T
his week I made the very long trip from Melbourne (via Sydney and Dallas) to New Orleans to participate in the Annual Meeting for the Association for Consumer Research, October 1 – 4, 2015. I arrived a day early in order to tick some things off the bucket list, including enjoying a beignets, spotting swamp alligators, and enjoying a drink on Bourbon street.
At the conference, I presented a working paper in the Friday night poster session. The photo here shows me explaining things to my colleague, Bernardo Figueiredo. I am very excited by this project, which was inspired by some animal learning research that I first learned about during my undergraduate psychology studies. My co-authors are Jin Liyin (Fudan University, China) and Ying Zhang (Peking University, China). Our paper is called “Probability-Based Loyalty Programs Increase Motivation”. A link to our poster is found here. The program abstract summarises:
We demonstrate and then discuss why consumers are less motivated in a traditional loyalty program (where a certain number of actions must be completed before the reward is obtained) than a probability-based loyalty program (where there is some non-zero probability of obtaining the reward after every action).