Customers’ Goal-Related Behavior in Loyalty Programs

Goal plays a vital role in the purposive behavior of consumers, and goal pursuit represents an important psychological mechanism under loyalty programs. The purpose of my dissertation is to understand loyalty program members’ goal pursuit behavior and uncover the underlying psychological mechanisms. The first essay examined how success or failure to achieve a tier goal affects consumers’ subsequent goal pursuit behavior. Specifically, utilizing two lab experiments and 5,719 customers’ flight activities data from a major airline’s multi-tiered frequent flyer program, this essay studied the effect of goal completion magnitude on individuals’ effort toward achieving subsequent goals, and how goal type moderates this relationship. I found that, when individuals failed to reach their preset goal, those failed an attainment goal put more effort in pursuing their subsequent goal than those who failed a maintenance goal. The opposite was true when individuals were highly successful in achieving their goals. In addition, when goal pursuit was successful, goal achievement magnitude and subsequent goal pursuit effort showed a positive linear relationship for individuals with a maintenance goal but an inverted U-shaped relationship for those with an attainment goal. For individuals with an attainment goal, high goal achievement created a surprising hampering effect on subsequent goal pursuit effort, which I termed the “close-but-no-cigar effect”. Two subsequent lab experiments explored the underlying psychological mechanisms. In the goal failure situation, negative self-efficacy mediated the effect of goal type on subsequent goal pursuit effort; in the goal success situation, negative emotion and counterfactual thinking were found to be the key drivers. The second essay investigated loyalty program members’ reactions to email messages as a function of their program status. Applying construal level theory to two different distance dimensions, this essay showed that goal distance and tier level jointly moderate the relative effectiveness of abstract vs. concrete framing and cognitive vs. emotional appeals in email marketing messages. I analyzed 240 email campaigns that were sent to 19,281 loyalty program members from September 2016 to December 2016. I found that when goal distance is large, cognitive appeal is more persuasive than emotional appeal, and abstract message framing is more persuasive than concrete framing. In contrast, when consumers are close to their goals, emotional appeal is more effective than cognitive appeal, while abstract and concrete message framings are equally effective. In addition, these moderating effects of goal distance are stronger at lower tier levels than at higher tiers. Tiers served as a vertical dimension in forming one’s mental construal level. The insights from this research can help loyalty program managers optimize marketing communication to individual members

Evaluation of WIC Online Ordering During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence From an Oklahoma Grocery Store Chain

The COVID-19 pandemic is worsening the disparities in food access in the United States. As consumers have been increasingly using grocery online ordering services to limit their exposure to the COVID-19 virus, participants of federal nutrition assistance programs lack the online benefit redemption option. With the support of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), retailers are pilot-testing online food benefit ordering in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). By combining the Oklahoma WIC administrative data, the online ordering data from a grocery store chain in Oklahoma, and the COVID-19 data in Oklahoma, this study examines how WIC participants responded to the online food benefit ordering option and how their adoption of online ordering was associated with the COVID-19 incidence. Results show that from July to December 2020, 15,171 WIC households redeemed WIC benefits at an Oklahoma chain store, but only 819 of them adopted online ordering. They together completed 102,227 online orders, which accounted for 2.7% of the store visits and 2.6% of the monetary value of WIC redemptions at these stores. There was no significant relationship between WIC online ordering adoption and COVID-19 incidence in Oklahoma

A Method of Electric Power Equipment Integrated Modeling Based on Carrier

AbstractModeling of electric power equipment is very important in power system. But there are several problems by the current method, such as information is incomplete. This paper proposes a method of electric power equipment integrated modeling based on carrier. Electric power equipment model are numbered and classification, then all of them are knowledge-related through knowledgebase. In the design, user-defined of meta-data structure is supported, which can be integrated with a variety of heterogeneous systems. Finally, the model can be displayed with the dynamic three-dimensional way after rendering by texturing techniques. Experiment indicates that the proposed model contain more information and more realistic

Association Between Usage of an App to Redeem Prescribed Food Benefits and Redemption Behaviors Among the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children Participants: Cross-Sectional Study

