Nicholas Lurie


Consumers: Online Restaurant Reviews are not All Equal

UConn Today – People searching online restaurant reviews give less value to those written on mobile devices than on other platforms, according to new research in the journal Marketing Science.

In a study of 275,000 restaurant reviews, researchers from the University of Connecticut, Boston College, and Peking University found differences in reader perception based on the platform where the review was generated.


Gamification and Mobile Marketing Effectiveness

Journal of Interactive Marketing 34 (2016), 25–36

Charles F. Hofacker, Ko de Ruyter, Nicholas H. Lurie, Puneet Manchanda, & Jeff Donaldson

A variety of business sectors have been buffeted by the diffusion of mobile technology, a trend that presents a variety of difficult challenges but interesting opportunities to marketers. One such opportunity is gamification, which, one hopes, will enhance appeal to mobile consumers. Our sense from both personal experience and the literature is that the gamified mobile apps currently offered by firms mostly miss the mark. We provide a systematic overview of game design and note how principles derived from that field are highly applicable to gamification in mobile marketing settings. We are aided by the work of Schell (2008), whose Elemental Game Tetrad Model allows us to offer a coherent look at how gamification should affect mobile marketing outcomes.  Full article.


What Makes Us Tick?

Behavioral lab at UConn School of BusinessNew Behavioral Lab Expected to Fuel Surge in Research at UConn

Marketing Professor David Norton has a theory he just can’t wait to test, and it involves two things most people love:  coffee and their own names.

“One idea that I’m currently pursuing is whether having the name on your morning coffee cup spelled incorrectly can impact your evaluation of that cup of coffee,” Norton said. “Essentially, the idea is that we like ourselves, and pretty much anything associated with ourselves, so when we are reminded about “me” we get positive feelings toward the object that does the reminding.”Continue Reading


Marketing Scholars Lurie and Pancras Invited to Mobile Marketing Thought Leadership Conference

Nick Lurie - Mobile Conf
Professor Nicholas Lurie engaged in workshop discussions.

Nicholas Lurie and Joseph Pancras, associate professors of marketing, were invited to the Thought Leadership Conference on “Mobile Marketing and its Implications for Retailing” held at the Mays Business School, Texas A&M University on Jan 21-23. Leading researchers in mobile marketing and industry practitioners participated in work group discussions on five different areas of mobile marketing.Continue Reading


Faculty Research: Study Shows that Decision Aids Can Hurt Consumer Decision Making

Journal of Retailing (2014)

Nicholas Lurie. Co-Author: Na Wen.

To help consumers deal with increasing amounts of information, many online retailers offer simple decision aids, such as the ability to sort products on a particular product attribute. Intuitively, such aids should help consumers but, in a recent article, Nicholas Lurie and a colleague at City University of Hong Kong show that simple decision aids can hurt consumers’ ability to make good decisions.

Whether decision aids help or hurt depends on the extent to which choices involve tradeoffs among attributes. For example, a consumer buying a laptop might want a large screen and lots of memory. If large screen laptops usually come with lots of memory then using a decision aid to sort on screen size will help the consumer choose the best laptop for her. However if, instead, the consumer wants a large screen and light weight laptop, and large screen laptops tend to be heavy, sorting on screen size will not enhance choice. The authors suggest that consumers use simple decision aids as substitutes for cognitive effort and find that the more consumers use such aids, the lower the quality of their decisions. Providing consumers with multiple decision aids, such as the ability to eliminate as well as sort products, is one way to overcome the negative aspects of such aids.


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2014 Marketing Faculty Awards

  • Nicholas Lurie, associate professor of marketing, received the School of Business 2014 Best Paper Award for his Journal of Marketing Research article, “Temporal Contiguity and Negativity Bias in the Impact of Online Word of Mouth,” co-authored with Zoey Chen, University of Miami.
  • Bill Ross, Voya Financial Global Chair and professor of marketing,  and coauthors Hang Thu Nguyen, Michigan State University, and Joseph Golec, University of Connecticut, received the Best Paper Award in the Branding Track at the 2014 American Marketing Association Winter Educators Conference for their paper titled, Acquisition Value Creation: The Role of Marketing Relationships in Uncertain Environments.
  • Girish Punj, professor of marketing, received the School of Business Graduate Teaching Award.


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Honor, Wisdom, Earnestness: Faculty and Students Recognized for Academic Achievements

School of Business Awards and Honors
The best and brightest of UConn School of Business were honored Friday morning, April 25 at the 2014 School of Business Awards & Honors ceremony. Honorees, family and friends gathered in the Dave Ivry Seminar Classroom at the School of Business in Storrs for the annual celebration, where 2014 Student Hall of Fame Fellows were recognized, Ackerman Scholars were awarded, Faculty Awards were presented, and new members were officially inducted to the Beta Gamma Sigma honor society.Continue Reading


Marketing Department Fall 2013 Newsletter Now Available

Education takes many roads! In January, Professor Bill Ross led an MBA group to Lyon, France, and in June, Professor Robin Coulter led the Executive MBA Class of 2014 on their trip to Beijing, China (see the photos here). Both trips were filled with enriching academic and cultural experiences.

