When consumers post questions online, who influences the content of the discussion more: the consumer posting the question or those who respond to the post? Analyses of data from real online discussion forums and four experiments show that early responses to a post tend to drive the content of the discussion as much as or more than the content of the initial query. Although advice seekers posting to online discussion forums often explicitly tell respondents which attributes are most important to them, the authors demonstrate that one common online posting goal, affiliation, makes respondents more likely to repeat attributes mentioned by previous respondents, even if those attributes are less important to the advice seeker or support a suboptimal choice given the advice seeker's decision criteria. Firms “listening in” on social media should account for this systematic bias when making decisions on the basis of the discussion content.

As technology advances, it becomes more feasible to load products with a large number of features, each of which individually might be perceived as useful. However, too many features can make a product overwhelming for consumers and difficult to use. Three studies examine how consumers balance their desires for capability and usability when they evaluate products and how these desires shift over time. Because consumers give more weight to capability and less weight to usability before use than after use, they tend to choose overly complex products that do not maximize their satisfaction when they use them, resulting in ”feature fatigue.” An analytical model based on these results provides additional insights into the feature fatigue effect. This model shows that choosing the number of features that maximizes initial choice results in the inclusion of too many features, potentially decreasing customer lifetime value. As the emphasis on future sales increases, the optimal number of features decreases. The results suggest that firms should consider having a larger number of more specialized products, each with a limited number of features, rather than loading all possible features into one product.

This research examines how consumers make trade-offs between highly competent, less moral service providers and highly moral, less competent service providers. Counter to research on general impression formation, which shows that moral traits dominate competence traits, the authors demonstrate that when choosing between service providers, consumers systematically value competence more than morality. However, underdog positioning moderates this effect. When a moral service provider is positioned as an underdog, consumers feel empathy, thereby attenuating the dominance of competence. Notably, although underdog positioning can help a moral provider overcome a deficit in competence, it does not help a competent service provider overcome a deficit in morality or a warm provider overcome a deficit in competence. Thus, underdog positioning is particularly well suited for less competent service providers who are highly moral.