Eric A. Greenleaf’s research while affiliated with New York University and other places

In-process promotions focus on promotional activities during marketing events such as auctions, crowdfunding, or fund-raising. Firms can observe consumers’ responses to these promotions and use this information to adjust future promotions sent during the same events. The authors study the impact of promotions on market outcomes and focus on one use of such promotions: messages sent during online auctions, in which the outcome is the final auction price. They propose that the effect of these messages can be understood by observing their aggregate impact on final auction prices and by examining how messages affect behaviors at the bid level, namely, new-bidder entry and jump bidding. These bid-level behaviors can, when summed at the auction level, affect auction prices. Besides examining the messages’ impact on bidder behavior, the authors study the auctioneer’s strategy in issuing these messages. They distinguish between informative messages, which focus on product attributes, and persuasive messages, which try to motivate the message recipients to bid. They test hypotheses derived from their framework using data from online auctions of Air France airline tickets. The authors also conduct “what-if” simulations to help auctioneers identify the optimal number of messages to send during an auction.

This article introduces the method of single-neuron recording in humans to marketing and consumer researchers. First, the authors provide a general description of this methodology, discuss its advantages and disadvantages, and describe findings from previous single-neuron human research. Second, they discuss the relevance of this method for marketing and consumer behavior and, more specifically, how it can be used to gain insights into the areas of categorization, sensory discrimination, reactions to novel versus familiar stimuli, and recall of experiences. Third, they present a study designed to illustrate how single-neuron studies are conducted and how data from them are processed and analyzed. This study examines people's ability to up-regulate (i.e., enhance) the emotion of fear, which has implications for designing effective fear appeals. The study shows that the firing rates of neurons previously shown to respond selectively to fearful content increased with emotion enhancement instructions, but only for a video that did not automatically evoke substantial fear. The authors discuss how the findings help illustrate which conclusions can and cannot be drawn from single-neuron research.

This paper introduces the method of single-neuron recording in humans to marketing and consumer researchers. First, we provide a general description of this methodology, discuss its advantages and disadvantages, and describe findings from previous single-neuron human research. Second we discuss the relevance of this method for marketing and consumer behavior, and more specifically how it could be used to gain insights in the areas of categorization, sensory discrimination, reactions to novel versus familiar stimuli, and recall of experiences. Third, we present a study designed to illustrate how single-neuron studies are conducted and data from them are processed and analyzed. This study examines peoples’ ability to up-regulate (i.e., enhance) the emotion of fear, which has implications for designing effective fear appeals. The study shows that the firing rates of neurons that were previously shown to respond selectively to fearful content, increased with the emotion enhancement instructions, but only for a video that did not automatically evoke substantial fear. We discuss how the findings help illustrate which conclusions can, and cannot, be drawn from single-neuron research.

Auctioneers often issue promotional messages during auctions conducted live and online. We propose and test a model of the impact of these messages on final auction prices. The model examines messages’ direct price impact, which affects valuations of existing bidders, and their indirect price impact, through the two mediators of affecting new bidder entry and jump bidding. This model also examines how the auctioneer’s message-sending decisions are influenced by past bidding and past message-sending in the auction. We create sub-models of these bidder and auctioneer decisions, which allow dynamic auction decisions that change at each bid (for bidders) or bid interval (for the auctioneer), and link these sub-models to a sub-model of the final auction price. We also distinguish between informational messages that convey information about the item’s attributes and bidding messages that focus on bidder actions particular to auctions. The proposed model is supported when tested on data from real time Internet auctions of Air France airline tickets. A counterfactual analysis provides insights into how changing the frequency or placement of messages can increase or decrease the predicted auction price.

An important pricing decision that many firms face is whether to use a partitioned price, which divides a product's price into two or more parts, or to charge one all-inclusive price. This paper examines trends in partitioned pricing in the marketplace and public policy arenas, and then proposes and uses a framework to organize and review extant academic research on partitioned pricing. It also proposes psychological explanations for why partitioned pricing affects consumers. We discuss the implications of academic research for practitioners and public policy makers when they create or regulate partitioned pricing strategies, and identify unanswered questions in partitioned pricing as a proposed agenda for continuing research.

I study a budget-constrained, private-valuation, sealed-bid sequential auction with two incompletely-informed, risk-neutral bidders in which the valuations and income may be non-monotonic functions of a bidder's type. Multiple equilibrium symmetric bidding functions may exist that differ in allocation, efficiency and revenue. The sequence of sale affects the competition for a good and therefore also affects revenue and the prices of each good in a systematic way that depends on the relationship among the valuations and incomes of bidders. The sequence of sale may affect prices and revenue even when the number of bidders is large relative to the number of goods. If a particular good, say [alpha], is allocated to a strong bidder independent of the sequence of sale, then auction revenue and the price of good [alpha] are higher when good [alpha] is sold first.

We examine how optimal reserve prices, and the market information that sellers need to collect, change when sellers in open English auctions anticipate regret from setting the reserve so high that their property does not sell. We find that this regret can create reserves that have multiple optima, depend on the number of bidders, and equal the seller's own valuation. Regret can also make the seller's payoff less sensitive to the reserve. These results do not occur for regretless sellers. These results complicate decision-making and information gathering for regretful sellers, who need to obtain more market information to set the optimal reserve compared to regretless sellers. We find that regret's impact depends on how the seller forms regret, and compare three types - constant, best possible outcome, and close miss regret. The extent of polarization in bidder valuations affects regret's impact on reserves for some regret forms but not for others. Vickrey auctions create additional opportunities for anticipated regret that raise optimal reserves compared to open English auctions, and cause reserves to depend on the number of bidders.

Help-seeking and help-giving have been investigated extensively in other areas, such as psychology, education, and child development, but have received relatively little attention in consumer behavior settings, where retailers often provide consumers with help. We draw from the extant literature on help, and from the unique aspects of help in consumer settings, to develop hypotheses concerning the impact on consumers of three kinds of help - requested, offered, and imposed - that have been identified in help research in other areas, and how this impact differs across store and internet shopping. We test these hypotheses with two laboratory experiments, one field study, and two field experiments.

Consumers' reactions to rectangles have implications for package and product design. In two lab studies and an analysis of field data, the authors find that the ratio of the sides of a rectangular product or package can influence purchase intentions and preferences and is related to marketplace demand. In more exploratory inquiries, the authors also find that the impact of this ratio on consumers depends on the relative seriousness of the context in which the product is used. Furthermore, ratio can also affect product perceptions, and consumers appear to prefer a range of contiguous ratios for different contexts rather than a particular ratio.