We are pleased to share these with you in our latest newsletter, along with exciting updates from our undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. programs here in Connecticut.

>>Access the Fall 2013 Marketing Department Newsletter (PDF)

In this issue, you’ll read about our undergraduate students who developed a promotional and advertising campaign for the Honda Civic sedan and graduate students who tackled marketing challenges for The Palace – Stamford Center for the Arts and News America Marketing.

You’ll find that we are also looking forward to some exciting research: Professors Hongju Liu, Nicholas Lurie, and Joseph Pancras received prestigious Marketing Science Institute grants for their proposals on mobile marketing.

View the full newsletter here to learn more. We are looking forward to a great 2013-14 academic year!


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Marketing Department Professors Awarded MSI Research Grants

Professors Hongju Liu, Nicholas Lurie and Joseph Pancras, Marketing Department, UConn School of Business, have received research awards from the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) competition, “Mobile Platforms, Location-Based Services, and their Impact on Customers.” MSI received 35 proposals and funded only six, including two featuring UConn faculty. Please join us in congratulating the following scholars who have earned this honor:

  • Nicholas H. Lurie, Sam Ransbotham, and Hongju Liu: “Going Mobile: The Characteristics and Influence of Mobile Word of Mouth” received an $11,800 award.
  • Joseph Pancras, Rajukumar Venkatesan, and Bin Li: “Returns from Customizing Mobile Loyalty Programs: Spatial and Temporal Aspects” received a $13,000 award.

The competition was sponsored by MSI to stimulate research that contributes new insights to marketing practice. According to MSI, “There is widespread expectation that while mobile devices currently absorb a small part of marketing spending, they have game-changing implications for marketing in the future. This research competition [was] intended to provoke exploration of these implications.”

Pictured left to right: Hongju Liu, Nicholas Lurie and Joseph Pancras


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Digital Media Symposium: Innovative Collaborations

Representatives from business, creative, digital humanities/social sciences and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines gathered in the Rome Ballroom on Thursday, April 4th for a day full of exciting updates from the new Department of Digital Media and Design. UConn President Susan Herbst welcomed over 100 attendees, introducing digital media as an “umbrella discipline” with the areas it affects being limitless. Tim Hunter, Director & Department Head for the recently established Digital Media Center, further emphasized the symposium’s goal to raise awareness of current digital media projects and to stimulate new collaboration between disciplines. He also touched upon theory versus practice, citing digital media’s relevance to multiple industries and functions including business and entertainment, marketing, advertising, branding, entrepreneurship and social media.

Specialized presentation sessions were held for each of the four topic areas: business, creative, digital humanities/social sciences, and STEM.

Specialized Session for Business

The business session featured William Congdon ’75, Popular Mechanics magazine; Maureen Croteau, The Day newspaper in New London, Connecticut; and ING Global Professor in marketing Nicholas Lurie. A lively roundtable discussion moderated by Christopher Levesque ’87, Director of the Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (CCEI) included Richard Guha, President of Synerscope Inc. (North America) and Mark B. Hatch, CEO of mBlast, Inc.

Digital media has paved the way for an enhanced user experience, according to Congdon and Croteau who presented the challenges and many changes their companies faced with the advent of digital media in the print magazine and newspaper industries. They also shared how digital media has changed the reader experience with the launch of news and magazine websites, iPad apps, video, interactive media, social media and contests.

The business roundtable discussion focused on “digital media and entrepreneurial trends,” including Facebook and Twitter, the increasing need for technology and software to analyze and visualize “big data,” and how consumers are influenced to choose some brands over others.

Marketing Professor Nick Lurie closed the business session by presenting findings of research on the perceived value of consumer-generated content, the differences in perception of negative versus positive reviews, and the role of temporal contiguity as it influences value perception.

Future Digital Media Collaborations

Provost Mun Choi joined the enthusiastic crowd for an open networking hour during which attendees discussed ideas and opportunities for future digital media collaborations.

The rapidly growing Department of Digital Media and Design recently welcomed digital media specialists Perry Harovas and Samantha Olschan to the UConn faculty. In addition, two new undergraduate majors jointly sponsored by the schools of business, fine arts, and engineering will be offered starting this fall at the Storrs and Stamford campuses.

Those who missed the symposium can catch up on Twitter using #UConnDMD


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