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New database will improve food safety and decrease the risk of food-borne illnesses

This article introduces the Marketing Science Special Issue on Consumer Protection. This special issue and an accompanying conference were conceived as a partnership with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. We outline the potential areas and opportunities for academic scholarship in marketing to inform regulation on consumer protection. We group the areas of potential research and the papers in the special issue into three broad buckets: (1) what consumers need protection from, especially the need for regulations in new industries; (2) the impact of existing regulations; and (3) the distributional impact of regulations. The article concludes with a call for ongoing policy-relevant research on consumer protection.

We study how consumers make brand choices when they have limited information. In a market of experience goods with frequent product entry and exit, consumers face two types of information problems: first, they have limited information about a product’s existence; second, even if they know a product exists, they do not have full information about its quality until they purchase and consume it. In this chapter, we incorporate purchase experience and brand advertising as two sources of information and examine how consumers use them in a dynamic process. The model is estimated using the Nielsen Homescan data in Los Angeles, which consist of grocery shopping history for 1,402 households over 6 years. Taking ready-to-eat cereal as an example, we find that consumers learn about new products quickly and form strong habits. More specifically, advertising has a significant effect in informing consumers of a product’s existence and signaling product quality. However, advertising’s prestige effect is not significant. We also find that incorporating limited information about a product’s existence leads to larger estimates of the price elasticity. Based on the structural estimates, we simulate consumer choices under three counterfactual experiments to evaluate brand marketing strategies and a policy on banning children-oriented cereal advertising. Simulation suggests that the advertising ban encourages consumers to consume less sugar and more fiber, but their expenditures are also higher because they switch to family and adult brands, which are more expensive.

Because consumer reviews leverage the wisdom of the crowd, the way in which they are aggregated is a central decision faced by platforms. We explore this "rating aggregation problem" and offer a structural approach to solving it, allowing for (1) reviewers to vary in stringency and accuracy, (2) reviewers to be influenced by existing reviews, and (3) product quality to change over time. Applying this to restaurant reviews from Yelp.com, we construct an adjusted average rating and show that even a simple algorithm can lead to large information efficiency gains relative to the arithmetic average.

Ginger Zhe Jin, University of Maryland, et al.; 2013-009

Ginger Zhe Jin, University of Maryland, and Jungmin Lee, Sogang University; 2013-010

Ginger Zhe Jin, University of Maryland, et al.; 2013-012

Ginger Zhe Jin, University of Maryland, et al.; 2013-011

Ginger Jin, Economics

While parental matchmaking has been widespread throughout history and across countries, we know little about the relationship between parental matchmaking and marriage outcomes. Does parental involvement in matchmaking help ensure their needs are better taken care of by married children? This paper finds supportive evidence using a survey of Chinese couples. In particular, parental involvement in matchmaking is associated with having a more submissive wife, a greater number of children, a higher likelihood of having any male children, and a stronger belief of the husband in providing old age support to his parents. These benefits, however, are achieved at the cost of less marital harmony within the couple and lower market income of the wife. The results render support to and extend the findings of Becker, Murphy and Spenkuch (2015) where parents meddle with children's preferences to ensure their commitment to providing parental goods such as old age support.