William T. Ross Jr

• University of Connecticut

The study explores how and why an embedded implausible tensile price claim (TPC) affects consumers’ decisions as to whether to click on the associated online advertisement and their subsequent purchases. The authors conduct a field experiment by designing a structured set of search advertisements with implausible TPCs for a global apparel brand and...

Polychronicity – an individual's level of preference for doing several things within a given time block – is a key salesperson characteristic with implications specific to increased performance. While a number of articles show that polychronicity positively affects performance, previous research has not explored underlying mechanisms, making it unc...

In this research, we explore the impacts of cross-modal correspondence between sound frequency and color lightness on consumers’ shopping behavior. Compared to previous studies that relied on a stable single-stage information environment, our study is based on a two-stage (i.e., elimination and choice stages) cognitive model to account for the dyna...

Drawing from uses and gratifications theory, the current research demonstrates that users' trust in social media advertising is differentially influenced by the users' online motivation. We focus on three specific motivation types that previous research has shown are particularly relevant to internet use: (1) information motivation, using the inter...

Practice- and Policy-Oriented Abstract

We show that linguistic numeral structures affect consumers' comparative evaluations of numbers, prices, and alphanumeric brand names. For example, 80 (eighty) in English is perceived as 4 × 20 (quatre‐vingts or four twenties) in French and as 8 × 10 (ba‐shi or eight tens) in Chinese. Thus, the difference between 80 and 20 is expressed with differe...

This research introduces personified suggestive brand names, the degree to which a brand name (1) defines a potential user of the brand or (2) portrays personal characteristics that are used by the consumer to anthropomorphize the brand. Results of four experiments show that consumers are more likely to form brand relationships and more favorable b...

Purpose This research aims to examine how credence, search and experience attributes compete with suggestive brand names that are incongruent with the attributes they cue (e.g. expensive EconoLodge Motel, short-lasting Duracell battery and joint-stiffening JointFlex pill). Design/methodology/approach This study relies on experimental studies, toge...

This research examines the total value impact of cobranding in new product introductions and how the value is distributed between partners. Analysis of 728 cobranded new products in the consumer electronics and packaged goods industries reveals that cobranding does not always create value for partnering firms. In most cases, any value created is di...

An inspection of time-related research in marketing documents two dominant conceptualizations of time: objective time and subjective time. Objective time is straightforward, and refers to clock time. In contrast, subjective time is quite nuanced and refers to the differential experience and perception of time. Recognizing this distinction, a number...

In the fight against obesity, governments have pursued various policies to increase soda prices in the hope of discouraging consumption. Previous studies examining the efficacy of taxing sodas have generalized sales taxes to other taxes and assumed that imposing a tax is as salient as imposing a direct price hike. In this research, the authors reco...

In the fight against obesity, governments have pursued various policies to increase soda prices in the hope of discouraging consumption. Previous studies examining the efficacy of taxing sodas have generalized sales taxes to other taxes and assumed that imposing a tax is as salient as imposing a direct price hike. In this research, the authors reco...

This research examines how married consumers form relational brand connections. Findings from two studies contribute to research on identity‐related brand consumption by showcasing how shared brand consumption and marital satisfaction influence relational brand connections and the perceived importance of the brand to the marital relationship. This...

Local retailers considering offering daily deals must take into account possible impacts of both electronic-word-of-mouth (e-WOM) and local competition. However, how e-WOM, local competition, and their interactions affect local retailers' decisions to offer daily deals remains unclear. Here we examine these effects utilizing a data set that contain...

Historically, when issues of time and temporality were considered within marketing and other contexts, they were viewed in a defined and discriminant manner as reflected through clock and/or calendar time, i.e., objective time. While the use of objective measures has traditionally been appropriate when considering time, anecdotal evidence and recen...

Although firms leverage social media platforms such as Facebook to engage with customers, they often treat social media elements and other online marketing activities such as search engine advertising as stand-alone, rather than part of an integrated online activities system. Hence, it is important to systematically understand how specific elements...

The current work examines who consumers hold responsible when multi-loci failures occur-failure situations in which multiple firms contribute to the failure. Much of the literature that examines consumer responses to product and service failures has traditionally focused exclusively on situations that are caused by a single firm or employee (Bitner...

