Research Seminars
November 14, 2023
Presented by: Chethana Achar, Associate Professor of Marketing
Title: Black-Owned drugs: Consumer responses to Black ownership labeling on regulated substances
Abstract: Legalization of drugs in the US has been growing, along with calls for reparations to the Black community — who have been disproportionately criminalized before legalization — through priority licensing to commercialize drugs. However, consumer responses to Black ownership of drug-based products remain unknown. We experimentally tested for the effect of ‘Black-owned’ labels in cannabis and psychedelic categories using 2 field experiments and one online survey. We find that a psychedelics ad with a Black-owned label increased the click through rate by 21%; but this improvement did not generalize to a Woman-owned label. In study 2, we randomly assigned participants to consider cannabis (vs. candy) gummies presented with (vs. without) a Black-owned label. We find that White participants reported higher intentions to consume the cannabis gummies with a Black-owned label, but not Black participants. For candy gummies, the pattern reversed, with Black participants indicating higher intentions to consume the Black-owned product. These effects were robust after controlling for participants’ gender, political ideology, religiosity, anti-Black prejudice, and support of cannabis legalization. We discuss potential mechanisms and address the broader discourse on racial reparations through drug commercialization.
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October 17, 2023
Presented by: Kara Palamountain, Research Associate Professor & Lecturer, Kellogg’s Sustainability & Social Impact Program
Title: Tackling Global Health Inequity: investing in “silver bullet” medical technology or healthcare system fundamentals?
Abstract: There are many inequities in global health due to lack of investment in life saving medical technologies and healthcare systems. Access to vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics can save countless lives, but only when paired with a functioning health care system with sufficient infrastructure, health workforces, and laboratory / referral networks. When initiating efforts to tackle global health inequity, is it better to invest resources in medical technology development or healthcare systems? What are the considerations and tradeoffs for one approach versus the other, and what practical examples of success and failure can we learn from? This talk will explore the research on both technology-based and healthcare system approaches for tackling global health inequity implemented by Palamountain and colleagues, including 1) rapid diagnostic testing platforms for HIV, TB, and hepatitis, 2) an “uber-like” laboratory sample transport system in Malawi, and 3) improving hospital-based newborn care at 67 hospitals in Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, and Malawi.
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September 19, 2023
Presented by: Becca Kirby, Research Assistant Professor & Lecturer, Kellogg’s Sustainability & Social Impact Program
Title: Market Shaping Approaches in Global Health
Abstract: To properly function, health care markets, like all markets, require effectively balancing supply-side and demand-side needs. Specifically, the supply side must figure out how to cost-effectively manufacture, sell, distribute, and maintain products that address key needs of patients, providers, and health systems. In global health, however, complexities often create barriers to creating healthy marketplaces. This session will focus on different market shaping approaches utilized in global health by NEST360, an international alliance united to end preventable newborn deaths in African hospitals. These approaches include leveraging strategic Target Product Profiles (TPPs), landscape reports, and both qualitative and quantitative research methods to better connect both the supply and demand side who face high transaction costs, information gaps, and/or risk imbalances that contribute to market shortcomings.
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June 6, 2023
Presented by: Timothy Feddersen, Wendell Hobbs Professor of Managerial Politics, Professor of Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences
Title: Information and Influence: The Swing Voter’s Curse Revisited. Joint with Wolfgang Pesendorfer.
Abstract: The Swing Voter’s Curse (Feddersen and Pesendorfer (1996)) develops a model of voting in elections that explains rational abstention as a form of delegation from less well-informed voters to better informed voters. Delegation from the less informed to the more informed voters also motivates a recent literature on “liquid democracy” (Campbell et al (2022); Dhillon et al (2021); Ravindran (2021)). In these setting less informed agents might give their vote to a more informed agent. This creates, in effect, a weighted voting game in which some agents have more votes than others. In this paper we show that if a better-informed agent is given too many votes they may prefer to abstain and, in effect, delegate the election outcome to the less well-informed. Thus, rational abstention is not due to the less informed delegating to the more informed but, rather, the result of too little information meeting too much influence.
