Abhijit Biswas published in top-rated Journal of Marketing

Professor of Marketing Abhijit Biswas has a co-authored paper accepted for publication in the Journal of MarketingThis is Biswas' third major paper acceptance in the last thirteen months.

The paper is titled “An Empirical Analysis of the Joint Effects of Shoppers’ Goals and Attribute Display on Shoppers’ Evaluations.” 

The Journal of Marketing, a bimonthly publication of the American Marketing Association (AMA), is one of the premier refereed scholarly journals of the marketing discipline. Since its founding in 1936, the journal has played a significant role in the dissemination of marketing knowledge grounded in scholarly research, as well as in shaping the content and boundaries of the discipline.

Two AMA objectives have a direct bearing on the publication policies of the journal: (1) to lead in the development, dissemination, and implementation of marketing concepts, practice, and information and (2) to probe and promote the use of marketing concepts by business, not-for-profit, and other institutions for the betterment of society.

Abstract

This paper develops a decision-making framework which highlights how display of numeric attribute information (e.g., display of calorie information) and shoppers’ goals (i.e., having a diet-focus versus a taste-focus) jointly influence shoppers’ choices and preferences. Across two sets of studies, including a field study involving the launch of a new Coca-Cola product, the authors show that when food items are displayed in an aligned manner, i.e., when food items with lower-value calorie information are displayed below food items with higher calorie values, shoppers assign more importance weight to calorie gap information. In turn, higher importance weight assigned to calorie gap information leads diet-focused shoppers to relatively prefer low-calorie food items, but leads taste-focused shoppers to relatively prefer higher-calorie food items. The third set of studies shows that the above decision-making framework has widespread applicability, and is relevant in any domain where advertising, retail and online displays show comparisons of numeric attribute information.

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