Empirical Generalizations Research Articles

Empirical Generalizations: New Laws for Digital Marketing

The article reports on the second Empirical Generalizations in Advertising conference held at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in June 2012. It discusses conference sessions dealing with topics including social media marketing, Internet advertising, and methodological issues in advertising effectiveness research.

Digging Deeper Down into the Empirical Generalization of Brand Recall

<h3>ABSTRACT</h3> ZenithOptimedia9s Touchpoints ROI Tracker research, based on interviews with over 700,000 consumers in 47 countries, shows that across paid, owned, and earned consumer contact points, users of brands have a higher propensity to recall the brands that they use than non-users buying in the same category. On average, brand recall amongst users is 1.7 times greater (the user multiplier) than amongst non-users. There is significant variation in the user multiplier by product category, brand size, market maturity, and touchpoint type. Marketers of brands with higher user multipliers, particularly those marketing smaller brands, have a harder job to reach non-buyers than those with low multipliers.

If an Advertisement Runs Online And No One Sees It, Is It Still an Ad?

ABSTRACT This study presents findings from three charter studies involving leading global advertisers in three key geographical regions: the United States, Europe, and Canada. The goal of the research was to identify and better understand the incidence of sub-optimal digital campaign delivery as it pertains to viewability, audience delivery, geographic targeting, and brand safety. Through an evaluation of the study findings, several significant empirical generalizations emerged, and this article highlights these generalizations and discusses their implications for the digital advertising ecosystem.

Shelf space elasticity: A meta-analysis

This article presents a meta-analysis of 1,268 estimates of shelf space elasticities, that is, the ratio of additional sales to additional space allocated in retail settings. The study finds several new empirical generalizations about shelf space elasticity. The most important generalizations are as follows: The average observed shelf space elasticity is .17, which varies across product categories, with the lowest estimates for commodities, followed by staples, and the highest estimates for impulse buys. Store size moderates the effect of product characteristics on shelf space elasticity: in large stores, the difference between elasticities for brand versus category is greater than in small stores. Furthermore, the shelf space elasticity estimates are less dependent on method characteristics than commonly assumed in the literature. Regarding the influence of the direction of space variation, the study finds that shelf space increases results in greater elasticity estimates than shelf space reduction, a finding that emphasizes the application of shelf space variation as a useful marketing tool. These findings provide several implications for managers and researchers.

Revisiting the Satisfaction–Loyalty Relationship: Empirical Generalizations and Directions for Future Research

This extensive literature review highlights the state of the art regarding the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty, both attitudinal and behavioral. In particular, it brings to light several issues that should be carefully considered in analyzing the efficacy of customer satisfaction in explaining and predicting customer loyalty. In fact, for many years companies all around the world have heavily invested in customer satisfaction in the hope of increasing loyalty, and hence, consequently, profitability. But after having gone through a detailed analysis, it is clear that this link it is not as strong as it is believed to be and customer satisfaction is not enough to explain loyalty. In fact, the major findings of this review are captured in the form of a few empirical generalizations. We generalize that, while there is a positive relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty, the variance explained by just satisfaction is rather small. Models that encompass other relevant variables as moderators, mediators, antecedent variables, or all three are better predictors of loyalty than just customer satisfaction. Further, the satisfaction–loyalty relationship has the potential to change over time. Similar weaker findings are uncovered and the study offers specific guidelines on who, when, and how much to satisfy. Finally, suggestions for future research to explore this domain are offered.

Consequences of New Product Development Speed: A Meta‐Analysis

Five meta‐analyses previously have been published on the topic of new product development involving the concept of new product development speed. Three of these studies have investigated antecedents to new product development success, of which just one was new product development speed. The other two studies used new product development speed as the dependent variable, and analyzed antecedents to achieving speed. This article extends previous empirical generalizations in this domain by using a meta‐analytic methodology to understand the link between new product development speed and new product success at a more granular level. Specifically, it considers the relationship with different dimensions of success as measured overall or compositely, operationally (i.e., the process measures of decreasing development costs and proficiently managing market entry timing and the product measures of technical product performance and product competitive advantage), and relative to external success outcomes (i.e., customer based and financial success). While the results indicate that, in general, new product development speed is associated with improving success outcomes, those relationships may diminish or even disappear depending upon a number of methodological design decisions and research contexts. A subsequent meta‐analysis of the antecedents of development speed provides a more holistic picture of development speed. These results are broadly consistent with those produced by another recent meta‐analytic investigation of the issue. Together, these findings have important implications for academics pursuing further research in this domain, as well as for managers considering implementing a program to increase new product development speed.

