Marketing Tradeoffs
Beyond Visibility: The Disability Inclusion Effect in Advertising
Martina Cossu, Zachary Estes & Joachim Vosgerau
Journal of Marketing, forthcoming
Abstract:
People with disabilities are among the most stigmatized groups in society, and the most underrepresented in advertising. We investigate advertising practices by which brands can include people with disabilities in ways that go beyond mere visibility. Across nine preregistered studies involving both hedonic and functional goods and services, we show a robust positive effect of featuring people with disabilities in advertisements on consumers’ attitudes toward the ad, brand, and product. This disability inclusion effect generalizes broadly across products, endorsers (e.g., customers, models), disabilities (both visible and invisible), and consumer segments (people with and without disabilities). It arises because the brand demonstrates its support for the societal integration of people with disabilities. Accordingly, the effect arises whether the brand includes people with disabilities voluntarily or to comply with industry regulation, because both actions can produce the same perceived outcome—meaningful, concrete support of people with disabilities. On the contrary, the effect disappears when a brand’s portrayal emphasizes vulnerability or impairment rather than agency and social inclusion, or the brand conspicuously highlights the model’s disability in the ad itself in a tokenizing manner. Collectively, these studies reveal how managers can support people with disabilities and earn consumers’ patronage without risking their backlash.
Separating the Artist from the Art: Social Media Boycotts, Platform Sanctions, and Music Consumption
Daniel Winkler, Nils Wlömert & Jūra Liaukonytė
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper investigates how demand for an artist’s creative work changes when social media mobilizes to “cancel” the artist in response to misconduct. Human brands are particularly vulnerable to reputational shocks, yet how misconduct translates into changes in demand remains poorly understood. Using R. Kelly’s case, we examine how consumption of his music changed following calls for boycott and platform sanctions, including the removal of his songs from major playlists on the largest streaming platform. A cursory examination of music consumption after these scandals would lead to the erroneous conclusion that consumers are intentionally boycotting the artist. We propose an identification strategy that leverages variation in song-removal status and geographic demand to assess the relative roles of platform visibility and intentional consumer responses. Our findings show that the decrease in music consumption is primarily driven by supply-side factors due to reduced platform visibility rather than demand-side factors. Media coverage and calls for boycott have promotional effects, suggesting that social media boycotts can inadvertently increase music demand. The analysis of other cancellation cases involving Morgan Wallen, Rammstein, and Diddy shows no adverse effects on music demand, reinforcing the potential promotional effects of scandals in the absence of supply-side sanctions.
Automated Versus Human-Operated: Impact of AI-Driven Autonomous Stores on Prosocial Behavior
Xiaoyan (Jenny) Liu, Chi Hoang & Sharon Ng
Journal of Marketing, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many leading retailers have introduced AI-driven autonomous stores, sparking a trend that others are eager to follow. Although prior research has emphasized consumer acceptance of these formats and their operational advantages (e.g., reduced costs, improved efficiency), their broader societal consequences remain underexplored. Across nine online and field experiments, this research demonstrates that consumers engage in less prosocial behavior after interacting with AI-driven autonomous (vs. human-operated) stores. This effect stems from a diminished sense of social connectedness caused by the absence of human interaction at key service touchpoints (e.g., reception, checkout) and persists across both non-embodied and embodied humanlike AI systems. Three boundary conditions specify when this adverse effect can be mitigated, spanning the consumer context (joint consumption), firm context (consumer-welfare AI framing), and charitable organization context (self-benefiting prosocial appeal). Together, these findings provide the first empirical evidence of the social costs associated with autonomous retail formats and offer actionable insights for marketers, charitable organizations, and policymakers seeking to balance technological efficiency with societal well-being in an increasingly automated world.
The Effects of Sports Betting on Casino Gambling in the United States
Ege Can, Mark Nichols & Vasileios Pavlopoulos
Southern Economic Journal, April 2026, Pages 990-1002
Abstract:
This paper examines the effect of sports betting legalization on casino gambling revenues, focusing on full legalization, defined as having both online and onsite sports betting operational. Our empirical analysis finds that full legalization has an average negative but statistically insignificant effect on casino revenues. We also find that the impacts vary by state, with the legalization of sports betting significantly reducing casino revenue in some states, increasing revenue in others, and having no statistical effect in the remaining states. We extend these findings by examining the potential net tax revenue implications resulting from legalized sports betting. Based on our empirical estimates and existing research, we provide possible explanations for our mixed findings, as well as tax policy considerations for states that have legalized or are considering legalizing sports betting.
Measuring Heterogeneity in TV Advertising Elasticities: Evidence from 135 Retail and Restaurant Brands
Samsun Knight, Tsung-Yiou Hsieh & Yakov Bart
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
We estimate the heterogeneity of TV advertising effectiveness across store characteristics and advertising levels using a large-scale panel of 135 US retail and restaurant brands, and then use these estimates to assess strategies for improving TV advertising performance. We find significant heterogeneity in TV advertising elasticity across characteristics for over 93% of brands, but show that firms’ observed allocations generally fail to fully exploit this estimated heterogeneity and instead covary much more closely with simple heuristics. For example, we find that firms tend to advertise in areas where they already have high revenue, rather than in the areas estimated to have the highest incremental revenue from advertising. In particular, brands tend to overinvest in dense, high-income markets and underinvest in markets with high concentrations of college-educated residents. We project that brands could improve ad lift by a median 2.35 percentage points (relative to <0.5% median baseline ad lift) and earn tens of millions in additional revenue under identical-budget reallocations that better leverage this heterogeneity, and that 14-16 percentage points of brands with negative return-on-investment (ROI) from TV advertising could achieve positive ROI through such reallocations.