With increased competition in the attention economy, content creators need sustainable strategies for cultivating consumer engagement. One common strategy is to develop relationships with audiences, and prior research has shown that use of first-person singular pronouns (FPP), such as "I" or "me," can be used to build relationships and increase engagement in the short-term. However, we argue that the effects of FPP are dynamic, changing as a relationship evolves. Through a unique panel data set of content creator and audience dyads on Twitter, we replicate earlier findings that FPP is associated with increased engagement initially, while also observing that this effect is underestimated almost nine-fold when relationship duration is not considered. Crucially, we find this initial positive effect of FPP attenuates over time, eventually yielding negative effects on engagement. We propose that this occurs because the continued use of FPP suggests self-focus to the audience, rather than the relationship-building motivations initially inferred. We show converging evidence through moderation tests, exploration of boundary conditions and additional experiments. Our results suggest that content creators must consider the stage of their relationships with their audience members and the mix of recent versus long-term followers when using FPP to generate engagement.

Brands invest tremendous resources into building engagement with their customers on social media. But considerably less focus is placed on addressing disengagement, when users actively choose to distance themselves from the brand through reduced posting or even unfollowing. The authors find that the same self–brand connections that lead individuals to defensively protect the brand can also lead them to experience shame vicariously when others mention the brand in socially unacceptable ways. Experiencing vicarious shame motivates them to distance themselves from the brand, driving disengagement. Three mixed-method studies show that a socially unacceptable behavior—using profanity while mentioning the brand—leads highly connected consumers to experience vicarious shame, prompting disengagement motivations and ultimately leading to real-world unfollowing behaviors on social media. The authors also show that proactive moderation behaviors by the brand can attenuate these responses. These results provide insight into the process by which self–brand connection interacts with socially unacceptable brand mentions and suggest a limitation to the insulating effects of strong self–brand connections.

The rise of the internet has upended numerous industries, but none more so than news production. The connectivity fostered by digitization has been accompanied by the emergence of content aggregation, the proliferation of fake news, and the extended geographic reach of industry leaders, all of which have served to hollow out local reporting capacity. In this work, we examine the result of changes wrought by the internet on an outcome of theoretical and practical significance: corruption. Inasmuch as newspapers are viewed as an important investigative arm of local communities, it is possible that corrupt local actors will be emboldened in their absence. To test this hypothesis, we employed a difference-in-differences approach, exploiting the phased closure of major daily newspapers across the country. Our results indicate a significant and positive correlation between federal corruption charges and newspaper closures. Further, we observed no evidence that the rise in online news vendors or the democratization of the press ameliorates this effect. This suggests a key issue with the increased geographic reach of digitized firms in the form of “information blindness” to local issues.

The rise of the internet has upended numerous industries, but none more so than news production. The connectivity fostered by digitization has seen the emergence of content aggregation, the proliferation of fake news, and the extended geographic reach of industry leaders; all of which has served to hollow local reporting capacity. In this work, we examine the result of changes wrought by the internet on an outcome of theoretical and practical significance: corruption. Inasmuch as newspapers are viewed as an important investigative arm of local communities, it is possible that corrupt local actors will be emboldened in their absence. To test this hypothesis, we employ a difference in difference approach, exploiting the phased closure of major daily newspapers across the country. Results indicate a significant and positive correlation between federal corruption charges and newspaper closure. Further, we observe no evidence that the rise in online newsvendors or the democratization of the press ameliorates this effect. This suggests a key issue with the increased geographic reach of digitized firms in the form of “information blindness” to local issues.

Racial disparities exist in how different peer-to-peer (P2P) business activities are treated. Adapting from institutional theory, whiteness theory, and stereotyping research, we find across a series of experiments that P2P activities are rated more negatively and lower in normative legitimacy when their actors are perceived to be Black as opposed to White. Local acceptance and regulative legitimacy increased normative legitimacy ratings for P2P activities in a Black community, but did not erase the normative legitimacy gap. Moreover, we find that popular terms for P2P businesses ("sharing economy" and "side hustle") have racial associations, influencing perceptions of normative legitimacy. However, we also show that this may potentially be altered by the legitimating action (an advertising campaign) of a major P2P company employing these terms. Our results suggest that policymakers and programs for improving entrepreneurial achievement need to explicitly consider these racial associations and perceived differences in legitimacy.

