Title: How Perceived Social Mobility Affects Parents’ Preferences for Children’s Educational Products

时间：2023年4月21日9:30

线下地点：承泽园333教室

zoom会议号：889 3583 7839

Speaker: Qihui Chen

Abstract: Although the market for children’s educational products is expanding rapidly, the factors that underlie parents’ preferences for children’s educational products remain understudied in the marketing literature. This research provides novel insights into the status motivations behind parents’ spending on children’s educational products. Specifically, we find that when parents perceive higher social mobility (i.e., society provides enough opportunities for upward mobility through hard work), they prioritize the status advancement goal relative to the status maintenance goal and thus display a greater preference for strength-focused products (i.e., to further develop a child’s strength) relative to weakness-focused products (i.e., to remedy a child’s weakness). Furthermore, we demonstrate three theoretically relevant and practically important moderators of this effect: successful individual prototype, status relevance, and effort dependence of children’s strengths and weaknesses. Across eight studies, we implement a multimethod approach (archive data, survey, experiment) and examinations in different contexts (with both incentive-compatible and actual expenditure measures) to provide converging evidence for our propositions.

Introduction of Speaker: Qihui Chen is a fifth-year PhD candidate at University of Maryland and will soon join HKUST as an Assistant Professor in Marketing. Her research mainly focuses on two streams. The first stream is how social perceptions and status goals influence consumers’ product preferences and symbolic consumption. The second stream is what factors underlie consumers’ acceptance or resistance of innovations in the marketplace, such as service robots, AI art, and lab-grown food. She applies diverse methods to pursue her research, including archive data analysis, field experiment, survey, and lab experiment. Through her research, she hopes to provide insights into motivating consumer behavior that facilitates a more equal, sustainable, and innovative world. She has presented her work in several conferences (e.g., SCP, ACR) and published at Journal of Consumer Research, a top-tier marketing journal.