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May 15, 2005
Society for Consumer Psychology Cruise-Conference
SOCIETY FOR CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY CRUISE-CONFERENCE
The Society for Consumer Psychology (SCP) will be holding its Annual Winter Conference on February 9-13, 2006. The SCP conference provides a relatively intimate forum, with opportunities for a high level of interaction among participants interested in the integration of psychology and consumer research. This year the conference will take place at sea, on a Carnival Cruise! Not only will you hear brilliant colleagues present intriguing research aboard the Imagination cruise ship, but you will also have the opportunity to spend time at the ports of Key West, Florida and Cozumel, Mexico.
Carnival Cruise from Port of Miami February 9-13, 2006
We will set sail from the port of Miami at 4:00 PM on February 9th and return to the port of Miami at 8:00 AM on February 13th. Since the conference will be at sea much of the time, it will be very difficult and costly to arrive late or leave early. Therefore, those who wish to participate in this conference will need to plan on attending the entire event. We have reserved a set of rooms at discounted conference rates, and the prices will be comparable to the cost of registration, hotel + meals at prior SCP conferences, with options ranging from around $720 per person, double occupancy (you will share the cabin with another conference attendee) to around $1140 per person single occupancy. These prices are for ocean view cabins and include conference registration, port charges, taxes, insurance (travel), meals, lodging, and gratuity. Students will receive a $50 discount, and non-SCP members will pay an additional $50. Participants also have the option of upgrading to a suite, which are limited in supply and not part of SCP's contract with Carnival. For more details on the cruise, the cabins, shore excursions, etc. see:
http://www.carnival.com/Ship_Detail.aspx?shipCode=IM
(click on the 'Western Caribbean, 4-day' option to learn more about the ship's itinerary)
For questions on cruise logistics and/or travel arrangements, please contact our travel agent, Sonatina Fernandes (Tel: 319-351-1911; sonatina1000 at yahoo.com)
Conference Submissions:
We will be accepting proposals for competitive papers, special sessions, and working paper sessions. Working paper sessions will involve presentations at a table in an "AMA job interview style" format. We welcome diverse methodologies including experimental research, ethnography, survey research, or other methodologies relevant to the study of consumer psychology.
All submissions should be sent electronically as a pdf document to http://sloanspace.mit.edu.
All SCP members will have an account on SloanSpace soon (you will get an email with the information). If you don?t get an account and need one, please contact Leonard Lee at: leonardl at mit.edu.
Competitive papers and working paper session submissions should be no longer than 12 pages, double-spaced, in a 12 point font (including bibliography and tables). This limit is to encourage authors to describe their research to the reviewers in a succinct manner. Proposals should be submitted on SloanSpace in pdf format. In the case of papers, authors must agree, if the submission is accepted, to publish either the complete paper or an abstract in the Conference Proceedings. At least one author of each submitted competitive paper/working paper session must agree to register and present the paper at the conference, if it is accepted. Submissions must be received by Friday, September 2nd, 2005.
Special topic session proposal submissions should include (a) the rationale for the session, (b) a list of participants, and (c) a one page abstract for each paper. Submissions should be double-spaced in 12 point font. As the goal of the conference is to stimulate intellectual discussions, there should only be three papers and one discussant per session. The discussant of each session should be prepared to not only discuss the papers presented, but more importantly to engage the audience in conversation about the research ideas and how to forward the research in this stream. The chair of the session should be prepared to make sure that all talks proceed (and end) on schedule. Special topic session presenters are required to publish at least an abstract of their presentations (or entire papers if they prefer) in a Proceedings volume. As with the competitive papers and working paper sessions, special topic session proposals should be submitted on SloanSpace as attachments in pdf format. At least one author of each presentation in the proposal must agree to register and present at the conference, if their proposal is accepted. Submissions must be received by Friday, September 2nd, 2005.
We look forward to seeing you at the SCP cruise-conference next
February!
Dan Ariely (Ariely at mit.edu)
Baba Shiv (shiv_baba at gsb.stanford.edu)
Michal Ann Strahilevitz (SCPcruise at yahoo.com)
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May 11, 2005
What is Behavioral Targeting?
