In brand imitation lawsuits, the primary focus is on demonstrating harm as it relates to brand confusion. The authors' premise is that such a narrow focus does not capture the complete impact of brand imitation. They offer a broader, theory-based perspective of harm by proposing that brand imitation affects both brand consideration and preference in the consumer choice process. The authors establish a formal nexus between brand consideration and the legal doctrine "initial interest confusion." Using choice experiments and statistical modeling, they show that brand imitation harms the imitated brand even after controlling for brand confusion. Moreover, brand imitation harms not only the imitated brand but also other national brands in the category that are not being imitated. To quantify brand consideration and preference harm in financial terms, the authors propose two metrics: choice share shift and share-equalizing price cut. The results show that brand imitation harms the national brand more when the imitating brand is not associated with a well-known retailer and that brand imitation harm extends beyond brand confusion. The proposed framework provides both legal and managerial guidance.

Native advertising is a type of online advertising that matches the form and function of the platform on which it appears. In practice, the choice between display and in-feed native advertising presents brand advertisers and online news publishers with conflicting objectives. Advertisers face a trade-off between ad clicks and brand recognition, whereas publishers need to strike a balance between ad clicks and the platform’s trustworthiness. For policy makers, concerns that native advertising confuses customers prompted the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to issue guidelines for disclosing native ads. This research aims to understand how consumers respond to native ads versus display ads and to different styles of native ad disclosures, using randomized online and field experiments combining behavioral clickstream, eye movement, and survey response data. The results show that when the position of an ad on a news page is controlled for, a native ad generates a higher click-through rate because it better resembles the surrounding editorial content. However, a display ad leads to more visual attention, brand recognition, and trustworthiness for the website than a native ad.

In this article, the authors contend that member influence in a group's decision could be decomposed into two distinct elements of preference revision and concession. Using a hierarchical Bayes model of dyadic decision making, the authors show that the degree of preference revision and concession varies across product attributes, individuals, and product categories. The authors demonstrate that converging preferences affect a member's concession, which in turn affects members’ satisfaction with the joint decision. More important, a member's satisfaction is higher when his or her concession is reciprocated.

Advertising recognition tests use advertisements as visual retrieval cues; they require consumers to report which advertisements they remember having seen earlier and whether they noticed the advertised brand and read most of the text at the time. Using a heterogeneous randomly stopped sum model, the authors establish the relationship between consumers' actual attention to print advertisements, as measured through eye tracking, and subsequent ad recognition measures. They find that ad recognition measures are systematically biased because consumers infer prior attention from the ad layout and their familiarity with the brands in the advertisements. Such biases undermine the validity of recognition tests for advertising practice and theory development. The authors quantify the positive and negative diagnostic value of ad recognition for prior attention and demonstrate how these diagnostic values can be used to develop bias-adjusted recognition (BAR) scores that more accurately reflect prior attention. Finally, the authors show that differences in the scores from ad recognition tests based on in-home versus lab exposure attenuate when the bias-adjustment procedure is applied.