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Despite increasing efforts to encourage the adoption of field experiments in marketing research (e.g., Campbell 1969; Cialdini 1980; Li et al. 2015), the majority of scholars continue to rely primarily on laboratory studies (Cialdini 2009). For example, of the 50 articles published in Journal of Marketing Research in 2013, only three (6%) were based on field experiments. The goal of this article is to motivate a methodological shift in marketing research and increase the proportion of empirical findings obtained using field experiments. The author begins by making a case for field experiments and offers a description of their defining features. She then demonstrates the unique value that field experiments can offer and concludes with a discussion of key considerations that researchers should be mindful of when designing, planning, and running field experiments.

This paper uses a natural field experiment to connect corporate social responsibility (CSR) to an important but often neglected behavior: employee misconduct and shirking. Through employing more than 1,500 workers, we find that our use of CSR increases employee misbehavior—24% more employees act detrimentally toward our firm by shirking on their primary job duties when we introduce CSR. Observed data patterns across the treatments are consonant with a model of “moral licensing,” whereby the “doing good” nature of CSR induces workers to misbehave on another dimension that is harmful to the firm. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, decision analysis .

Does the consumption of ideologically congruent news on social media exacerbate polarization? I estimate the effects of social media news exposure by conducting a large field experiment randomly offering participants subscriptions to conservative or liberal news outlets on Facebook. I collect data on the causal chain of media effects: subscriptions to outlets, exposure to news on Facebook, visits to online news sites, and sharing of posts, as well as changes in political opinions and attitudes. Four main findings emerge. First, random variation in exposure to news on social media substantially affects the slant of news sites that individuals visit. Second, exposure to counter-attitudinal news decreases negative attitudes toward the opposing political party. Third, in contrast to the effect on attitudes, I find no evidence that the political leanings of news outlets affect political opinions. Fourth, Facebook’s algorithm is less likely to supply individuals with posts from counter-attitudinal outlets, conditional on individuals subscribing to them. Together, the results suggest that social media algorithms may limit exposure to counter-attitudinal news and thus increase polarization.

In collaboration with an online seller of home-improvement products, the authors conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment to study the effects of retargeted advertising, a form of internet advertising in which banner ads are displayed to users after they visit the advertiser's website. They find that switching on experimental retargeting causes 14.6% more users to return to the website within four weeks. The impact of retargeting decreases as the time since the consumer first visited the website increases—indeed, 33% of the effect of the first week's advertising occurs on the first day. Furthermore, the authors find evidence of the existence of complementarities in advertising over time: the effect of advertising in week 2 of the campaign is higher when the user was assigned to a nonzero level of advertising in week 1. The authors discuss mechanisms that can explain their findings and demonstrate a novel low-cost method that can be applied generally to conduct valid online advertising experiments.

Firms using online advertising regularly run experiments with multiple versions of their ads since they are uncertain about which ones are most effective. During a campaign, firms try to adapt to intermediate results of their tests, optimizing what they earn while learning about their ads. Yet how should they decide what percentage of impressions to allocate to each ad? This paper answers that question, resolving the well-known “learn-and-earn” trade-off using multi-armed bandit (MAB) methods. The online advertiser’s MAB problem, however, contains particular challenges, such as a hierarchical structure (ads within a website), attributes of actions (creative elements of an ad), and batched decisions (millions of impressions at a time), that are not fully accommodated by existing MAB methods. Our approach captures how the impact of observable ad attributes on ad effectiveness differs by website in unobserved ways, and our policy generates allocations of impressions that can be used in practice. We implemented this policy in a live field experiment delivering over 750 million ad impressions in an online display campaign with a large retail bank. Over the course of two months, our policy achieved an 8% improvement in the customer acquisition rate, relative to a control policy, without any additional costs to the bank. Beyond the actual experiment, we performed counterfactual simulations to evaluate a range of alternative model specifications and allocation rules in MAB policies. Finally, we show that customer acquisition would decrease by about 10% if the firm were to optimize click-through rates instead of conversion directly, a finding that has implications for understanding the marketing funnel. Data is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2016.1023 .