When purchasing indulgent products, the characteristics of the purchase, such as price discounts and redemption windows (the amount of time available to consume the product), can affect the likelihood of purchase. We show how these characteristics jointly influence consumers' likelihood of purchasing indulgent products and identify the consumer lay theories that drive this effect. Although price discounts can alleviate the anticipated guilt associated with indulgent consumption, we propose that consumers believe the guilt-reducing effects of discounts fade over time. In four experiments, we show that, based on this belief, consumers strategically protect their enjoyment of indulgent products by choosing shorter time periods to consume discounted indulgent purchases, and by preferring discounted indulgent products offered with shorter (vs. longer) redemption windows. We find convergent evidence in sales data from a large discount offers website, observing higher purchase rates for discounted products with shorter redemption windows compared with those for longer ones.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the effectiveness of systems for ensuring cooperation in online transactions is impacted by a positivity bias in the evaluation of the work that is produced. The presence of this bias can reduce the informativeness of the reputation system and negatively impact its ability to ensure quality. Design/methodology/approach This research combines survey and experimental methods, collecting data from 1,875 Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers in five studies designed to investigate the informativeness of the MTurk reputation system. Findings The findings demonstrate the presence of a positivity bias in evaluations of workers on MTurk, which leaves them undifferentiated, except at the extremity of the reputation system and by status markers. Research limitations/implications - Because MTurk workers self-select tasks, the findings are limited in that they may only be generalizable to those who are interested in research-related work. Further, the tasks used in this research are largely subjective in nature, which may decrease their sensitivity to differences in quality. Practical implications - For researchers, the results suggest that requiring 99 per cent approval rates (rather than the previously advised 95 per cent) should be used to identify high-quality workers on MTurk. Originality/value - The research provides insights into the design and use of reputation systems and demonstrates how design decisions can exacerbate the effect of naturally occurring biases in evaluations to reduce the utility of these systems.

The population density of a geographical area has a well-known and strong positive effect on sales in the area. Yet, for some brands, there may be factors that affect the strength of this density-sales relationship. The present research shows that for product categories that consumers use to signal their identities (e.g., clothing, restaurants and cars), the strength of this relationship varies with brand commonness. Consumers residing in densely populated areas are motivated to express their distinctiveness by reducing their preference for identity relevant brands that are common, such as large chains and brands owned by many people. Thus, as identity-relevant brands become more common, they suffer from a “population penalty” – a weakening of the positive effect of population density on sales. We show this effect with three experiments and two empirical analyses of automobile and alcohol sales. Our findings extend literature on distinctiveness theory by demonstrating these effects at the community level and provide insights for marketers on accounting and adjusting for this effect.

Individuals often signal group affiliations to others, and the display of such identity signals is frequently rather subtle. While prior work has focused on understanding an individual's choices of subtle versus prominent signals, in this work, we look at the downstream consequences of such choices. Specifically, we explore how the prominence of identity signals may affect one's behavior in intergroup interactions. Drawing from literature on processing fluency, we propose that the use of difficult to process (subtle) identity signals in intergroup interactions leads signalers to experience identity threat, lowering confidence in their identity and leading them to engage in behaviors to recover from this experience. Across three different identity domains (college affiliation, political affiliation, and brand loyalty), we show that when individuals use difficult to process identity signals, they derogate out-group members in communication and behave less cooperatively in intergroup interactions. We find that these effects depend upon the observability of the signals by out-group members and only occur for individuals who are highly identified with the in-group. We also find that the effects are attenuated when behavior towards members of the out-group is made public. Copyright (c) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Conspicuous brand usage, defined as attention-getting use of a brand, causes brand dilution under certain conditions. This research examines changes in observers' attitudes toward a brand after seeing a brand user engaged in conspicuous use of the brand. The authors propose that observers infer that a consumer engaged in conspicuous brand usage is driven by an ulterior motive of impression management. When observers have low self-brand connection, they exhibit less favorable attitudes toward both the brand user and the brand. In contrast, observers with high self-brand connection maintain their favorable view of the brand in the face of a conspicuous brand user. Three studies demonstrate the brand dilution effect of conspicuous brand usage.