No comment?! The drivers of reactions to online posts in professional groups

Social media has moved beyond personal friendships to professional interactions in high-knowledge industries. In particular, online discussion forums are sponsored by firms aiming to position themselves as thought-leaders, to gain more insight in their customer base and to generate sales leads. However, while firms can seed discussion by posts, they depend on the forum members to continue the discussion in the form of reactions to these posts. The goal of the current study is to investigate what features and characteristics drive the number of comments that a post receives on an online discussion forum. The empirical setting involves a global manufacturer connecting with health care professionals through a LinkedIn discussion forum. We project that (i) content characteristics, (ii) post characteristics, (iii) author characteristics, and (iv) timing characteristics jointly determine the number of comments a post receives. We show that the readability of the post, the controversiality of the content and the status of the post author have the highest elasticity on the number of comments. These results provide valuable insights for firms on how to build and maintain an attractive online forum through ongoing discussions.the Marketing Science Institutepre-prin

Revisiting consistency with random utility maximisation: theory and implications for practical work

While the paradigm of utility maximisation has formed the basis of the majority of applications in discrete choice modelling for over 40 years, its core assumptions have been questioned by work in both behavioural economics and mathematical psychology as well as more recently by developments in the RUM-oriented choice modelling community. This paper reviews the basic properties with a view to explaining the historical pre-eminence of utility maximisation and addresses the question of what departures from the paradigm may be necessary or wise in order to accommodate richer behavioural patterns. We find that many, though not all, of the behavioural traits discussed in the literature can be approximated sufficiently closely by a random utility framework, allowing analysts to retain the many advantages that such an approach possesses

Empirical Models of Manufacturer-Retailer Interaction: A Review and Agenda for Future Research

The nature of the interaction between manufacturers and retailers has received a great deal of empirical attention in the last 15 years. One major line of empirical research examines the balance of power between them and ranges from reduced form models quantifying aggregate profit and other related trends for manufacturers and retailers to structural models that test alternative forms of manufacturer-retailer pricing interaction. A second line of research addresses the sources of leverage for each party, e.g., trade promotions and their pass-through, customer information from loyalty programs, manufacturer advertising, productassortment in general, and private label assortment in particular. The purpose of this article is to synthesize what has been learnt about the nature of the interaction between manufacturers and retailers and the effectiveness of each party’s sources of leverage and to highlight gaps in our knowledge that future research should attempt to fill

Proliferating Private-Label Portfolios: How Introducing Economy and Premium Private Labels Influences Brand Choice

Three-tiered private-label (PL) portfolio strategies (low-quality tier: economy PLs, mid-quality tier: standard PLs, and top-quality tier: premium PLs) are gaining interest around the world. Drawing on the context-effects literature, the authors postulate how the introduction of economy and premium PLs may affect the choice of mainstream-quality and premium-quality national brands (NBs) and the choice of the retailer's existing PL offering. The authors use the natural experiment offered by Asda's and Sainsbury's introduction of economy and premium PL tiers in the corn flakes and canned soup categories in the United Kingdom to test their framework. Using brand choice models that accommodate context (compromise, similarity, and attraction) effects, the authors find that both economy and premium PLs cannibalize incumbent PLs. Economy PL introductions benefit mainstream-quality NBs because these NBs become a compromise or middle option in terms of quality in the retailer's assortment. The effects of premium PL introductions on premium-quality NBs are mixed: Their share improves in two of four cases but decreases in the other two cases