This article, in five experiments, delineates the effects of alpha and numeric components of alphanumeric brand names (ANBs), by demonstrating the effects of disparities in processing between letter and number sequences on consumers’ brand evaluations. The findings show (i) ascending letters in ANBs (from D10 to E10) lead to more favorable evaluati...

Donating to charitable causes is generally perceived as a moral, prosocial behavior, but this may not always be the case. Though moral identity tends to have a positive effect on prosocial behavior, moral identity does not unconditionally enhance charitable giving. Four studies demonstrate that moral identity decreases donations when recipients are...

In this article, we extend and refine previous research on marketing relationships by specifically examining consumers’ use of pre-existing social relationships (i.e., friendships) with firm representatives to make purchases. This study identifies the various consequences of using pre-existing social relationships and integrates these new outcomes...

A growing number of people wish to do no harm to the earth and leave a stable living environment for future generations. In response to the growing concern with carbon emissions’ impact on the marketplace, this paper investigates the emerging field of sustainable development through the typical manner in which it is measured, carbon emissions. Firm...

We assess attenuating and augmenting effects of brand commitment on consumer responses when product recalls occur. Consistent with our theorization, results from a laboratory experiment and an event study show that high levels of brand commitment attenuate negative consumer responses in low-severity product recalls but augment them in high-severity...

The interplay between brand and store loyalty is investigated in the situation of stockout of a preferred brand at a preferred store through three studies. A four-item scale for measuring store loyalty is developed and tested. While brand loyalty influences between-store substitution and within-store substitution in a stockout, store loyalty does n...

Fostering and maintaining buyer–supplier relationships is a fundamental premise of many channel initiatives. Indeed, these relationships may culminate in significant performance enhancements and competitive advantage. Yet these relationships may also result in competitively harmful events such as partner opportunism. Despite this potential competit...

We investigate how two important social identities—gender identity and moral identity—result in differential donations to in‐groups and out‐groups. Results from three studies indicate that moral identity importance tends to increase donations to out‐groups (Iraq, Indonesia) and not to in‐groups (London, New Orleans). How...

Brand schematicity refers to a generalized consumer predisposition to process information using brand schema. This research uses schema theory to build the theoretical groundwork for brand schematicity and reports seven studies conducted to measure, validate, and establish the nature of the construct. Studies 1 and 2 pertain to a scale developed to...

This research develops a taxonomy of alphanumeric brand names (ABs) based on the alignment between the brand names and their links to products and attributes. Five empirical studies reveal that ABs have systematic effects on consumers' product choices, moderated by consumers' need for cognition, the availability of product attribute information, an...

Investigating the effects of brand and flavor variety on perceived variety (PV), we show, through two experiments, that because a brand is a perceptual attribute, sheer brand variety does not lead to PV; the brands need to be highly differentiated in the consumer's mind to create PV. Further, even highly differentiated brands create PV to a greater...

Consumers often infer quality information from prices and rely on their reference prices. This paper incorporates both behavioral regularities into the classic utility function. The analytical investigation reveals five qualitatively different types of consumers, three of which are relatively new to modeling literature. The authors test the model's...

Marketing scholars have proposed that service employees play a primary role in delivering service quality. However, the question of how to motivate service employees to enhance service production has received little research attention. The authors address this gap by advocating a control mechanism first discussed in the economics literature-buyer m...

The marketing literature has made significant progress towards a better understanding of how firms can effectively design and manage their channels of distribution. However, the complexity of today’s channel systems raises additional issues that remain unaddressed. The purpose of this article is to suggest promising research directions in this doma...

Most purchases involve choices among options with incomplete attribute information. In such situations, consumers often have the option not to choose any of the alternatives to avoid uncertainty. Alternatively, consumers can make inferences about the missing attributes. These inferences may occur spontaneously, or they may be strategically prompted...

Commitment is a key construct determining relationship outcomes, especially in B2B relationships. However, the processes by which commitment affects relationship outcomes—specifically likelihood to terminate a B2B relationship—are not well understood. Using a number of decision-process models, we propose three mechanisms by which commitment influen...

The authors dedicate this paper in honor of the memory of their deceased co-author, Erin Anderson. In dyadic business relationships, parties can be incorrect in reading their counterparts' relational closeness. For example, they can overestimate or underestimate the counterpart's commitment to their relationship. In the business-to-business (B2B) l...

