The dissertation examines two distinct problems related to ;;marketing communicationdynamics”. The main goal of this line of research is to help firms provide individuallytailored marketing contents to their customers. In these two essays, I develop statisticalmodels to first understand customers’ responses, and then explore methods to optimizefirms’ reactions accordingly. Essay 1 examines ;;scale attraction effects” in a charitabledonation context, introducing novel constructs (;;compliance degree”, ;;pulling amount”,;;accumulated pulling amount”) to describe attraction effects for multi-point appeals scales.The proposed model jointly accounts for donation incidence and amount using a Tobit 2formulation, and allows heterogeneity in seasonality and pulling effects. Results suggestsubstantial scale attraction effects that vary across donors, stronger ;;pulling down” than;;pulling up”, and heterogeneous seasonal donation patterns. A significantly negative errorcorrelation between donation incidence and donation amount underscores the importanceof accounting for selectivity effects. The effects of individually tailoring appeals scales isdemonstrated through simulation.Essay 2 investigates mate-seeking users’ decision rules in an online dating context. Idevelop an empirical two-stage mate choice model that can accommodate compensatoryand non-compensatory decision rules in each of two stages: browsing and writing. Amixture of logits model with changepoints allows for distinct decision rules across stagesand heterogeneity in rule use across site users. Most importantly, it allows us to identifyand compare attribute-level decision rules (;;deal-breakers” and ;;deal-makers”) over thetwo stages. Results suggest the existence of heterogeneity in decision rules across (1)genders, (2) stages, and (3) site users. Additionally, it suggests the existence of potential deal-breakers/makers across both discrete and continuous attributes.
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