I attended the 2017 annual meeting for the Association for Consumer Research, which was held in San Diego between 26-29 October, 2017. I attended an interesting pre-tenure workshop as well as many other interesting talks. It was great to see old friends and make some new ones.
I presented a talk called “Consumer Underestimation of Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Associated with Food”, which is joint work with Richard Larrick, Shajuti Hossain, and Dalia Patino-Echeverri. Here is the abstract:
Although food production and transportation is a major source of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, we find that consumers underestimate these impacts, and underestimate them significantly more than for appliances. However, a carbon footprint label can nudge consumers – particularly those who are pro-environmental – towards lower impact foods.
I also presented a poster called, “Provision of Sales Volume Information Influences Consumers’ Preferences Via Perceived Purchase and Word-of-Mouth Popularity”. Here is the abstract:
Across three experiments, we show that when consumers are presented with both the number of online reviews and the number of sales, many of them use the ratio between these numbers – the reviewer percentage – to infer a product’s “word-of-mouth popularity”, which is distinct from a product’s “purchase popularity”.
My PhD student, Ashleigh E. Powell, also presented a poster. This was her first international conference and it was great to see how inspired she was by the end of the conference. Her poster was called “Understanding Word-of-Mouth Transmission” and is joint work with Angela R. Dobele and Constantino Stavros. Here is the abstract:
We integrate emergent consumer psychology findings regarding emotional arousal, self-enhancement, and communication context by examining how these factors interact to influence word-of-mouth transmission.
The Saturday Evening Gala was held at the San Diego Air & Space Museum. I really enjoyed walking around and interacting with the exhibits. The “Be the Astronaut” exhibit – “… a fun, interactive adventure where you are in control as you launch a rocket, pilot a spaceship, and drive a rover in space!” – was a good effort though not as exciting as I had hoped.
More generally around San Diego, I really enjoyed visiting the museums in Balboa Park (the Fleet Science Center was my favorite), walking around the gaslight district, and biking and kayaking around the beaches (La Jolla being my favourite).