Colorism, or discrimination based on skin tone, has been widely documented as privileging lighter and disadvantaging darker skin tones in personal and professional contexts. In contrast to this, the current research uncovers a novel and positive “dark is hardworking” association in India. This association is theorized based on sociological accounts linking dark skin to outdoor labor, personal accounts of dark skin-toned individuals overcoming discrimination to achieve success, and widespread media cues featuring dark skin-toned achievers in arduous career pursuits. Darker skin tone thus cues perceived competence of service providers, driven by perceptions of being more hardworking. Evidence from six studies— including five experiments and a behavioral field study— demonstrates that while lighter skin continues to be advantageous in attractiveness-favoring professions (such as beauty consulting), darker skin offers a distinct advantage to service providers in competence-favoring fields (such as financial and technical services). Furthermore, highlighting competence can increase the preference for darker skin-toned professionals, even in attractiveness-favoring domains. This research contributes to the literature on stigmatized groups- specifically, colorism and its effects on stereotyped evaluation of service providers. The findings provide strategic insights for service providers and have implications for social policy.

Platform endorsement is becoming increasingly popular and plays a critical role in online healthcare platforms by aiding patient choices and shaping doctors’ decisions. Using a unique dataset from a major Chinese online doctor consultation platform, this study applies a generalized synthetic control method to examine the impact of endorsement on patient demand, doctor service pricing, quantity, and quality. The findings show that endorsement significantly increases the price and quantity of paid services, while reducing free services among endorsed doctors. Despite handling higher service volumes, endorsed doctors maintain or improve quality. The endorsement program generates greater revenue for endorsed doctors and the platform, but it raises concerns about equity in healthcare access due to reduced free service provision for underprivileged patients. The analysis further reveals that the impact of endorsement varies between initial endorsement and re-endorsement as well as between high-prosocial and low-prosocial doctors. These findings underscore the nuanced role of information disclosure in shaping doctor behavior and patient access, offering important implications for platform design.

Marketers can display their products horizontally or vertically in both online and offline settings. This display orientation has been shown to influence consumers’ judgments about individual products. The present research extends the literature by investigating the moderating impact of display orientation on the attraction effect, one of the most well-established context effects in choice. A total of eleven studies, including seven pre-registered experiments, document a novel finding that the attraction effect is stronger when choice alternatives are displayed horizontally rather than vertically. This moderating influence is replicated in both consequential choices and hypothetical scenarios and shown to generalize over diverse product categories. We explain this influence by proposing that a horizontal (vs. vertical) display increases the ease of comparing choice alternatives, leading consumers to notice the asymmetric dominance (AD) relationship among them more easily. Consistent with this mechanism, we find that the moderating influence of display orientation attenuates when individuals are guided to recognize the AD relationship or when their ability to compare vertically displayed products is momentarily enhanced. The present research thus demonstrates a significant effect of spatial orientation on the comparison and evaluation of alternatives. Theoretical and managerial implications of findings are discussed.

The unique characteristics of the health care industry have given rise to an intriguing and pervasive form of joint venture between hospitals and physicians known as Physician–Hospital Organization (PHO). With transaction cost analysis as the overarching theory, the authors draw on practitioner insights and literature to reveal the advantages and disadvantages of PHOs and identify the boundary conditions under which PHOs are more likely to enhance patient satisfaction. They test the proposed model using multiyear panel data from 19,134 observations in the U.S. health care industry. The results underscore PHOs’ capability to enhance patient satisfaction with hospital services. The significant main effect grows stronger when the market is characterized by intense competition among hospitals, high mortality rates, urban settings, and high unemployment rates. The post hoc analysis reveals that PHOs can additionally improve patient recommendation of a hospital indirectly through patient satisfaction. This study contributes to research on governance structure and customer satisfaction by establishing a connection between PHO and patient satisfaction and identifying its boundary conditions. The findings highlight several fertile avenues for research.

Consumers’ spending decisions are shaped not only by their objective financial resources but also by their subjective perceptions of wealth. This research investigates the interplay between subjective poverty (e.g., feeling financially constrained) and income in driving spending. Across five studies including real-world spending data from a U.K. financial management app, longitudinal surveys from Kenya and the United States, and controlled experiments, the authors reveal that subjective poverty increases spending among higher-income consumers but decreases spending among lower-income consumers. That is, wealthy consumers who feel financially poor tend to spend more, whereas poorer consumers who feel financially constrained tend to reduce their spending. Drawing on compensatory control theory, the authors demonstrate that subjective poverty threatens individuals’ sense of personal control over life, but people cope with this diminished sense of control differently based on their available resources. Higher-income individuals engage in compensatory consumption to restore control, while lower-income individuals adopt different strategies, including reduced spending. This research advances the understanding of how psychological and material dimensions of wealth interact to shape consumer behavior.

