Ongoing Projects
Nuggets of Gold in Blocks of Data: Mining the Blockchain for Customer Purchase Behavior
Blockchain transactions are increasingly important due to the rising value of cryptocurrencies and growing corporate investments in blockchain applications. These transactions provide enhanced transparency, offering full visibility into both customer and market activities, including secondary markets. This study analyzes over a year of data from 2,314 NFT collections and 1.7 million transactions, revealing key insights into customer behavior.
A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents of Psychological Ownership
This meta-analysis investigates the antecedents of psychological ownership, particularly in light of recent consumption trends like the rise of intangible goods, access-based services, and blockchain-enabled ownership. These developments challenge traditional antecedents—investment, control, and intimate knowledge—of psychological ownership. The analysis reveals that investing in and intimately knowing the target are key drivers of psychological ownership, with control and self-investment showing even stronger effects for intangible and less evaluable targets.
Publications
Crypto-marketing: How non-fungible tokens (NFTs) challenge traditional marketing
Reto Hofstetter, Emanuel De Bellis, Leif Brandes, Melanie Clegg, Cait Lamberton, David Reibstein, Felicia Rohlfsen, Bernd Schmitt, John Z Zhang
In this article, we argue that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) challenge established marketing understanding of digital ownership, uniqueness, and value; authenticity, status, and sharing; and branding and distribution. We propose a set of preliminary research questions rooted in these areas, in hopes of offering entry points to future programmatic investigation of the broader field of “crypto-marketing.” This emerging subdiscipline offers opportunities to expand our understanding of consumer behavior, pricing, and product design and may be crucial in predicting the future of our discipline as NFTs further evolve.
Beyond scarcity: A social value-based lens for NFT pricing
Reto Hofstetter, Martin P Fritze, Cait Lamberton
Over the last half-century, consumer research has often depicted scarcity as a dominant factor increasing price. But should we assume that scarcity’s upward pressure on price remains intact, in a world where novel forms of digital products proliferate? In this article, we propose that blockchain-encrypted digital goods, in particular, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), offer good reason to revisit this assumption. In this context, we argue and find that social value can outweigh intrinsic value as a determinant of willingness-to-pay. As a result, when scarcity threatens access to high levels of social value, its effect on price can be negative rather than positive—an inversion of a pattern typically observed for offline collectibles. Secondary data taken from the NFT platform Opensea and a set of experimental studies support this social value-based lens. Given these findings, we propose a research agenda to ground future work in this area. We also suggest that NFTs offer a laboratory in which past theories related to social value, scarcity, and price can be reconsidered and future theories developed, hopefully allowing consumer researchers to lead knowledge development in these domains over the next 50 years.
Fragile Permanence: How NFTs Shape Perceptions of Artistic Identity and Value
David Finken, Tim Döring, Reto Hofstetter
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique digital assets securely recorded on a blockchain, a characteristic that fundamentally distinguishes them from other digital goods. Building on this characteristic, our research examined how people perceive one-of-a-kind (unique) artworks. Drawing from the literature on permanence and essentialism, we demonstrate that NFTs are often seen as lacking permanence compared to traditional artwork. This perception diminishes their ability to capture an artist’s essential identity, explaining why people prefer traditional oncanvas (over NFT) artwork. However, when an artwork’s permanence is threatened (eg, by intentional or accidental destruction), NFTs may better preserve value, eventually increasing preferences. We tested our predictions in four experiments (N= 1,628) and three replications (N= 697). Results enhance our understanding of how technologies (e.g., NFTs) shape the perception of artwork. We expand the limited research on permanence and connect with literature on essentialism, offering insights into why individuals may ascribe value to artwork.