This research examines how consumers experience decision making for experiential products such as vacations. We combine data from 1) ethnographic interviews, 2) online community discussion forums, and 3) an introspective vacation-planning task to explore the experience of emotion in the decision process and to develop a new model of decision making...

In this article, the authors introduce the idea of a compound relationship; that is, for many pairs of firms, the overall relationship between the two firms is composed of multiple simple relationships: supplier to customer, and vice versa; competitor to competitor; and partners. This multiplicity of relationships can lead to both opportunities and...

This research examined factors that influence how consumers respond to prosocial marketing initiatives. Specifically, consumers' attitudes toward the societal role of corporations were examined within the context of a prosocial (an activity perceived by the consumer to benefit society) marketing action being undertaken by a corporation. The results...

In many product categories, unit prices facilitate price comparisons across brands and package sizes; this enables consumers to identify those products that provide the greatest value. However in other product categories, unit prices may be confusing. This is because there are two types of unit pricing, measure-based and usage-based. Measure-based...

Marketing and organizational - behavior scholars have identified several control mechanisms - behavioral, outcome, and clan - for managing employee performance. However, these mechanisms are inadequate in contexts characterized by high customer contact and complex, customizable service interactions (e.g., restaurant dining or spa services). In such...

The present research examines how the availability of information about the value of a product, expressed as a ratio of the quality received per dollar, influences preference formation. This index, similar to unit price which provides information about how much quantity is received per dollar, presents consumers with information regarding the quali...

Should you set up your own sales force or should you outsource it? The standard analysis is cost based and assumes that the direct sales force is a fixed cost and that the outsourced sales force's cost varies with sales. The standard analysis then calculates the sales volume at which the direct sales force's costs equal the outsourced sales force's...

We investigate the role of disconfirmation, responsibility, and stability attributions in the formation of satisfaction judgments. Building on the valence-expectancy framework, we find that disconfirmation and attributions impact satisfaction in a complex manner. Besides its main effect, responsibility moderates disconfirmation's effect on satisfac...

We explore two dimensions of situational factors expected to influence decision-making about ethical issues among sales representatives – universal vs. particular and direct vs. indirect. We argue that these distinctions are important theoretically, methodologically, and managerially. We test our hypotheses by means of a survey of 252 sales represe...

Current theories of B2B relationships implicitly assume that the parties involved are accurate in their perceptions of each other. The present paper explores whether this assumption is justified, and what are the behavioral and economic consequences if parties misread the other party's states and behaviors. Using original dyadic data in the service...

The purpose of this research was to systematically examine factors that may influence participation in risky recreational activities. Because more people participate in risky leisure activities, it is important to acquire a more in-depth understanding of the factors influencing their behaviours. We examine these issues in the context of a survey co...

Should you set up your own sales force or should you outsouce it? The standard analysis uses a cost basis to answer this question. It assumes that the direct sales force is largely a fixed cost and that the outsourced sales force is largely a cost that varies with sales. It then calculates the sales quantity at which the costs associated with the d...

How decision makers invest their effort among various issues is critical to organizational success (Ocasio 1997). The authors investigate the effects of issue valence and issue capability on how decision makers allocate effort to an issue. They develop hypotheses regarding these constructs and test them in three studies. Results show that in the co...

This study tests the usefulness of a person-situation interactionist framework in examining the willingness of a salesperson to lie to get an order. Using a survey of 389 salespersons, our results demonstrate that organizational relationships influence willingness to lie. Specifically, salespersons are less willing to lie to their own company than...

In this paper we examine the nature of the decision-making process for recurrent marketing decisions and its effects on firm performance. A conceptual model of recurrent decision-making in a competitive environment is developed and used as a framework for analyzing 96 tactical decisions made by 35 management groups in the last three periods of a ma...

This research provides insight into the experience of regret and its influence on the decision maker's subsequent aversion to risk. First, a study is conducted in order to construct a reliable multi-item measure of regret and to demonstrate that different levels of outcome feedback result in different levels of regret. A second experiment tests the...

In this article, the authors describe the need and the search to date for a normative moral foundation for marketing. Social contract theory appears promising because of its clear correspondence to the exchange relationships central to marketing thought and practice. The authors introduce it in a specific formulation known as Integrative Social Con...

In this article, the authors describe the need and the search to date for a normative moral foundation for marketing. Social contract theory appears promising because of its clear correspondence to the exchange relationships central to marketing thought and practice. The authors introduce it in a specific formulation known as Integrative Social Con...

