PHD Publications

Thesis Summary In this dissertation, I examine the influence of aversive states (e.g., unpleasant emotions, undesired outcomes) on consumers' motivations and behaviors. In essay 1, I explore how feelings of physical and moral disgust can be threatening to consumers’ sense of self and motivate them to engage in compensatory consumption. In essay 2, I investigate why and when consumers exhibit negative behavioral intentions against firms that terminate unconditional business-to-consumer gift-giving initiatives. In essay 3, I explore how loneliness affects consumers’ preferences for products and services that do or do not require interpersonal touch and interaction (e.g., getting a massage vs. shopping online). Together, the three essays contribute to the literature on emotion, identity threats, and compensatory consumption, to the literature on sales promotion, and to the literature on loneliness. Moreover, the research findings inform marketing practice in the fields of advertising, sales promotions design, and consumer haptics. Finally, this research provides insights into consumer welfare by bringing attention to the unforeseen consequences of marketers’ actions that seek to benefit the consumers but instead generate compensatory behaviors to cope with their aversiveness.

Thesis Summary This thesis investigates the impact of patent pools for technical standards on the direction of cumulative innovation. It examines eight modern patents pools in the information and communication technology sector and measures the effect of pool formation and pool extension on rates of follow-on innovation in the direction of pool technology.Patent pools are the subject of much theoretical and empirical work. The aim of this thesis is to fill a gap in current literature that focuses on the motivations of firms to join a patent pool.This thesis contributes to the literature by extending analyses to the introduction of patents to patent pools over time. It consists of three empirical studies. Patent pools as institutions possess mechanisms that encourage and discourage innovation. The formation of a patent pool and its extension as a result of the addition of patents to the patent pool after its launch may alter the incentives to innovate of outsider firms. This, in turn, may have important impacts on competition and society. Finally, this thesis also analyzes the evolution of an industry that is particularly linked to technology in patents pools—the film industry.Digitization has transformed movie distribution and technological disruption has altered the supply and demand dimensions of this market. The main findings of these three studies arepresented at the beginning of each chapter.

Thesis Summary Decision Theory has been a very dynamic field since von Neumann and Morgenstern 1943. New decision models have opened new ways to think about our actions and every day decisions. Allais’ Paradox in 1953 forced decision theorists to be clearer about the intents their models and several authors claimed that expected utility solely has a normative intent (choices that we should make, potentially better) and not a descriptive one (choices as we make them, potentially flawed). It also allowed defining better methods of validation for a descriptive point of view. Best practices in descriptive decision theory have emerged and we have now clear-cut and vetted methods of justifying the use of a given model of decision theory for a descriptive aim. However for normative decision theory that intents to help us make better choices, we do not have a clear-cut way to determine and "prove" that a given model is the right one. This thesis provides an empirical design that provides such a methodology.

Thesis Summary The objective of the present dissertation is to gain a better understanding of how people assess creativity, and of the antecedents and outcomes of this creativity assessment process. In the first essay, I address the question of how people in different cultures assess creativity. In an inductive study of the French and US versions of Top Chef, a professional chefs’ competition, striking cultural differences emerge both in the moves used at each step of the assessment process and in the frequency and valence of the criteria. In the second part of this dissertation, I focus on the cues upon which evaluators rely to assess creativity. In particular, I disentangle the mechanism underlying the relationship between the creator’s status and the evaluation of his or her creativity. I develop the role of a specialist identity and argue for a complementary effect with the creator’s status. I hypothesize and find evidence that the creator’s status is only beneficial for his creativity evaluation when he has a specialist identity. Finally, in the third part of the dissertation, I focus on team creativity and develop a theoretical model where the assessment process provides an explanation as for why teams are not always the breeding ground for creativity. I propose to conceptually distinguish between different team assessment processes and to explore their respective impact on team’s ability to select its most creative idea for further implementation.

Thesis Summary This dissertation comprises three essays that pertain to the interrelated constructs of materialism and compensatory consumption. In Essay 1, I review research on the conceptualizations, causes, and consequences of materialism, analyze how adopting different conceptualizations may account for variations in research outcomes, and suggest a broad framework for analyzing materialism research. I also introduce research on compensatory consumption, which refers to the use and possession of material goods to address self-identity threats. In the end, I discuss some ideas for future research, particularly those related to compensatory consumption. In the next two essays, I investigate specific questions on compensatory consumption. In Essay 2, I revisit extant research that shows that compensating with products symbolic of threatened aspects of self-identity (i.e., within-domain compensatory consumption) causes threat-related rumination and depletes self-control resources of individuals. I find that such depletion occurs only when products are explicitly connected to the threatened aspects of self, and not when they are implicitly connected to the threatened aspects. In Essay 3, I examine the efficacy of within-domain compensatory consumption, that is, whether it restores self-identity on aspects damaged by a self-threat. I find that self-identity repair is thwarted when threatened individuals compensate with products having explicit connections to the threatened identity domain, but not when these connections are kept implicit. Explicit, but not implicit, connections remind consumers of the threat, thereby impeding self-repair. I also test a boundary condition to these finding, and show that when the self-threat itself is implicit (e.g., subtle, non-obvious), even products with explicit connections can provide self-repair.

Thesis Summary The quality of collaboration within and betweenfirms in a supply chain is one of the main concernswhich is studied in supply chain management andeconomics literature. There are many forces thataffect the level of collaboration in differenthierarchical settings: collaboration within firms (inteam (group) level) and between firms (in firmlevel) (Drago and Turnbull, 1988; Siemsen,Balasubramanian, and Roth, 2007). Collaborationand communication within firms and betweenfirms is studied in previous literature fromdifferent aspects and through analytical (Gibbons,2005) and non-analytical methods (Mortensen andNeeley, 2012). This dissertation focuses oncollaboration and cooperation between differentparties, either within a firm or among differentfirms in a supply chain, in different contexts.This thesis consists of three chapters. In the firstchapter, I discuss incentive design specifically inthe context of product development and howdifferent types of collaboration affect optimal teamcomposition in designing a product. In the secondchapter, I focus on collaboration among a supplierand different retailers to improve sustainability ina supply chain in terms of improving socialwelfare by lowering waste in the supply chain. Inthe last chapter, I consider the collaboration amonga supplier and different buyers. The main purposeof this chapter is to study buyers' outsourcingversus in-sourcing decision in a supply chain in thepresence of learning-by-doing by players,considering the effect of competition in themarket.