In this article, we examine whether consumers may “accidentally” endanger a product they own when a new version of the product is introduced. We propose that owners endanger their product when they want to upgrade to a new version but have difficulty justifying the upgrade and that owners find justification more difficult when a new version offers an improved design but does not offer a significant technological improvement. Owners endanger their product hoping that it will be fortuitously damaged. Product damage provides owners with a good reason to upgrade. Focusing on iPhone as a case study, field data and experiments provide evidence for product endangering, and they support the role of justification in three ways. First, as hypothesized, endangering occurs when the new product offers an improved design but does not offer a significant technological improvement. Second, owners are less likely to endanger a product that is under warranty; therefore, damage to it will not enable upgrading. Third, owners are more likely to endanger their product when their justification concerns are heightened. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, decision analysis.

AbstractA brand name is a fundamental component of a brand's identity. This research introduces a novel linguistic tool for brand name creation: phonesthemes—sound and spelling letter clusters that are associated with one dominant meaning. For instance, sn, one of over 140 phonesthemes in English, consistently appears in words related to the nose or breathing (sneeze, sniff, snort). Six experiments reveal positive effects of phonesthemic non‐word brand names (e.g., Glif; gl‐; e.g., glow, glimmer; meaning “light”) on consumer preference, attitude, purchase intent, and choice when the dominant meaning activated by the phonestheme is semantically congruent with the product category or product attribute (e.g., luminant car wax), due to enhanced processing fluency. Phonological (sound) and orthographic (spelling) priming are eliminated as alternative explanations for the phenomenon. This research advances psycholinguistic research in marketing and the emerging area of brand linguistics by broadening the focus beyond brand name phonology.

We examine the impact of social investing on charitable donations using a unique data set consisting of investment behaviors and donation transactions for more than 10,000 customers of an investment app platform. We find that investors switching to a recently introduced social fund reduced their donations, mainly in charities supporting causes similar to those of the social fund. However, 79% of the investors that switched to the social fund did not donate before switching, so the social fund attracted more people to fund social causes. Still, because of the substitution effect, we estimate social funds have a positive effect on society only if their annual contributions to social causes are greater than 3.2% of the balance invested. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, finance. Funding: This work was supported by the Henry Crown Institute of Business Research and the Jeremy Coller Foundation. Supplemental Material: Data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4339 .