Speaker:

Professor Per Vagn Freytag,

Affiliation:

University of Southern Denmark

Venue:

Room 214/215, H69 - Economics and Business Building

Title:

How do firms understand their business model; destruction and creation of meaning through the business model

Description:

The aim of this conceptual paper is to impart an understanding of how actors create meanings about the firm's business model through interaction processes. In particular we are interested in understanding how business models are shaped through interaction processes (Tikkanen et al. 2005). Actors hold different understandings or beliefs of the business model and give them different meanings (Wieck 1995; Welch & Wilkinson, 2002). These schemas or meanings are essential in the structuring process of the resources and activities which are available. Business models are the manifestations of the meaning creating processes which takes place and evolve over time. Business models make action meaningful and direct intentions yet also limit the repertoire of possible actions. However firms do change their repertoire over time. What is it that drives change in the meaning or understanding of the business model?

Interaction takes places at different levels: within the firm, in dyads and networks. These different levels effect the understanding of the business model and how it works and as actors hold different obligations and take care of different tasks this may imply different understandings of the model. Therefore interaction processes takes place and schemas can collide on a firm and on a network level. Little is known about how these processes takes place and how new mental business models emerges. In this paper based on a comprehensive litterateur review and a case study, different business model understandings are highlighted and a conceptual framework is developed.

Speaker:

Dr. Adrian Camilleri,

Affiliation:

Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, USA

Venue:

Room 214/215, H69 - Economics and Business Building

Title:

Translated attributes as choice architecture.

Description:

The attributes of alternative choice options can be described in different ways. For example, vehicle fuel economy can be expressed as fuel consumption, the cost of fuel, or carbon emitted. Moreover, each translation can be expressed on a contracted scale such as "per week" or an expanded scale such as "per year".

We ran two sets of online studies in which participants chose between vehicles that differed in their tradeoff between price and fuel economy. The experiments manipulated the number and type of translated attributes expressing these two global dimensions. In one set of online experiments, we found that the presentation of these translated attributes in isolation influenced people's choices in predicable ways. In a second set of online experiments, we found that the presentation of these same translated attributes in combination also influenced people's choices in predicable ways. We attribute these effects to a number of psychological phenomena including metric compatibility, anchoring, goal activation, and use of a counting heuristic. The usefulness of translated attributes as a choice architecture tool that can facilitate informed consumer choices is discussed.

Speaker:

Associate Professor Carl Yngalk,

Affiliation:

Stockholm University School of Business

Venue:

Darlington Centre Boardroom

Title:

Constituting consuming bodies: food labeling and the bio-politics of consumerism

Description:

Consumerism can be understood as a nexus of powerful discourses that construct and link consumption practices to marketplace rationalities. That consumption entails essentially ritual and embodied practices has not been missed by consumer research and the field of consumer culture studies. However, while issues of power and embodiment remain marginalized in the field as such, previous research tend to focus on the individualistic, experiential aspects of consumption, and we know little about the politics of the consuming body and concrete ways in which consumerism at larger levels of scale seeks to construct and manage the ways in which people embody consumption practices. Through qualitative data generated from official documents and interviews with state agency officials as well as food manufacturers and retailers, the study undertakes a discourse analysis of food date labeling (e.g. best-before and use-by dates) in the Swedish market. In accounting for the regulative, organizational and performative dimensions of consumption, the case of food date labeling makes it possible to study consumerist discourses at the intersection of the state, business and consumers. The study shows how a multiplicity of mundane power struggles taking place between the different market actors in the wake of date labeling give rise to particular institutional conditions which constitute embodied consumption practices as controlled, predictable and responsible. As such, the study argues that date labeling reproduces a mind/body dualism of consumer culture by privileging cognition and choice at the cost of the human embodiment and sensory perception.

Speaker:

Associate Professor Alexander (Sasha) Fedorikhin,

Affiliation:

Indiana University

Venue:

Room 214/215, H69 - Economics and Business Building

Title:

But How Did You Expect To Feel?: The Motivated Misremembering of Affective Forecasts

Description:

Research  on the hindsight bias has shown that when forecasts and experiences are  discrepant, people often recall their forecast as being closer to the  experience than it actually was.  The present research demonstrates that  people tend to misremember their affective forecasts even when their experience  was similar to their actual forecast.  In a series of studies, both  with real affective forecasts and under strict lab control, we  show that when experiences and expectations align, people recall their  affective forecasts as being less favorable than both their actual  forecasts and their actual experiences. We claim that people misremember their  forecasts so as to make the experience feel more surprising to  them.  Since surprising outcomes are often more elating than expected  outcomes, people feel happier when they misremember their predictions in this  way.  People evidently are motivated to convince themselves that a  good-as-expected experience was unexpectedly good. We demonstrate that people  report greater affective arousal at the time of recall when they misremember  their forecasts. Furthermore, this illusory surprise effect can actually alter  the choices that participants subsequently make.

