Two Journal of Marketing Research articles have been selected to receive the 2024 Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award. They include:
- Martin Mende, Maura L. Scott, Jenny Van Doorn, Dhruv Grewal, and Ilana Shanks (2019), “Service Robots Rising: How Humanoid Robots Influence Service Experiences and Elicit Compensatory Consumer Responses,” Journal of Marketing Research, 56 (4), 535–56.
- Oded Netzer, Alain Lemaire, and Michal Herzenstein (2019), “When Words Sweat: Identifying Signals for Loan Default in the Text of Loan Applications,” Journal of Marketing Research, 56 (6), 960–80.
The Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award honors JMR articles published five years earlier that have made the most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice. The award committee this year consisted of Brett Gordon (Northwestern University), Mary Frances Luce (Duke University), and Kapil Tuli (Singapore Management University). Their statements are below:
“Service Robots Rising: How Humanoid Robots Influence Service Experiences and Elicit Compensatory Consumer Responses”
Florida State University
Florida State University
University of Groningen
Babson College
Stony Brook University
“With the increasing adoption of technology in general, and robotics in particular in customer interactions, it is critical for marketing scholars to develop an understanding of how consumers are likely to respond to firm initiatives to deploy robots in customer-facing roles. Against this background, the paper by Martin Mende, Maura Scott, Jenny van Doorn, Dhruv Grewal, and Ilana Shanks, “Service Robots Rising: How Humanoid Robots Influence Service Experiences and Elicit Compensatory Consumer Responses,” published in the Journal of Marketing Research, August 2019, provides an in-depth perspective into how humans are likely to respond to the increased use of robots in service settings. The authors propose and test hypotheses using a combination of lab and field experiments that bring to fore the compensatory responses that consumers are likely to have when interacting with service robots.
Since its publication, the manuscript has become the most highly cited paper published in JMR since 2018 with more than 21,000 downloads, and it has been ranked in the top 25% of all the research output scored by Altmetric. A key reason for the widespread impact of the manuscript is the salient theoretical contribution it makes to the emerging field of interdisciplinary research that synthesizes insights from marketing, robotics, and ethics to develop a more holistic understanding of human–technology interactions. Building on the foundation provided by the article, subsequent studies have explored the impact of technologies on both psychological concepts such as empathy (Liu-Thompkins 2022; Garvey et al. 2023) and financial metrics such as sales (Luo et al. 2021). Importantly, the insights offered by the manuscript have direct implications across industries in which service robots are increasingly deployed, such as health care, retail, hospitality, and education.”
“When Words Sweat: Identifying Signals for Loan Default in the Text of Loan Applications”
Columbia University
University of Texas at Austin
University of Delaware
“What we write can reveal our intentions, even unbeknownst to ourselves. This paper, by Oded Netzer, Alain Lemare, and Michal Herzenstein, “When Words Sweat: Identifying Signals for Loan Default in the Text of Loan Applications,” published in JMR in 2019, provides compelling evidence that what borrowers write in their loan applications can predict their financial behavior sometimes years later. Using data from an online crowdfunding platform, they show that augmenting traditional models with the text from loan applications improves lenders’ ability to predict default. The authors find that defaulters tend to use simpler yet wordier language, seeking to explain their situation and why they need the loan. These results highlight the value of incorporating “soft,” or unstructured, data into typical consumer finance models.
The paper has garnered over 230 citations and nearly 6,000 downloads and was even featured in the bestselling book, “Everybody Lies” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. More importantly, the paper has broad appeal, with 63% of its citations coming from outside the field of marketing. Furthermore, the paper has been presented at numerous industry conferences, such as the JP Morgan Chase Conference (2016) and The New York Society of Security Analysts (2020). The researchers have been collaborating with both Moody’s and the FDIC to incorporate text data into their models of company default and bank failure, respectively. This level of dual impact—on both research and practice—is rare.”
Three other excellent papers were named finalists for the 2024 Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award:
- Shiri Melumad, J. Jeffrey Inman, and Michel Tuan Pham (2019), “Selectively Emotional: How Smartphone Use Changes User-Generated Content,” Journal of Marketing Research, 56 (2), 259–75.
- A. Yeşim Orhun and Mike Palazzolo (2019), “Frugality Is Hard to Afford,” Journal of Marketing Research, 56 (1), 1–17.
- Navdeep S. Sahni, Sridhar Narayanan, and Kirthi Kalyanam (2019), “An Experimental Investigation of the Effects of Retargeted Advertising: The Role of Frequency and Timing,” Journal of Marketing Research, 56 (3), 401–18.
Congratulations to all these authors! The winners will be recognized during the awards luncheon at the AMA Summer Academic Conference in Boston (August 16–18, 2024).
Go to the Journal of Marketing Research