On this special mini episode of How I Wrote This, Karen and Brett take you behind the scenes to hear about what it's really like to be a co-editor for a journal.

Brett Gordon sits down with JP Dube and Günter Hitsch from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Peter Rossi from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. They discuss their influential paper, “Do Switching Costs Make Markets Less Competitive?” Since the 1960s, marketing and economics scholars have studied switching costs, with theoretical literature largely suggesting that these costs lead to higher prices among competing firms. However, when these three researchers conducted an empirical analysis, they found surprising results that challenged the prevailing wisdom. Join them as they share how their project evolved over time, including their measured response to critical feedback and how they expanded their initial scope of inquiry.

Karen learns how Rachel Gershon and Zhenling Jiang merged their behavioral and quantitative skillsets to identify the robust effect of referral contagion. Their findings are published in their paper “Referral Contagion: Downstream Benefits of Customer Referrals” in JMR.

Brett talks to Ankit Sisodia, Alex Burnap and Vineet Kumar about their forthcoming JMR paper “Generative Interpretable Visual Design: Using Disentanglement for Visual Conjoint Analysis.”

On the first episode of Season 2, Karen talks to authors Huachao Gao, He (Michael) Jia, and Bingxuan Guo about their paper “Resources Available for Me Versus Us: Implications for Mitigating Consumer Food Waste.”

In the final episode of season 1, JMR Co-Editor Brett Gordon speaks with Yufeng Huang, Paul Ellickson, and Mitch Lovett about their paper Learning to Set Prices.

JMR Co-editor Karen Winterich talks with Annika Abell, Carter Morgan, and Marisabel Romero about the impact of star ratings relative to numerical ratings. Their findings are published in “The Power of a Star Rating: Differential Effects of Customer Rating Formats on Magnitude Perceptions and Consumer Reactions”. You’ll also want to hear how their experience complying with the new JMR Research Transparency policy when their manuscript was conditionally accepted.

In Episode 8, JMR Co-editor Karen Winterich talks with Joyce Liu and Anirban Mukhopadhyay from Bayes Business School, City, University of London about how they, along with coauthor Amy Dalton, developed an idea from movie night into a JMR publication, “Favorite Possessions Protect Subjective Well-Being Under Income Inequality”. The article finds effects of income inequality on feelings of deprivation can be attenuated by focusing on a favorite possession, but we’ll hear how the idea started out with a different focus before the role of favorite possessions became clear. You’ll want to listen to learn why the final submission of this article is unforgettable for one of the authors plus how the nuggets they uncovered along the way shaped the paper.

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