Indirect agree in Lubukusu complementizer agreement

This paper introduces a new complementizer agreement relation to the theoretical literature from Lubukusu (Bantu, Kenya), in which a declarative-embedding complementizer agrees in an upward orientation with the subject of its selecting clause. The agreement relation is extensively documented in a wide variety of syntactic contexts including ditransitives, causatives, passives, and multiple embeddings, establishing the empirical generalization that the complementizer agrees with the most local superordinate subject. The paper proposes that this agreement relation is not a direct Agree relation, but is instead the result of local agreement between the complementizer and a null subject-oriented anaphor (whose antecedent is necessarily the superordinate subject). This is termed an Indirect Agree relation, defined as an instance of agreement between a head and an agreement trigger that is mediated by a different syntactic element (a null anaphor, in this case). A variety of evidence is given in support of this conclusion, including mismatched agreements between the complementizer and matrix subject agreement, lack of split anaphora, the properties of raising constructions, (tensed) clause-boundedness, and the intervention of specified subjects. A number of issues for future research are noted as well, including various complementation patterns relating to evidentiality, factivity, and sentience as they intersect with the properties of the agreeing complementizer.

WHAT IF CRONBACH WAS RIGHT?

ABSTRACT In quantitative research, an important principle is data objectivity, which allows the generalization of the thesis. Cronbach thinks that the empirical generalization of social sciences stems from the failure of the research strategy (Cronbach, 1982). This research will verify if abstraction of the contexts should be made or not during the generalization of the results. A comparison between the results of a questionnaire managed with resident doctors at the University of Sherbrooke in 2007 and the results of the same questionnaire with 605 resident doctors of Quebec in 2011 will be carried out. In this research, three contexts were evaluated (time, place of practice and type of practice) and only the place of practice context affected the generalization of the results between the 2007 and 2011 data. Keywords Statistics, Context in research, Generalization, Medical residents Uniformity in the physical apparatus of life would be no engraves matter, goal uniformity in matters of thought and opinion is much more dangerous (Russell, 2004).

Brand personality: A meta-analytic review of antecedents and consequences

This article presents a meta-analysis on brand personality (BP) by investigating the antecedents and consequences of the BP dimensions of sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness, as suggested by Aaker (Journal of Marketing Research 34:347–356, 1997). The authors synthesize the results from 76 independent samples in 56 studies. The meta-analysis finds several new empirical generalizations about BP. First, the key drivers of BP are communication with hedonic benefit claims, branding activities, a brand’s country-of-origin, and consumer personalities. Second, the study finds that the effects of BP are stronger for mature brands than for brands in the early life cycle stages. Third, sincerity and competence have the strongest influence on brand success variables (e.g., brand attitude, image, commitment, purchase intention), while excitement and ruggedness have the weakest influence on brand attitude and brand commitment.

The syntax of registers: Diary subject omission and the privilege of the root

This paper examines register-based language internal variation, focussing on subject omission in English diaries. This register-specific pattern might be seen as some kind of ‘extragrammatical’ culturally-determined stylistic convention associated with this particular register, but a survey of the relevant data shows that the omission of the subject in diary styles is subject to the core syntactic constraints that have been identified in formal syntax. Importantly, the observed restrictions on subject omission do not follow from a purely functional account according to which recoverable subjects can be omitted: while recoverability certainly plays a role, there are precise constraints on the syntactic positions in which recoverable subjects can be omitted.The empirical generalisation that emerges is that subjects can be omitted in root clauses. Moreover, apart from fronted adjuncts no other constituent can precede the non-overt subject. The generalisation applies both to English and to French.The paper develops an account for subject omission which, in addition to standard assumptions about phrase structure, makes use of (i) the Phase based theory of truncation, (ii) the hypothesis of the articulated subject field.It is shown that other instantiations of subject omission such as that found, for instance, in note style journalese or in Samuel Beckett's poem Rockaby (Bianchi, 2007), are governed by the same principles, suggesting that the pattern is subject to grammatical constraints which are not exclusively tied to the specific register. That the type of subject omission identified here should be analysed in terms of core grammatical principles is confirmed by the fact that subject ellipsis in second conjuncts, a phenomenon which is independent of register variation, is subject to the same restrictions as subject omission in the diary style and can be accounted for using the hypotheses developed here. The conclusion I draw from this discussion is that the grammatical patterns displayed by what might seem a culturally determined linguistic system are fully amenable to core principles and parameters of universal grammar.

The importance of surprising findings in psychology

The importance of surprising findings in psychology

De nominale woordgroep vanuit dialectvergelijkend perspectief - Variaties en generalisaties

This paper discusses the DiDDD-project (Diversity in Dutch DP Design) which ran at Utrecht University from 2005-2010 and was funded by NWO. The project investigated the morpho-syntactic variation in the nominal domain of Dutch dialects, Frisian dialects and older varieties of Dutch. Its purpose was to describe the variation within the nominal domain, to analyze it within the framework of generative grammar and to identify the parameters within this framework that facilitate the attested linguistic variation. The data from this project are publically available as part of the Mimore-project. This article can therefore be seen as background information for this project. This paper discusses both the practical-methodological aspects of the project (methodology of data collection and storage) as well as the descriptive-theoretical dimensions by discussing the most important empirical generalizations.

The Paradox of Redistribution Revisited: And that it May Rest in Peace?