This research uses original data from matched pairs of insurers and their independent agents to examine whether it is possible to build committed relationships between insurers and independent agents, how such commitment could be built, and whether any benefits are realized in such relationships. It is shown that mutual commitment can be built by a...

Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effect...

The relationship between attribute-level performance, overall satisfaction, and repurchase intentions is of critical importance to managers and generally has been conceptualized as linear and symmetric. The authors investigate the asymmetric and nonlinear nature of the relationship among these constructs. Predictions are developed and tested empiri...

The relationship between attribute-level performance, overall satisfaction, and repurchase intentions is of critical importance to managers and generally has been conceptualized as linear and symmetric. The authors investigate the asymmetric and nonlinear nature of the relationship among these constructs. Predictions are developed and tested empiri...

We focus on the principal-agent relationship in a distribution channel. In a services context (insurance), we examine how two facets of performance, from the point of view of both the principal and the agent, are influenced by the perceiver's belief that it is more committed to the relationship than is the other party. Using primary data from 255 i...

A conceptual distinction is offered between amplifying versus simplifying technological innovations. This distinction is shown to have value in explaining intended adoption. The results of the study indicate the need for further conceptualization and research regarding the role of innovation characteristics in adoption-decision processes.

This research examines how ethical and unethical corporate behavior influence the perceived value of a firm's products, operationalized as the price consumers are willing to pay for that product relative to the competition. We propose that if consumers expect companies to conduct business ethically, then ethical behavior will not be rewarded but un...

This paper develops a framework for examining decision making about ethical issues and tests the applicability of a social contract perspective. Using two separate samples of students and salespeople, we determine that community members (salespeople) tend to judge a potentially unethical act to constitute a violation of an implicit social contract...

Personal selling is one of the most expensive, and for many companies, one of the most important elements of the marketing mix. Salesperson adaptivity is an especially important element of salesperson performance. The purpose of this research was to explore factors that may influence salespersons'' adaptivity during the impression-formation and str...

Interpreting interactions is important in analyzing data generated by the NOVA family of techniques. In this article, we examine how to specify the cell means used to describe an interaction. Although most researchers utilize the raw means that are the output of most analysis packages, R. Rosenthal and R. L. Rosnow suggest an alternative procedure,...

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether inferences about missing attribute information made in a choice context are susceptible to hindsight bias and, more importantly, whether an increase in the amount of cognitive effort expended during the choice process diminishes the hindsight bias effect. The results of two experiments confirm our e...

This article is concerned with the process by which inferences about missing information are formed. We propose that consumers use within-attribute (other-brand) processing first and, if that information is diagnostic, infer the value of the missing information with little consideration of additional information. If the within-attribute processing...

Experiences often consist of a number of temporally separated events or outcomes, events which might be positive or negative. Building on previous research, the present paper proposes that the chronological order of the component events influences overall evaluations of these experiences. In particular, a preference for happy endings is hypothesize...

What level of quota should be imposed on the salesperson? The author proposes that when performance against quota is a significant factor in a salesperson's compensation, that salesperson's call selection decision is influenced by his or her position in relation to quota. That is, quota acts as a reference point that influences the salesperson's be...

What level of quota should be imposed on the salesperson? The author proposes that when performance against quota is a significant factor in a salesperson's compensation, that salesperson's call selection decision is influenced by his or her position in relation to quota. That is, quota acts as a reference point that influences the salesperson's be...

In this paper we examine how the information processing of subjects who make an innovative choice (innovators) differs from that of subjects who make a noninnovative choice (noninnovators). The task involves selection of an alternative within a range of prerated product category innovativeness. We propose that subjects who seek 1) impersonal/uncont...

This note raises questions about two of the results of Hogarth and Makridakis (Hogarth, R. M., S. Makridakis. 1981. The value of decision making in a complex environment: An experimental approach. Management Sci. 27 93--107.) based on a lack of statistical support and inadequate consideration of the effect of team starting position on performance....

ABSTRACT

EXTENDED ABSTRACT Conceptualization As the fabric of civilization, social relationships play an important, yet often subtle, role in society. Relationships bind individuals together by facilitating correspondence and collabora-tion among them. Because of their intrinsic function in social interactions, relationships have the capacity to impact nume...