Time intervals can be framed either by a calendar year (e.g., “2015”) or by length (e.g., “10 years”), yet these ostensibly equivalent formats lead to systematically different judgments. Combining data from whiskey auctions with seven controlled experiments, we demonstrate that length framing elongates time perception compared to year framing, which we refer to as the year–length effect. As a result of changes in time perception, length framing increases the importance of time-related attributes in choice, leading to more favorable product evaluations in contexts where age enhances product value (e.g., whiskey evaluation) and to more negative evaluations in contexts where age reduces it (e.g., used goods). Process evidence implicates the logarithmic mental number line: years with large nominal values occupy a compressed region of the line, relative to small length numerals. These findings offer practical guidance on how time framing can be used to shape time perception and customer value.

Retailers frequently advertise price promotions with purchase preconditions (i.e., minimum spending). This research provides a novel perspective for evaluating preconditions: treating them as external reference points (ERPs) that override consumers’ internal reference points (IRPs) and thus alter perceived discount magnitude. Specifically, consumers evaluate a discount without a precondition by comparing it with an IRP based on past experiences. Conversely, a discount with a precondition creates a new, salient benchmark (ERP) against which the discount is more likely to be evaluated. Due to this change in reference point, a precondition resets the consumer’s discount magnitude calculus, influencing their intentions to shop at the store. This can create dominance violations in which restricted discounts are preferred to their unrestricted counterparts, contingent on whether the precondition is below or above the IRP. The influence of a precondition as an ERP on discount magnitude perceptions is attenuated when the IRP is highly accessible in memory, or when the discount magnitude is already explicit in relative (e.g., percentage) terms. Additionally, similar effects can be produced with a product category restriction equivalent in value to the precondition, and the effect of adding a precondition is attenuated when the equivalent value reference is already present.

This paper finds that online reviews submitted during the weekend tend to have lower rating scores than reviews submitted during the week. Analyzing 400 million reviews across 33 e-commerce, hospitality, entertainment, and employer platforms, the authors find that weekend reviews have a 3% lower relative share of 5-star ratings and a 6% higher relative share of 1-, 2-, or 3-star ratings compared to weekday reviews. The pattern emerges even when controlling for quality of reviewed items. This weekend effect is surprising given that studies usually report higher happiness levels and a better mood on weekends. The authors discuss several explanations related to where the review is submitted (platform characteristics), what the review is about (listing characteristics), and who submits the review (reviewer characteristics). They present evidence that temporal self-selection of reviewers is a dominant driver of the weekend effect. During the weekend, a different set of users—those more prone to write negative reviews—is more likely to select to leave a review. These findings complement extant research on review self-selection by adding a temporal layer to the self-selection processes inherent in online reviews. This paper also highlights managerial implications by demonstrating that solicitations sent during the weekend (versus weekday solicitation) lead to collecting more negative reviews.

School shootings are a disturbingly regular occurrence in the United States. While their direct impact on those involved are well-researched, their broader effects on communities are less understood. The authors focus on the underresearched question of how such traumatic incidents affect community consumption. Using data from various sources, the authors find that fatal school shootings decrease grocery purchases by 2.09% in affected communities, lasting up to six months. This economic impact is felt more in liberal- than conservative-leaning counties. Additionally, extended analysis reveals that these incidents reduce spending at food services and drinking places by 8% and at food and beverage stores by 3%. Three experimental studies provide evidence that this decrease is driven by heightened anxiety around consumption in public spaces, particularly for political liberals. This work suggests the violence has far-reaching consequences, harming the local economy. The decline in spending highlights the need for community leaders to develop supportive community responses to such horrific incidents, in addition to the resources currently offered to the victims and their families.

Discriminant validation examines to what extent constructs measured with multi-item scales, which are hypothesized to be conceptually distinct, are empirically distinct. A literature review of published scale development studies shows that a variety of criteria and approaches to assess discriminant validity are in use. However, the requirements for an appropriate criterion have not been spelled out, which has led to the use of problematic criteria. The present research introduces three requirements that an appropriate discriminant validation criterion should satisfy, concerning the correlation, comparison standard, and comparison method. It shows that the common Fornell and Larcker criterion is based on an inappropriate comparison standard and method and that alternative criteria have weaknesses as well. The authors therefore propose an improved comparison standard, congeneric reliability (CR), and develop a systematic discriminant validation procedure based on CR and an existing criterion (Phi), both of which satisfy the three requirements. The procedure provides continuous measures of support for discriminant validity and accounts for measurement and sampling error. A detailed case study and reanalyses of seven published scale development articles demonstrate the application and strengths of the procedure. Example code and an online application facilitate its implementation.