Popular digital platforms, such as Netflix and GrubHub, purposefully aggregate offerings, according to the premise that customers value products chosen from plentiful assortments. Yet academic literature provides little clarity about when, for whom, or how larger online retail assortments affect the value of the products. To provide new insights, the current article aims to address ambiguous extant findings about the effects of larger product assortments. Specifically, this research tests whether customers with high, as opposed to low, assessment orientation value products more when they have chosen them from larger, as opposed to smaller, assortments. Four experiments affirm this idea, such that customers with a high assessment orientation value products more when they have chosen them from platforms with relatively larger assortments. Sequential mediation of the effect occurs through increased choice engagement and attitude certainty. For managers, customer segmentation along the assessment dimension offers benefits, while assessment type marketing communications can increase the likelihood of product selection, like in our field study, where we find an increase of 27%.

Despite growing managerial interest in frontline employee behavior, and in display authenticity specifically, customers’ heterogeneous reactions to authentic displays have received little scholarly attention. Drawing on emotion as social information theory, we investigate the role of motivational orientations (i.e., regulatory focus) in customer reactions to authentic displays. The findings show that inauthentic displays have stronger negative effects on service performance for prevention-focused than for promotion-focused customers. A dyadic field study details these effects in terms of tipping, and three experiments provide further evidence by experimentally manipulating authenticity and regulatory focus. The conditional effect of authenticity on service performance also is mediated by inferred deception. Specifically, prevention-focused customers interpret inauthentic emotion displays as more deceptive than promotion-focused customers do. Managers should prime customers’ promotion focus using marketing communications before the service delivery when inauthentic displays are likely as well as consider customers’ regulatory focus when designing authenticity training for employees.

Researchers are increasingly confronting the need to examine the impacts of social media on democratic discourse. Analyzing 55,560 tweets from the official Twitter accounts of the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States, we examine approaches used by political parties to encourage sharing of their content within the contemporary political divide. We show that tweets sent by the Republican Party are more likely to be predominant in the language of assessment and that tweets predominant in the language of assessment lead to more retweets. Further, this effect is reduced as political parties gain control of successive branches of government. This is because successive increases in political power create fewer impediments to the implementation of a party’s political agenda. As impediments to action are reduced, so is regulatory fit for assessment-oriented language. Goal pursuit language shared on Twitter therefore reveals distinct approaches to obtaining and dealing with power across the U.S. political system, and constitutes an important tool for public policy makers to use in successfully conducting policy debates.

Variety-seeking research has examined antecedents in terms of contextual factors and individual differences. However, it does not consider the interaction of individual difference factors such as regulatory focus (promotion vs. prevention) and regulatory mode (locomotion vs. assessment) to predict variety-seeking.Drawing on regulatory fit theory, this study introduces a new kind of regulatory fit based on the interaction between regulatory focus and mode (i.e., regulatory focusmode fit), thereby extending previous work examining fit based on either regulatory focus or regulatory mode in isolation. Results from five studies, including field data from 10,547 music app consumers (text analysis), two preregistered studies, and two online experiments, show that regulatory focus-mode fit (vs. non-fit) decreases variety-seeking. Engagement and attitude certainty serially mediate regulatory focus-mode fit effects. Findings provide implications for consumer segmentation and message framing.

Physical movement is an important contextual factor during customer's decision-making. Yet, little is known about how movement can affect customer's response to mobile promotions, or how it can influence the search and evaluation of products in a retail setting. Across three studies, this research shows that physical movement improves the perceived value of products and promotions for customers with a predominant locomotion motivation. Such effects are mediated by engagement.One implication is that retailers may increase engagement for individuals with a predominant locomotion motivation by playing mobile adverts when cellular sensors indicate movement.