MAKING INFERENCES ABOUT WHAT INTERESTS
Behavioral Targeting is the ability to deliver ads to consumers based upon their recent behavior viewing web pages, shopping online for products and services, typing keywords into a search engine or a combination of all three. "Interest-Based Targeting allows large-brand advertisers… to target more precisely the audience they are trying to reach with the message they are trying to convey," said Randy Kilgore, vice president of advertising, The Wall Street Journal Online. A recent white paper (requires registration) out of the Wall Street Journal Online and eMarketer discusses this recent phenomenon in terms of what it might mean for today’s business to adopt such an approach to advertising.
ABSTRACT:
Behavioral targeting has been around, in various forms, since the late 1990s. Previous attempts failed due to problems with privacy and technology, but this generation of software appears more robust, and marketers seem more accepting. Today's behavioral targeting can be done on individual Web sites, on networks and via adware applications. While behavioral targeting will certainly be a part of a smart marketer's online arsenal, issues of privacy, data sharing and implementation will keep it from becoming a dominant form of advertising in the way paid search has become. However, behavioral targeting offers a compelling benefit to marketers: the ability to deliver relevant branding messages to a highly targeted audience.
QUOTES:
"The basic premise behind behavioral targeting is that what's important for online advertising is not necessarily a page of content or a section of a Web site, but the actual person who is viewing and interacting with that content. Seen in that light, behavioral targeting could presage a shift in the online advertising, paradigm — away from the notion of buying "pages" and instead toward the idea of reaching "people". Instead of buying ads that would appear adjacent to certain content, ads would instead appear only to someone who has demonstrated, through previous actions, that they are potentially interested. The end result, theoretically, would be a perfect economy, where no ad is wasted."
"Earlier this year, Snapple ran an ad campaign on the iVillage Web site that tested behavioral targeting. The beverage company wanted to pitch its Snapple-a-Day meal-replacement drink to women who care about health and exercise. Using technology from Tacoda, iVillage pinpointed users who visited its Diet & Fitness channel three times within the past 45 days. Then, no matter where within the iVillage site these targeted visitors surfed, they were shown the Snapple-a-Day ads. By comparing those targeted visitors with a control group that saw the same Snapple-a-Day ads only on the Diet & Fitness channel, researcher Dynamic Logic found that the run of site behavioral targeting ads increased brand metrics across the board. For example, the behavioral targeting ads increased ad awareness by 51%, while content targeting resulted in only a 33% boost."
"One behavioral targeting campaign, from American Airlines on the Wall Street Journal site, tracked readers of WSJ.com’s travel columns and features. Since the "one flight-a-year site visitor was the airline’s target," as reported in Advertising Age, the "rich media, large-format ads, which featured testimonials from customers" were served across the site to those visitors who "spent time eyeballing a travel article on one occasion." In this case, "Revenue Science made an educated guess that that person traveled once a year on business." This example indicates how behavioral targeting may be used to pinpoint a group within a group. In this case, the American Airlines campaign narrowed the funnel not just to identify anyone reading travel articles—after all, visitors who read that section frequently might well be frequent travelers—but to the once-a-year business traveler. The campaign showed that audience composition was improved with behavioral targeting. Against especially high-frequency business travelers, audience composition increased 145%, according to Revenue Science. Brand metrics showed improvement, and in some cases, message association for targeted business travelers increased as much as 218%."
"All the players involved in behavioral targeting take great pains to stress that they do not collect personally identifiable information (PII) in order to deliver advertising. This is one important distinction from some of the targeting systems of the past. However, behavioral targeting still inhabits some rather gray territory when it comes to consumer knowledge and acceptance."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Debra Aho Williamson is the senior analyst for the eMarketer research firm.
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May 04, 2005
Loss Aversion
WHAT IS LOSS AVERSION?:
Loss aversion, or the tendency for people to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains, is a much-cited psychological concept receiving more and more attention in economic analysis. A recent article presents a behavioral definition of loss aversion and dicusses implications for original and cumulative prospect theory.