Amid growing calls for transparency and social and environmental responsibility, companies are employing different strategies to improve consumer perceptions of their brands. Some pursue internal initiatives that reduce their negative social or environmental impacts through responsible operations practices (such as paying a living wage to workers or engaging in environmentally sustainable manufacturing). Others pursue external responsibility initiatives (such as philanthropy or cause-related marketing). Through two experiments conducted in the field and complementary online experiments, we compare how transparency into these internal and external initiatives affects customer perceptions and sales. We find that transparency into both internal and external responsibility initiatives tends to dominate generic brand marketing in motivating consumer purchases, supporting the view that consumers take companies’ responsibility efforts into account in their decision making. Furthermore, the results provide converging evidence that transparency into a company’s internal responsibility practices can be at least as motivating of consumer sales as transparency into its external responsibility initiatives, incrementally increasing a consumer’s probability of purchase by 6.40% and 45.85% across our two field experiments, conducted in social and environmental domains, respectively. Our results suggest that it may be in the interest of both business and society for managers to prioritize internal responsible operations initiatives to achieve both top- and bottom-line benefits while mitigating social and environmental harms. This paper was accepted by Charles Corbett, operations management.

This natural field experiment tests the effects of purely symbolic awards on volunteer retention in a public goods context. The experiment is conducted at Wikipedia, which faces declining editor retention rates, particularly among newcomers. Randomization assures that award receipt is orthogonal to previous performance. The analysis reveals that awards have a sizeable effect on newcomer retention, which persists over the four quarters following the initial intervention. This is noteworthy for indicating that awards for volunteers can be effective even if they have no impact on the volunteers’ future career opportunities. The awards are purely symbolic, and the status increment they produce is limited to the recipients’ pseudonymous online identities in a community they have just recently joined. The results can be explained by enhanced self-identification with the community, but they are also in line with recent findings on the role of status and reputation, recognition, and evaluation potential in online communities. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2540 . This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics .

Observational methods often fail to accurately recover the treatment effects generated from randomized advertising experiments on Facebook. Measuring the causal effects of digital advertising remains challenging despite the availability of granular data. Unobservable factors make exposure endogenous, and advertising’s effect on outcomes tends to be small. In principle, these concerns could be addressed using randomized controlled trials (RCTs). In practice, few online ad campaigns rely on RCTs and instead use observational methods to estimate ad effects. We assess empirically whether the variation in data typically available in the advertising industry enables observational methods to recover the causal effects of online advertising. Using data from 15 U.S. advertising experiments at Facebook comprising 500 million user-experiment observations and 1.6 billion ad impressions, we contrast the experimental results to those obtained from multiple observational models. The observational methods often fail to produce the same effects as the randomized experiments, even after conditioning on extensive demographic and behavioral variables. In our setting, advances in causal inference methods do not allow us to isolate the exogenous variation needed to estimate the treatment effects. We also characterize the incremental explanatory power our data would require to enable observational methods to successfully measure advertising effects. Our findings suggest that commonly used observational approaches based on the data usually available in the industry often fail to accurately measure the true effect of advertising. The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2018.1135 .

We report from a large-scale randomized field experiment conducted on a unique sample of more than 15,000 taxpayers in Norway who were likely to have misreported their foreign income. By randomly manipulating a letter from the tax authorities, we cleanly identify that moral suasion and the perceived detection probability play a crucial role in shaping taxpayer behavior. The moral letter mainly works on the intensive margin, while the detection letter has a strong effect on the extensive margin. We further show that only the detection letter has long-term effects on tax compliance. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics.

Virtually no research has examined the role of emoticons in commercial relationships, and research outside the marketing domain reports mixed findings. This article aims to resolve these mixed findings by considering that emoticon senders are often simultaneously evaluated on two fundamental dimensions, warmth and competence, and the accessibility of one dimension over the other is critically contingent on salient relationship norms (communal vs. exchange norms) in customers’ minds due to individual and situational factors. Through laboratory and field experiments, the current research shows that customers perceive service employees who use emoticons as higher in warmth but lower in competence compared to those who do not (study 1). We further demonstrate that when a service employee uses emoticons, communal-oriented (exchange-oriented) customers are more likely to infer higher warmth (lower competence) and thus to be more (less) satisfied with the service (study 2). We also examine two practically important service situations that can make a certain type of relationship norm more salient: unsatisfactory services (study 3) and employees’ extra-role services (study 4). We speculate on possible mechanisms underlying these effects and discuss theoretical and practical implications along with opportunities for future research.