incorporated together in an analytic study: (1) the parties can do business repeatedly over time, often under different terms of trade (e.g., prices may vary), (2) the terms that the seller offers one buyer may be different from those she offers another, givin...

Abstract In today’s cluttered retail environments, creating consumer pull through memory-based brand equity is not enough; marketers must also create “visual equity” for their brands (i.e., incremental sales triggered by in-store visual attention). In this paper, we show that commercial eye-tracking data, analyzed using a simple decision-path model...

While consumer choice research has dedicated considerable research attention to aspects of choice that are deliberative and conscious, only limited attention has been paid to aspects of choice that occur outside of conscious awareness. We review relevant research that suggests that consumer choice is a mix of conscious and nonconscious influences,...

When it comes to making business decisions, being overconfident about your choices can actually be more harmful than just guessing. Here's how managers can calibrate their confidence levels-and avoid being too sure in the wrong situations.

In today's cluttered point-of-purchase environments, creating consumer pull through brand equity is not enough; marketers must also create "visual equity" through P-O-P marketing, i.e., increased consideration due to the visual salience of the product at the point of purchase. Commercial eye-tracking studies are commonly used to measure the ability...

this article we describe methods and models used in calibration research. We then review a wide variety of empirical results indicating that high levels of calibration are achieved rarely, moderate levels that include some degree of systematic bias are the norm, and confidence and accuracy are sometimes completely uncorrelated. Finally, we examine...

this article. They also thank Jonathan Levav for assistance in data collection

Behavioral researchers use analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests of differences between treatment means or chi-square tests of differences between proportions to provide support for empirical hypotheses about consumer behavior. These tests are typically conducted on data from "between-subjects" experiments in which participants were randomly assigned...

Consumer knowledge is seldom complete or errorless. Therefore, the self-assessed validity of knowledge and consequent knowledge calibration (i.e., the correspondence between self-assessed and actual validity) is an important issue for the study of consumer decision making. In this article we describe methods and models used in calibration research....

Unity and prototypicality are important visual aspects of product design. These design principles were operationalized by modifying line drawings of existing products. The results of four experiments provide evidence that these two factors positively affect aesthetic response. These effects were strongest when visual properties were the sole basis...

For a wide variety of real-world decisions, people must examine numerical tables and intuitively assess the correlations that exist among meaningful variables. The normative properties of correlation coefficients suggest that such decisions should be unaffected by perceptual factors (e.g., changes in row and column locations), semantic factors (e.g...

Pairwise partitioning is a nonmetric, divisive algorithm, for identifying feature structures based on pairwise similarities. For errorless data, this algorithm is shown to identify only (and sometimes all) valid features for certain hierarchical and multidimensional feature structures. Unfortunately, the algorithm is also extremely sensitive to err...

Recalling brand names is an important aspect of consumer choice in many situations. The authors develop a general Markov model that relates probabilistic aspects of recall to consumer and marketing mix variables. Then they illustrate how parameters can be estimated from recall data for three special cases of the model: The first is a ''baseline'' v...

Recalling brand names is an important aspect of consumer choice in many situations. The authors develop a general Markov model that relates probabilistic aspects of recall to consumer and marketing mix variables. Then they illustrate how parameters can be estimated from recall data for three special cases of the model: The first is a “baseline” ver...

This paper reviews recent research on normative and descriptive models of sequential choice. In particular, the basic results of dynamic decision theory, including Bellman's principle of optimality, are briefly described. We then consider the descriptive validity of three assumptions that are frequently made in applications of dynamic programming m...

Three experiments examined the effects of situational factors on the ability to learn simple rules for classifying products and estimating prices. In each experiment, multiattribute information about stereo speakers was presented to subjects in a training phase. However, only one attribute was diagnostic. Analytic processing (i.e., the ability to i...

A simple property of networks is used as the basis for a scaling algorithm that represents nonsymmetric proximities as network distances. The algorithm determines which vertices are directly connected by an arc and estimates the length of each arc. Network distance, defined as the minimum pathlength between vertices, is assumed to be a generalized...

The purpose of this article is to review basic empirical results from the psychological literature in a way that provides a useful foundation for research on consumer knowledge. A conceptual organization for this diverse literature is provided by two fundamental distinctions. First, consumer expertise is distinguished from product-related experienc...

A formal analysis is presented for three general classes of discrete attribute models of brand switching. The analysis focuses on the role of feature importance in specifying transition probabilities. A number of formal properties based on ordinal relations between transition probabilities are defined and each class of models is shown to satisfy a...

Investigated diagnostic properties based on nearest neighbor data. It is suggested that geometric models impose an upper bound on the number of points that can share the same nearest neighbor. A much more restrictive bound is implied by the assumption that the data points represent a sample from some continuous distribution in a multidimensional Eu...

Numerous experiments have attempted to show that people use a visuospatial representation to remember pictures and objects by demonstrating that perceptual variables affect memory perlormance. One problem with such experiments is that perceptual differences in the stimuli could cause differences in a verbal representation as well (i.e., could lead...

A review of some recent experiments suggested that general similarity between words might successfully function as a structural principle for semantic memory. A spatial model based on that assumption is proposed. Reaction times were taken as 16 paid observers judged which of 2 words was more similar to a 3rd word. The results, which are consistent...

ABSTRACT The experimental findings reported here support several conclusions about biases that occur in budget allocation decisions based on numerical data. First, graphical presentations did not reduce the types of heuristic-dependent biases previously reported for tabular data. Second, the effects of semantic frame were large compared,to the well...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 1981. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-87). Microfilm of typescript. s