The Relative Effect of the Convergence of Product Recommendations from Various Online Sources

The Attraction Effect in Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding has reached enormous popularity among entrepreneurs, yet many struggle to fund their projects. For example, only 39.8% of all Kickstarter projects get funded. Why? Entrepreneurs need to set a predefined funding goal, which needs to be reached to get the project funded. If not reached, they do not get the money. To reach the funding goal, entrepreneurs can design reward menus from which backers can choose low-priced to high-priced rewards to support a given project. We show that simply inserting a so-called decoy option—an option in the first place that does not make sense but makes higher-priced options more attractive—can lead to significantly more backers choosing a high-priced option (up to 28% more high-priced choices). This makes it more likely for entrepreneurs to reach their predefined funding goals and thus start their designated projects.

Human Versus Automated Sales Agents: How and Why Customer Responses Shift Across Sales Stages

Customers in sales processes increasingly encounter automated sales agents that complement or replace human sales agents. Yet, little is known about whether, how, and why customers respond to automated agents in contrast to human agents across successive decision stages of the same sales process. Even less is known about customer responses to combinations where both agents assume distinct roles and focus on complementary tasks that are traditionally performed by only one single agent. Against this backdrop, this paper explores the influence of increasingly common sales representative types on customer decisions across sales stages. Our findings demonstrate that customer responses to automated (versus human) sales agents are not stable in sales processes and instead, shift as customers move across sales stages. What is more, the paper shows that combinations of sales agents versus single sales agents do matter, yet their differential effects depend on contextual features of the sales setting. These insights are important because vendors may assume that a certain type of sales agent is always more appreciated by customers, whereas in fact, different sales agent types bring distinct attributes to the table, and customers’ appreciation of these attributes shifts across sales stages.