Publication records

Extant research established that customers’ expectations play an ambivalent role in the satisfaction formation process: while higher expectations are more difficult to meet and thus cause dissatisfaction, they simultaneously increase satisfaction via customers’ perceived performance owing to a placebo effect. However, to date, knowledge is scarce on the question under which conditions either the positive or negative effect of expectations on satisfaction prevails. Building on information processing theory, the authors hypothesize that an essential contingency of the indirect, placebo-based effect is the degree to which customers are able and motivated to process a service experience. Three studies with a total of over 4,000 customers in different service contexts provide strong evidence for this hypothesis. Thus, managers are well advised to provide a realistic or even understated prospect if the service context favors customers’ ability or motivation to evaluate. Conversely, if customers are neither able nor motivated to evaluate the service, increasing customer expectations represents a viable strategy to enhance satisfaction. Relatedly, if customers hold low service expectations, managers should foster customers’ ability and motivation to evaluate the service. In contrast, if service expectations are high, managers may benefit from reducing the likelihood that customers overly focus on the service performance.

With permission of SAGE Publishing

Banks have been subject to a wave of investigations regarding fraudulent behavior. Much of the discussion centers on manipulation of hard information by employees down the line, who missell mortgages due to flawed debt-to-income ratios or manipulate LIBOR and FX rates. Despite these prominent cases, little is known in the academic literature as to whether and how manipulation of hard information is affected by incentives of these employees, and if anything there is increasing reliance on quantitative, hard information based models for regulating banks. In this paper, we fill this gap by analyzing almost a quarter million of retail loan applications. We show that loan officer incentives significantly skew ratings even in settings where ratings are computed using hard information only. These incentives have a first-order effect on bank profitability. Our results suggest that ratings are subject to the Lucas critique: Incentives influence the hard information reported by loan officers and thus change the link between hard information and default probabilities.

The full text of the working paper is available at SSRN.

How does your organization manage the money it spends on digital? One surprising finding of my research is that most do not distinguish between different types of digital investments, treating all in a similar way. This situation exists because, believe it or not, a lot of organizations lack any mechanisms to help them actively manage the evaluation, selection, monitoring, and adjustment of digital investments to achieve clearly defined business results while meeting clear risk and return expectations.

We present the data from a crowdsourced project seeking to replicate findings in independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. In this Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) initiative, 25 research groups attempted to replicate 10 moral judgment effects from a single laboratory’s research pipeline of unpublished findings. The 10 effects were investigated using online/lab surveys containing psychological manipulations (vignettes) followed by questionnaires. Results revealed a mix of reliable, unreliable, and culturally moderated findings. Unlike any previous replication project, this dataset includes the data from not only the replications but also from the original studies, creating a unique corpus that researchers can use to better understand reproducibility and irreproducibility in science.