There is a long-standing controversy over question of whether targeting social transfers towards bottom part of income distribution actually enhances or weakens their redistributive impact. Korpi and Palme have influentially claimed that the more we target benefits at poor, less likely we are to reduce poverty and inequality. The basic empirical underpinning of this claim is a strong inverse relationship at country level between social transfer targeting and redistributive impact. We show that this no longer holds as a robust empirical generalisation. The relationship between extent of targeting and redistributive impact over a broad set of empirical specifications, country selections and data sources has in fact become a very weak one. For what it matters, targeting tends to be associated with higher levels of redistribution, especially when overall effort in terms of spending is high. We try to make substantive sense of this breakdown of originally established relationship by focusing on two questions: first, what has changed in countries originally included in study and, second, what is different about countries now additionally included in analysis?

A relativized probing approach to person encoding in local scenarios

In this paper I discuss three empirical generalizations about local scenarios: (i) four different realization strategies found cross-linguistically, (ii) an asymmetry in the number of arguments encoded on the verb in languages with person hierarchy-effects in non-local scenarios and (iii) the fact that person portmanteaux are particularly prominent in local scenarios. I claim that all three generalizations can be derived if Agree is relativized to target only positively valued person features on a goal. (ii) falls out directly from the Agree mechanism. (i) is a purely morphological phenomenon arising from the specification of local person exponents. Person portmanteaux are analyzed as inclusive markers in a derived inclusive context. Such a context can only emerge in local scenarios, which derives (iii). In general, the paper addresses the question how morphological theories that rely on discrete slots can handle portmanteaux by vocabulary insertion, without additional mechanisms like e.g. fusion. Keywords: Agree; relativized probing; person agreement; local scenarios; portmanteau morphemes; hierarchy effects; underspecification

The apology of reductionism (reductionism as ideological basis of mathematical modeling)

Данная работа представляет собой адаптированную к формату журнальной статьи одну из лекций курса «Математическое моделирование биологических процессов», читаемого одним из авторов. В ней подвергнуты критике холистические концепции ряда лженаучных философских школ и утверждается значение редукционизма, как единственной философской основы современного естественнонаучного знания вообще и математического моделирования биологических процессов в частности. Тем не менее, подчеркивается, что холистические концепции нельзя считать однозначно лженаучными. Как правило, они соответствуют либо эмпирическому уровню научного познания, либо этапу «феноменологических теорий» следующего (т.е. теоретического) уровня познания, когда происходит накопление, систематизация и обобщение фактологического эмпирического материала. С переходом на высший этап (этап «объясняющих теорий»), холистические представления естественным образом отмирают, уступая место редукционизму.

The Geometric Law of Annual Halving

We propose and test an empirical generalization: the probability that a customer will be active in a future window is reduced by half for every additional year the customer is inactive. We test this model over 6 nonprofit organizations and 30 B2C retail companies, and find that it fits very well. No significant differences in the decay constant were found between nonprofits and retailers, different customer groups defined by the frequency of previous purchases, or the length of the future period. The effect of frequency on the probability of future activity is empirically shown to follow the exponential learning curve. Norms are provided for asymptote, intercept and steepness coefficient.

Market Share and Product Distribution: Re-Tested and Extended

In Marketing Science’s review of empirical generalizations in marketing, Reibstein and Farris (1995) provide a model for the relationship of market share (MS) and product distribution (D). The relationship is generally convex, with high share brands having more share points per point of distribution. This paper tests this relationship across many categories and across six years from IRI’s Infoscan Reviews database. Most, but not all, categories follow the general pattern. We present evidence on the generality of the model, show how many consumer packaged goods categories follow the general pattern, show how stable the model is when estimated for multiple cross-sections, and assess whether cross-sectional convex models are consistent with changes seen over time for brands with substantial changes in share and/or distribution. We investigate alternative models incorporating both breadth and depth of distribution and show these provide more insight and better prediction.

Why are Consumers Less Loss Averse in Internal than External Reference Prices?

The literature has produced mixed support for loss aversion in a reference price context and the outcome may depend on the type of reference price. One extant study has reported empirical evidence that consumers are less loss averse in internal than external reference prices, but without discussing causes or implications. In the current study, we reconcile relevant literature and propose this asymmetric loss aversion result as an empirical generalization. Next, we provide and test an explanation: two empirical regularities in pricing cause that consumers tend to observe few losses for external reference price and many losses for internal reference price, making them less sensitive to internal than external losses. We use two scanner panel data sets to show that the two empirical regularities contribute to asymmetric loss aversion, while accounting for alternative explanations. We explore the implications of loss aversion asymmetry for the effectiveness of price promotions by simulation.

Breaking the vicious circle of categorizing students in school

Abstract Teachers categorizing of students profoundly affects the educational process and can subvert open teacher–student communication and create a vicious circle of student's lack of support and academic failure. In this article we use data from a Change Laboratory intervention in a senior secondary school in order to study the possibilities of changing the way teachers construct students as objects of their work and overcoming this vicious circle. We analyze categorization as a form of thinking based on empirical generalization and conceptualize its opposite as a dialectical process of constructing individual students' specific potentials and learning problems as the object of teachers' work. For this the teachers' need new kinds of tools that mediate the teacher–student interaction in a way that supports teachers' and students' mutual learning and support. Previous studies have shown a number of steps that are necessary for such a remediation of the teacher–student interaction to take place. In this study, we test and elaborate these observations.

Focus on Authors

Focus on Authors