Payment plans are becoming an increasingly popular financing option for consumers, yet have received limited attention in the marketing literature. This research explores the consequences of payment plan usage on perceptions of financial constraint and subsequent financial behaviors. We find that, ex-ante, consumers expect payment plans to reduce financial constraint compared to paying upfront. Contrary to these expectations, borrowing with a payment plan increases perceived financial constraint over the course of the loan. This also leads to a reduction in non-focal monetary outlays, including both spending and saving allocations. This research contributes to literature on personal debt, resource scarcity, and misprediction.
As brands increasingly engage in socially and environmentally responsible practices, understanding how consumers respond to these distinct forms of corporate responsibility becomes critically important. While prior research has examined the effects of social responsibility or environmental responsibility in isolation, little is known about whether and why consumers respond to them differently. The current research aims to fill this gap by comparing brands’ social initiatives focused on fair-trade practices to environmental initiatives focused on minimizing packaging waste. Three studies demonstrate that consumers respond more favorably to brands engaging in those socially (vs. environmentally) responsible actions and that perceived brand power is one meaningful driver of this effect via mediation and moderation. These findings add to the limited research investigating how brands’ social and environmental responsibility distinctively influences consumers’ brand evaluations, provide valuable managerial insights, and open avenues for future research.
Merton (1968) showed that recognition accrues disproportionately to already-eminent producers of knowledge; marketing explains such patterns as signaling, with institutional affiliation acting as brand equity under quality uncertainty. Jo and Li (2026) report that AI-style writing attenuates this premium in SSRN working papers. This paper tests whether that claim generalizes to peer-reviewed venues and to algorithmic evaluators. In 476 Chinese business and management journal articles, institutional prestige predicts both downloads and citations, with elite-affiliated articles receiving 68
As traditionally offline sellers use digital platforms to reach global consumers, online narratives become central to market appeal. Yet digital markets require sellers to address both domain-based expectations, such as tradition and attention to detail, and platform-based expectations of efficiency and scalability. Using Etsy as a research site and drawing on the social constructionist view of craft and Language Expectancy Theory, we examine how the intensity of craft cues, reflecting the craft domain, and industrial cues, reflecting platform characteristics, impact market appeal. Analyzing 17,480 Etsy seller narratives, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship: craft and industrial cue emphasis increase appeal up to a point, after which additional emphasis reduces it. These findings extend research on craft narratives and platform-mediated activities by showing that market appeal depends on cue emphasis: sellers benefit neither from overemphasizing craft cues nor from avoiding industrial cues, offering guidance for craft producers seeking online visibility.
Studies suggest that creative choices related to facial absence (e.g., visual imagery) and facial presence (e.g., faces are in the scene) impact viewers’ engagement with media. However, studies offer conflicting advice. While some studies indicate facial absence enhances viewers’ engagement, other studies indicate facial presence enhances viewers’ engagement. These studies draw on a variety of theories to explain their findings. Should marketers emphasize facial presence in video advertising to enhance consumers’ engagement? What factors moderate the association between facial presence and consumers’ video advertising engagement? To examine the impact of facial presence and hedonic/utilitarian advertising contexts on viewers’ engagement we draw upon a large dataset of 3498 skippable digital video advertisements across 685 unique channels and 23 product categories. Across product categories, we find that a lesser percentage of facial presence before the skip option is associated with greater video view counts. Furthermore, we find that for utilitarian products, lesser facial presence before the skip option is associated with greater view counts and that for hedonic products facial presence is not significantly associated with qualified video views.
