a key challenge to brand managers is how to gain a better understanding of the relationship between brand and customer loyalty constructs. researchers have recognized that brand identity plays a key role in brand management. the purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of brand identity and brand identification on brand loyalty through perceived value, customer satisfaction, and trust...

Previous research suggests that narrow identification with one’s own racial group impedes coalition building among minorities. Consistent with this research, the 2008 Democratic primary was marked by racial differences in voting preferences: Black voters overwhelmingly preferred Barack Obama, a Black candidate, and Latinos and Asians largely favored Hillary Clinton, a White candidate. We invest...

Why do people sacrifice to help others in some situations, but not in others? Besides a direct taste for helping others, I study three additional psychological motivations that involve beliefs: social-signaling, which holds that a person wants others to think of her as fair-minded; self-signaling, which says she would like to think of herself that way; and beliefs-based altruism, which says tha...

Interaction between decision makers may affect their preferences. We consider a setup in which each individual is characterized by two sets of preferences: his unchanged core preferences and his behavioral preferences. Each individual has a social influence function that determines his behavioral preferences given his core preferences and the behavioral preferences of other individuals in his g...

Can the Pareto criterion guide policymakers who do not know the true model of the economy? If policymakers specify ex ante preferences for agents, then Pareto improvements from a distorted status quo are usually possible, and with more commodities than states, one can implement almost every Pareto optimum. Unlike the standard second welfare theorem, planners cannot dictate allocations: agents m...

This study examined the extent to which individuals used their self-concepts to determine brand preference. It was predicted that individuals would prefer brands with images congruent with their own self-image more than brands’ images inconsistent with their self-image. The study also predicted that others would influence consumers’ brand preference, and participants would prefer brands consona...

Observed friendship choices are constrained by social structures and thus problematic indicators for underlying personal preferences. In this paper, we report on a study demonstrating the causal effects of preference in friendship choice based on an online field experiment. Specifically, we tested two important forces that govern friendship choices: preference for shared group identity (operati...

Recognition of suitable group members can be learned through experience or can be genetically based. To determine when learning may be important in social recognition, we compared the social recognition of juveniles and adults of 2 sympatric species of three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus spp.). We altered the social environment of both species, rearing individuals with varying numbers of co...