ABSTRACT:
"A behavioral definition of loss aversion is proposed and its implications for original and cumulative prospect theory are analyzed. Original prospect theory is in agreement with the new loss aversion condition, and there utility is capturing all effects of loss aversion. In cumulative prospect theory loss aversion is captured by both the weighting functions and the utility function. Further, some restrictions apply for the weighting functions involved in the latter model."
QUOTES:
"It has first been proposed by Kahneman and Tversky (1979) in the framework of prospect theory, and later it has also been defined for choice under certainty by Tversky and Kahneman (1991). The popularity of loss aversion is due to the fact that it can explain many phenomena which remain paradoxes in traditional choice theory. Well-known examples are the endowment effect (Thaler, 1980), the equity premium puzzle (Benartzi and Thaler, 1995), and the status quo bias (Samuelson and Zeckhauser, 1988). In recent years loss aversion has also frequently been applied in behavioral finance (cf. Barberis et al., 2001; Barberis and Huang, 2001; Berkelaar and Kouwenberg, 2000a, b; Roger, 2003; Gomes, 2003). A further important aspect of loss aversion is the fact that it can resolve the criticism on expected utility put forward by Rabin (2000) and Rabin and Thaler (2001)who showed that reasonable degrees of risk aversion for small and moderate stakes imply unreasonable high degrees of risk aversion for large stakes."
"Kahneman and Tversky's (1979, p. 279) view of loss aversion is as follows: An individual is loss averse if she or he dislikes symmetric 50–50 bets and, moreover, the aversiveness to such bets increases with the absolute size of the stakes. This clearly is a behavioral concept defined entirely in terms of preferences. As such, the concept is model independent. Kahneman and Tversky (1979) showed that, in the framework of prospect theory, this definition of loss aversion is equivalent to a utility function which is steeper for losses than for gains. As probability weighting played no role in the derivation of this result, it appears that the effect of loss aversion is captured solely by the utility function. It is, therefore, not surprising that nearly all work on loss aversion employed utility as the carrier of loss aversion. For instance, Tversky and Kahneman (1992, p. 303) assume that utility is steeper for losses than for gains. Wakker and Tversky (1993) propose a preference condition based on a cardinal utility index independent of probability weighting. The latter condition has empirically been confirmed in a recent test in Schmidt and Traub (2002). In a review of non expected utility theories Starmer (2000) highlights the descriptive advantages of rank and sign dependent models, and summarizes loss aversion as utility being steeper for losses than for gains. Benartzi and Thaler (1995) view loss aversion as a property of utility exhibited at the status quo. This view is also adopted in K¨ obberling and Wakker (2003), where an index of loss aversion is defined as the ratio of the left and right derivative of utility at the status quo. All the previous conditions employ a comparison of utility differences between gains and losses of equal absolute size. In contrast Neilson (2002) suggests stronger conditions by dropping this symmetry requirement."
"The way loss aversion is currently understood, it is essential to identify utility independent of probability weights prior to any analysis of loss attitudes. Moreover, given that most definitions of loss aversion are not formulated in terms of pref erences, it follows that loss aversion is no longer model independent. Since most studies mentioned above do not use original prospect theory but the modern cumulative prospect theory instead, their notion of loss aversion does no longer agree with the behavioral concept proposed by Kahneman and Tversky (1979)."
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
ULRICH SCHMIDT
Lehrstuhl fuer Finanzmarkttheorie, University of Hannover, Germany. The research interets of Ulrich Schmidt are decision theory, public economics, finance and experimental economics. He has publshed more than thirty articles in journals like Management Science, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Mathematical Economics, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty und Journal of Mathematical Psychology. He is member of the editorial board of Theory and Decision and officer of the Economic Science Association. Homepage.
HORST ZANK
"Horst Zank teaches at the School of Economic Studies, The University of Manchester, UK. Horst received his Master's degree in mathematics from the University of Technology Aachen (Germany) in 1994. He was a PhD student at Maasticht University (the Netherlands) between 1995 and 1999. The topic of his PhD study was "Individual Decision Making under Risk/Uncertainty." From Horst's homepage at the University of Manchester.
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