Research in progress
Banker, Mohin, Joowon Klusowski, and Gal Zauberman. "Consumers Generalize Positive Information More than Negative Information (When Accounting for Prior Beliefs)". Under review at Management Science. Draft available upon request.
- A lot of work says people generalize negative outcomes more than positive (e.g., if Restaurant A is good/bad, does that mean nearby Restaurant B will be better/worse?). Some work says the opposite. We show prior beliefs (e.g., whether restaurants are generally more good than bad) can explain both findings. Using a new methodology accounting for prior beliefs, we are the first to show that people generalize positive information more, all else equal.
Banker, Mohin, Ravi Dhar, and Nathan Novemsky. "Price Neglect in Profit Perceptions: Consumers Attribute Increasing Profits to Higher Sales not Prices". Under review at Journal of Marketing Research.
- Past work says that people believe profits come at the expense of consumers. We find people actually like companies with increasing profits because they believe profits indicate how much the company sold, not how much it exploited its customers.
Banker, Mohin, Sally Shin, and Gal Zauberman. "The Primacy of Experience: Preference for Information from Experience over Observation". In prep for Journal of Consumer Research.
- Asking several people's opinions is better than asking one person's opinion. However, we find that people prefer recommendations from someone who has tried a product (e.g., listened to a music album) than someone who relays the recommendations of multiple people who tried the product.
Publications
Banker, Mohin, Moses Miller, Guy Voichek, Dafna Goor, and Tamar Makov. "Prosocial nudges and visual indicators increase social distancing, but authoritative nudges do not." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 33 (2022): e2116156119.
- We conduct a field experiment in an airport at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Color-coded visual indicators and messages like "Protect yourself" and "Protect others" increase social distancing in the airport, but authoritative messages like "Follow CDC COVID-19 guidelines" are ineffective.
- Open access link to the paper.
- Open access link to data.
- Featured in Forbes.
Cain, Daylian M., and Mohin Banker. "Do Conflict of Interest Disclosures Facilitate Public Trust?." AMA Journal of Ethics 22, no. 3 (2020): 232-238.
- Some work claims that the perverse effects of disclosing conflicts of interest can be mitigated, but we argue that they look at incidence of lying, rather than unintentional biases that arise in realistic environments.
- Open access link to paper.
Banker, Mohin, Cheryl Cooper, Heidi Johnson, Melissa Knoll, and David Sieminski (2019), “Planning for Tax-Time Savings.” Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Office of Research Reports.