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May 9, 2023
Presented by: Nancy Qian, James J. O’Connor Professor of Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences
Title: The Impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on the U.S. Economy
Abstract: This paper examines the economic effects of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration to the United States, across U.S. counties between 1860 and 1940. The Act reduced the size of the Chinese population and employment in all major economic sectors and lowered the quality of jobs among the Chinese who remained. Contrary to the expectations of its proponents, the Act also reduced the employment and the income of white workers, both native and foreign born ones, and had sharp negative effects on manufacturing and agriculture. The negative impact of the Act was concentrated in the western United States, where the majority of Chinese immigrants lived in 1880, and persisted until at least 1940.
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April 11, 2023
Presented by: Klaus Weber, Professor of Management & Organizations
Title: Expressive Apologies: Being a Socially Responsible Firm (co-authored with Wei Wang, PhD candidate, MORS)
Abstract: Studies in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) often focus on firms’ performance on environmental, social and governance dimensions. Yet, the idea of social responsibility also implies that firms should have a moral sense of responsibility. Because an organization’s actual sense of responsibility is unobservable, corporate communication practices can express a commitment to being a responsible company, beyond other signals in the form of CSR reporting and performance. We examine one potential way for a firm to project that it is a responsible actor: apologizing publicly for perceived wrongdoing that caused harm to stakeholders. When made in public, an apology expresses not an acknowledgement of fault, but also affirms the societal expectation of care and moral responsibility for stakeholders. The empirical setting is observed variation in Fortune Global 500 companies’ issuing of apologies in China. We expect firms that are morally oriented to use apologies expressively to maintain a responsible image. We expect firms that are less morally oriented to use apologies reactively in situations that pose reputation threats. We find that firms with a higher moral orientation have a higher base rate of publicly apologizing. Their choices to apologize in public are also less directly associated with by situational factors such as public attention to the wrongdoing and the localization of affected audiences.
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March 7, 2023
Presented by: Sean Higgins, Assistant Professor of Finance
Title: Why small firms fail to adopt profitable opportunities
Abstract: Why do small firms often fail to adopt new profitable opportunities, even in the absence of informational frictions, fixed costs, or misaligned incentives? We explore three potential mechanisms: present bias, memory, and trust in other firms. In partnership with a financial technology (FinTech) company in Mexico, we randomly offer firms that are already users of the payment technology the opportunity to be charged a lower merchant fee for each payment they receive from customers. The median value of the fee reduction is 3% of profits. We randomly vary the size of the fee reduction, whether the firms face a deadline to accept the offer, whether they receive a reminder, and whether we tell them in advance that they will receive a reminder. While deadlines do not affect take-up, reminders increase take-up of the lower fee by 18%, and anticipated reminders by an additional 7%. The results point to limited memory in firms, but not present bias. Additional survey data suggests trust as the mechanism behind the significant additional effect of the anticipated reminder. Upon receiving an anticipated reminder from the FinTech company, firms value the offer more and accept it even if they generally distrust advertised offers.
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June 9, 2022
Presented by: Nina Chala, Professor of Marketing, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
Title: Motivation of Environmentally Conscious Choice
Abstract: Deloitte (Deloitte Global, 2021) has shown that the current generation is willing to change its consumer behavior to stimulate change, with the aim of building a more sustainable world and preventing further climate change. Classic economic models are based on rational consumer choice, which presumes that the determining factor in consumer decision making is the price of the product. Under modern conditions, rational consumer choice involves not only the assessment of monetary costs and the value of ownership, but also an understanding of the compatibility of costs with intangible values held by the consumer (environmentally conscious consumption). The objective of the research is to show the influence of the rational factor “price” and the irrational factor “the use of green energy in the production of products” on consumer choice and social responsibility. The implementation of the European Green Deal can be supported through the stimulation of responsible consumer behavior and social responsibility. Practical cases of CSR and environmentally conscious choice will be discussed.