Speaker:

Associate Professor Anna Fyrberg Yngfalk,

Affiliation:

Stockholm University School of Business

Venue:

Room 214/215 Economics & Business Building

Title:

Consumer Communities and Wellbeing: Two Studies on Power and Control in Contemporary Society

Description:

Study 1: Control and Power in Online Consumer Tribes - the Role of Confessions

The present study conceptualizes control processes in online consumer tribes by investigating consumers' confession practices. Previous research on consumer tribes tends to be salient about how confession practices facilitate control and the implications for consumer tribal life. Focusing on members' confessions across three online tribal domains of consumption, opera, sports, and cars, we demonstrate how confessions align tribe practices with the common tribe ethos. And we show how this constitutes tribal life as different subject positions that are fundamental for the reproduction of the consumer tribe.

Study 2: Servicing the Body - Power, Service Systems and Consumer Wellbeing

How service systems constitute consumer wellbeing has received renewed interest in service research. Previous research is drawing attention to issues of power and embodiment because wellbeing is assumed to involve health and happiness. Existing studies have not fully explored the role of power in service systems and in particularthe embodied aspects of how power is practiced. Therefore, this study investigates how a service system constructs and manages people as healthy consumers in the context of a weight loss community. Initial results show how consumers and service employees make painful and fierce investments in their bodies in the search for a healthier lifestyle and body for the common good.

Speaker:

A/Professor Xiuping Li, Singapore National University Business School,

Affiliation:

Venue:

Room 214/215 Economics & Business Building

Title:

When Telling the World What You Want to Achieve can be Counterproductive

Description:

While some research has shown that publicizing a goal facilitates goal-consistent behavior, other research has demonstrated that it may impede enactment. This study posits that goal publicity backfires when one focuses on expressing the self. Five experiments test this premise. These experiments provide supportive evidence using behavioral goals such as academic excellence and environmental responsibility, and the goals were publicized in different ways (e.g., simply revealing to others one's goal commitment or signing a petition letter). Moreover, it shows that when self-expression orientation is highlighted, goal publicity entails a sense of progress towards goal attainment and subsequently decreases goal-consistent behavior (Experiment 3). Further, this research demonstrates that the backfiring effect depends on the self-expression orientation at the moment a goal is publicized rather than the overtness of the self-concept (Experiments 4 and 5).

Speaker:

Associate Professor Adam Duhachek,

Affiliation:

Kelley School of Business, Indiana University

Venue:

Room 214/215, H69 - Economics and Business Building

Title:

How Images of Other Consumers Influence Subsequent Taste Perceptions

Description:

Images of food are seemingly everywhere, yet the influence that such images have on important consumer outcomes is not well understood.

The authors propose that the effect that image exposure has on taste perceptions largely depends on the interaction between the type of food (hedonic vs. utilitarian) and whether the image shows the food alone (food image) or being consumed by a person (consummatory image). Specifically, the authors show that exposure to consummatory images prior to consumption actually increases taste perceptions relative to food images and that this effect occurs only for hedonic foods.

To explain this effect, the authors argue that seeing an image of someone else indulging in a hedonic food serves as social proof for the appropriateness and acceptability of hedonicconsumption. As such, images of consumers eating act as a licensing agent for real consumers, thereby reducing the conflict associated with the subsequent hedonic consumption experience and in effect, increasing taste perceptions.

The authors test this licensing effect across six studies and eliminate rival explanations pertaining to emotional contagion, goal contagion and source attractiveness.

Speaker:

Associate Professor Peter McGraw,

Affiliation:

University of Colorado, School of Business

Venue:

The Boardroom, Darlington Centre

Title:

The Psychophysics of Humor

Description:

Why can a tragedy be horrifying at one moment, funny in another moment, and not worthy of consideration in yet another? Answering this question has important implications for happiness (e.g., enjoying life), advertising (e.g., targeting the right audience), coping (e.g., transforming pain into pleasure), and common decency (e.g., avoiding "too soon" comedy fails). I examine two factors that jointly influence perceptions of humor: the degree to which a stimulus is a violation and one???s perceived distance from the stimulus.

A series of studies reveal that the relationship between psychological distance and perceived humor can be positive (and linear), negative (and linear), or even curvilinear depending on the aversiveness of the stimuli. For example, tragedies are more humorous when temporally, socially, hypothetically, or spatially distant, but mild mishaps are more humorous when psychologically close. Finally, for stimuli that fall somewhere between a tragedy and a mishap, the relationship between psychological distance and perceived humor can be curvilinear; moderately distant stimuli elicit greater humor than stimuli that are either too close or too far away.

The results are predicted by the benign violation theory, which contends that humor occurs when something that seems wrong, threatening, or unsettling (i.e., a violation) also seems okay or acceptable (i.e. benign). Consistent with a benign violation account, our inquiry shows how something that is tragic (a violation) can be transformed by the passage of time (or other distancing, threat-reducing mechanisms) into something that is funny (a benign violation) and then into something that is boring (a benign situation). The findings explain the ubiquity of the quip, ???too soon,??? and the less commonly uttered, but still apt response, "too late."

An implication of the inquiry is that nearly any aversive situation can be made more or less humorous by varying its perceived distance. I will discuss how the dynamic nature of humor challenges the leading theories of humor and psychological distance. I will conclude by presenting implications for the design of consumption experiences and effective marketing communications.

Link to research paper