BACKGROUND: The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is one of the most important food assistance programs in the United States, serving 6.4 million low-income, eligible women, infants, and children under 5 years of age in 2019. In the program, participants are prescribed a list of food benefits, which can be redeemed in WIC-authorized stores. However, there are multiple behavioral barriers in the program and the stores that prevent participants from redeeming the benefits fully. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to examine the relationship between the use of a widely used mobile phone app, WICShopper, and the redemption of the prescribed food packages. METHODS: WIC administrative data were obtained from West Virginia for the period January 2019 to January 2020 and included 30,440 WIC households that had received food benefits in that period. The redemption rates of 18 WIC food benefits were compared between app users and nonapp users, that is, those who never used the app in the study period. The use behaviors were defined for the app users, including the number of active use benefit cycles, active benefit cycle rates, number of active use days in the cycle, and proportion rates of daytime use. Panel linear regressions were applied to examine how the redemption rates were related to these behaviors over time. RESULTS: App users consistently had higher average redemption rates than nonapp users; the difference ranged from 3.6% (4.8% relative) for infant formula to 14.3% (40.7% relative) for fish. After controlling for sociodemographics, the coefficients of app use were significantly positive for all benefit categories except for WIC-eligible nutritionals. More active cycles and active days in the cycle were significantly related to redemption rates for all categories, except for frozen juice (coefficient=-0.002, P=.09). Daytime app access was positively associated with redemption rates for most food benefits except only a few, such as infant formula (coefficient=-0.03, P\u3c.001). CONCLUSIONS: Use of the WIC app was significantly related to higher redemption rates across food benefits, although the association varied across benefit categories. More active days were positively related to benefit redemptions across food categories, and the app\u27s daytime use was positively associated with the redemption of most benefit categories. These findings suggest that the WIC app can be an important tool for the promotion of benefit redemption among WIC participants

Learning with Structured Sparsity

This paper investigates a new learning formulation called structured sparsity, which is a natural extension of the standard sparsity concept in statistical learning and compressive sensing. By allowing arbitrary structures on the feature set, this concept generalizes the group sparsity idea that has become popular in recent years. A general theory is developed for learning with structured sparsity, based on the notion of coding complexity associated with the structure. It is shown that if the coding complexity of the target signal is small, then one can achieve improved performance by using coding complexity regularization methods, which generalize the standard sparse regularization. Moreover, a structured greedy algorithm is proposed to efficiently solve the structured sparsity problem. It is shown that the greedy algorithm approximately solves the coding complexity optimization problem under appropriate conditions. Experiments are included to demonstrate the advantage of structured sparsity over standard sparsity on some real applications

The Online Ordering Behaviors among Participants in the Oklahoma Women, Infants, and Children Program: A Cross-Sectional Analysis

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is a nutrition assistance program in the United States (U.S.). Participants in the program redeem their prescribed food benefits in WIC-authorized grocery stores. Online ordering is an innovative method being pilot-tested in some stores to facilitate WIC participants\u27 food benefit redemption, which has become especially important in the COVID-19 pandemic. The present research aimed to examine the online ordering (OO) behaviors among 726 WIC households who adopted WIC OO in a grocery chain, XYZ (anonymous) store, in Oklahoma (OK). These households represented approximately 5% of WIC households who redeemed WIC benefits in XYZ stores during the study period, which was 1 July to 31 December 2020. This period was during the COVID-19 pandemic but after the temporary lockdown in Oklahoma had been lifted. Descriptive statistics were estimated for WIC OO households\u27 adoption behaviors and their orders. The Cox proportional hazard model and zero-truncated negative binomial regression were applied to examine the relationship between participants\u27 socio-demographics and the length of time between 1 July 2020, and their first OO, as well as the number of WIC online orders. About 80% of these online orders were picked up without any changes. Minority households had a significantly longer time before adopting their first OO (hazard ratio (HR) \u3c 1, p \u3c 0.001), while households with a child or a woman participant, or more participants, had a shorter time before adopting OO (HR \u3e 1, p \u3c 0.05). Non-Hispanic black households had a fewer number of OOs than non-Hispanic white households (B = -0.374, p = 0.007). OO adoption varied across socio-demographics. More efforts are needed to ensure equal access and adoption of WIC OO