Journal Publications (* equal author contribution)
Differentiating on Diversity: How Disclosing Workforce Diversity Influences Consumer Choice
Balakrishnan, M.*, Nam, J.*, & Buell, R. (2023). Differentiating on Diversity: How Disclosing Workforce Diversity Influences Consumer Choice. Production and Operations Management, forthcoming.
Many companies are making efforts to diversify their workforces, motivated by documented operational performance benefits and the desire to heed increased pressure to “walk the talk” on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. One specific call-to-action from stakeholders is the public disclosure of EEO-1s. Companies with 100+ employees are federally mandated to annually report the intersectional diversity data of their workforce in the EEO-1. Through five online experiments, we examine how consumers perceive transparency into an operation's workforce diversity. We find no evidence that disclosing workforce diversity data undermines customer attitudes or behaviors toward the company, even when the disclosures reveal racial disparities across job categories. Instead, we find that consumers perceive firms that disclose their workforce diversity data to be more committed to DEI initiatives, view disclosing firms more positively, and are more likely to choose their offerings, relative to firms that choose not to disclose. We find these attitudinal and behavioral differences to be especially pronounced when the disclosures reveal progress in diversification.
Media Coverage: HBS Working Knowledge
Speedy Activists: Firm Response Time to Sociopolitical Events Influences Consumer Behavior
Nam, J., Balakrishnan, M., De Freitas, J., Brooks, A.W. (2023). Speedy Activists: Firm Response Time to Sociopolitical Events Influences Consumer Behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 33, 632-644.
Organizations face growing pressure from their consumers and stakeholders to take public stances on sociopolitical issues. However, many are hesitant to do so lest they make missteps, promises they cannot keep, appear inauthentic, or alienate consumers, employees, or other stakeholders. Here we investigate consumers’ impressions of firms that respond quickly or slowly to sociopolitical events. Using data scraped from Instagram and three online experiments (N=2,452), we find that consumers express more positive sentiment and greater purchasing intentions toward firms that react more quickly to sociopolitical issues. Unlike other types of public firm decision making such as product launch, where careful deliberation can be appreciated, consumers treat firm response time to sociopolitical events as an informative cue of the firm’s authentic commitment to the issue. We identify an important boundary condition of this main effect: speedy responses bring limited benefits when the issue is highly divisive along political lines. Our findings bridge extant research on brand activism and communication, and offer practical advice for firms.
Media Coverage: Harvard Business Review (Website)
Patel, M.S., Milkman, K. L., +42 authors including Nam, J., Duckworth, A.L. (2022). A Randomized Trial of Behavioral Nudges Delivered Through Text Messages to Increase Influenza Vaccination Among Patients With an Upcoming Primary Care Visit. American Journal of Health Promotion, 37(3), 324-332.
Milkman, K. L., +42 authors including Nam, J., Duckworth, A.L. (2021). A Mega-Study of Text-Based Nudges Encouraging Patients to Get Vaccinated at an Upcoming Doctor’s Appointment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(20).
Select Research in Progress / Working Papers
Calculated Complaints: Understanding Strategic Citations of Discrimination in Customer Service
Jimin Nam, preparing for resubmission.
Online discourse related to discrimination, including complaints about firm actions, has surged in recent years. While consumer complaints about discriminatory behavior by firms are often rooted in reality, they may at times contain distortions from the truth (e.g., false attributions, exaggerations) regarding experiences of differential treatment based on their membership in certain social categories. Combining evidence from Twitter with five incentive-compatible, online experiments, I investigate consumer motivations behind mentioning discrimination in their complaints within the context of airline customer service. I find that consumers perceive mentions of discrimination to be effective in eliciting a firm’s response, and this view is confirmed by Twitter data on major U.S. airlines: tweets mentioning discrimination-related words elicit faster responses from airlines. This is because consumers consider complaints mentioning discrimination (e.g., “I've been discriminated against”) as particularly damaging to the firm’s reputation. As a result, in settings where firms are more concerned about their reputation (e.g., public channels, corresponding track records), consumers are more inclined to strategically mention discrimination in their complaints, even when it is ambiguous whether discrimination actually occurred.
The Long and Short of It: Consumers Lose Track of Time While Watching Short-Form Videos
Lucy Shen, Jimin Nam, & Tomomichi Amano, preparing for submission.
Social media users have been spending increasingly more time watching short-form videos over the last few years. The authors demonstrate one explanation for this increased consumption: when watching short-form videos, consumers are more prone to losing track of time and spend more time than they anticipate. Across seven studies, viewers who successively watch a series of short-form video clips underestimate total time spent watching videos, compared to viewers who viewed the same video content and length presented as one long-form video. The authors show that this effect, termed the time underestimation effect, occurs because shorter videos naturally induce more viewer action to continue video consumption, i.e., clicking or swiping to the next video. These content-unrelated actions divert viewer attention from the actual video content, leading to lower perceptions of time spent on watching videos. Content characteristics moderate the time underestimation effect, which is also shown to be non-linear in the number of videos watched. Together, the findings offer implications for platform design, content creation and influencer marketing, and social media regulation.
Robo-Journalism: A Tool to Reducing Selective Exposure to Partisan News
Jimin Nam, Adam Waytz, & Michael I. Norton, preparing for submission.
The political divide in the United States has worsened in recent years, segregating the behavior of liberals and conservatives and contributing to selective consumption of news media that aligns with one’s ideological leanings. However, consuming politically biased news can influence political behavior and decisions, exacerbating the already raging political divide. Our research examines a novel technology—robot journalism—as a potential means to break partisans from seeking ideologically biased content. We report five preregistered studies demonstrating that both Democrats and Republicans perceive news written by a robot columnist to be unbiased because they perceive that the robot columnist is capable of aggregation. Furthermore, we find that they choose to read robot-generated news (even over news written by an ideological ingroup member) when incentivized to consider the news objectively. We suggest that robot journalism can reduce selective exposure to news and may reduce perceptions of media bias as well.