he-chen2019 Marketing Seminars

This year the Wisconsin School of Business' Marketing Department is inviting doctoral candidates to come and present their research to our school. 

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A challenge to measuring TV viewer attention is that instant access to social media, news, and work has raised the opportunity cost of engaging with TV ads.  The result may be a significant difference between traditional engagement measures, e.g., tuning, and measures which can capture more nuanced avoidance behaviors.  This paper asks two questions relating to viewer behavior in the context of TV advertising.  First, how do traditional TV tuning metrics relate to a novel set of viewer measures that may be more aligned with broadcasters’ and advertisers’ interests?  Second,what is the relationship between these new measures and ad content?  To answer these questions,we leverage novel, in-situ, audience measurement data that use facial and body recognition technology to track tuning, presence (in room behavior), and attention for a panel of 6,291 viewers and8,465,513 ad impressions,  as well as consider four different classifications of advertising content based on human and machine-coded features.  We find meaningful differences in the absolute levels and dynamics of these behaviors, and can identify ad content for which viewers are systematically more likely to change the channel, leave the room, and stop paying attention.  Such ads reduce the pool of attention to subsequent advertisers as well as the platform itself, a negative externality.  We quantify these spillover effects for the publisher by conducting a series of counterfactual simulations, and find that requiring advertisers to improve their content can result in significant increases in the cumulative levels of viewer tuning, in-room presence, and attention.

Cheng He, Doctoral Student, Georgia Institute of Technology

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The End of the Express Road for Hybrid Vehicles: Can Governments' Green Product Incentives Backfire?

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In response to growing environmental concerns, governments have promoted products that are less harmful to the environment—green products—through various incentives. We empirically study the impact of a commonly used non-monetary incentive, namely the single-occupancy permission to high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, on green and non-green product demand in the U.S. automobile industry. The HOV incentive could increase unit sales of green vehicles by enhancing their functional value through time-saving. On the other hand, the incentive may prove counterproductive if it reduces the symbolic value (i.e., signaling a pro-environmental image) consumers derive from green vehicles. Assessing the effectiveness of green-product incentives is challenging given the endogenous nature of governments' incentive provisions. To identify the effect of the HOV incentive on unit sales of green and non-green vehicles, we take advantage of incentive changes at the county level, and we employ a multitude of quasi-experimental methods, including difference-in-differences with Coarsened Exact Matching, border strategy, and regression discontinuity in time. Unlike previous studies that only examine the launch of the HOV incentive and find an insignificant association between incentive launch and green vehicle demand, we concentrate on its termination. We find that the termination of the HOV incentive decreases unit sales of vehicles covered by the incentive by 14.4%. We provide suggestive evidence that this significant negative effect of HOV incentive termination is due to the elimination of the functional value the incentive provides: time-saving. Specifically, we find that the negative effect is more pronounced in counties where consumers value time-saving more (i.e., counties with a longer commute to work and higher income). Additionally, in line with prior literature, the launch of the HOV incentive is not found to have a significant effect on green vehicle sales. Combined, our findings reveal that the effect of termination is not simply the opposite of that of launch, implying that governments' green product incentives could backfire.

Keywords: sustainability, green products, public policy, government incentives, climate change, technology adoption, policy evaluation, quasi-experiments, difference-in-differences, coarsened exact matching

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2019 Marketing Camp

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