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Research

Brought to You Live: Watching Live Streams Creates Connection and Enhances Enjoyment

Nofar Duani, Alixandra Barasch, and Adrian F. Ward

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Peer-to-peer live streaming is a rapidly growing phenomenon that has exploded in popularity on a variety of social media platforms. In 2020, users spent over 27 billion hours viewing live streams online, nearly doubling the hours spent in 2019. The current research investigates the unique social appeal of viewing live (versus pre-recorded) content. Across seven experiments—5 in the main manuscript and 2 in the Online Supplement—we find that watching videos live (vs. pre-recorded) leads consumers to feel higher levels of social connection, which in turn increases their enjoyment of the viewing experience. This "mere liveness" effect persists even when experimentally controlling for differences in video content, viewing environment, indeterminacy, and the presence of other simultaneous viewers. The social connection induced by watching content live also has important downstream consequences, increasing consumers’ willingness to continue watching similar videos and to attend similar events in the offline world. Critically, the appeal of live content depends on the desirability of the social connections it offers; consumer preference for live broadcasts is strongest when it offers the opportunity to connect with in-group (vs. out-group) members. These findings have clear substantive implications: marketers, platform developers, and media personalities can enhance consumer connection and enjoyment by going live.

Consumers’ Reaction to Price Discrimination in the Digital Age

Nofar Duani, Alixandra Barasch, and Vicki G. Morwitz

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In recent years, advancements in data processing and increased access to consumer data have revolutionized companies’ price discrimination capabilities. These technological advancements have not only changed how prices are determined, but also who determines them, with companies increasingly relying on algorithms rather than humans to set different prices for different consumers. In this research, we show that the perceived fairness of price discrimination depends on who consumers believe is responsible for implementing it (i.e., algorithms versus humans) and on the basis used to discriminate prices. Consistent with past algorithm aversion findings, temporal-based price discrimination (i.e., dynamic pricing) is seen as less fair when executed by algorithms than humans. However, this pattern reverses when prices are determined based on consumer demographics. That is, demographic-based price discrimination is perceived as more fair when prices are determined by algorithms (versus humans). We also offer preliminary evidence for one possible mechanism driving this reversal: when demographic price discrimination is performed by algorithms, people are less likely to attribute the discriminatory action to the agent’s moral agency.

Gender Differences in Economic Outcomes: Fairness Perceptions Depend on Group Membership

Nofar Duani, Alixandra Barasch, and Amit Bhattacharjee

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How do consumers evaluate unequal economic outcomes arising from explicitly unbiased institutional processes? Three studies find that men perceive gender pay gaps as equally fair regardless of the direction of the pay difference, while women perceive the exact same outcomes as more indicative of institutional unfairness when they are disadvantaged than when men are disadvantaged. Our findings highlight one reason for the contentiousness of discussions on outcome inequality: evidence for institutional discrimination and perceptions of what constitutes unbiased treatment may be in the eye of the beholder.

Pre-Commitment by Price: Consumers’ Reactions to Unlimited Offers for Vice Products

Nofar Duani, Sonia Kim, Steven Dallas, and Vicki G. Morwitz

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Although unlimited offers—offers that allow consumers to consume as much of a product or service as they would like for a fixed amount of money—are abundant in the marketplace, little is known about how consumers approach the choice between unlimited and pay-per-use payment offers. The limited body of research that exists has largely found that consumers tend to prefer unlimited options over pay-per-use options, even when unlimited options are actually more expensive, a phenomenon referred to as the “flat-rate bias.” This preference was found to be driven by consumers’ cost considerations, or their desire to avoid the negative emotions associated with payments. Yet, we posit that for some consumption decisions, consumers’ choice of payment options will reflect their concerns about the amount they will consume more than their concerns about the cost of that consumption. These include situations in which consumers feel the need to regulate their consumption, for example when products are considered to be vices. Across five studies, we show that consumers are less likely to choose unlimited payment options over pay-per-use payment options when they consider the product to be a vice (vs. a non-vice). When the product is framed as a vice, consumers feel the need to limit the amount they consume, and use the pay-per-use payment option as a pre-commitment, self-control device.

Selected Research in Progress

Elina Hur, Nofar Duani, Keith Wilcox, and Alixandra Barasch, “Virtual Connection through Video Enhances Motivation at Work,” Manuscript in preparation.

 

Niki Kotsenko and Nofar Duani, “Updating while Unemployed,” Data collection in progress.

 

Nofar Duani, Alixandra Barasch, and Vicki G. Morwitz, “Stronger Together? How Decision-Making Changes When Using Algorithmic Decision Aids,” Data collection in progress.

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