Customer metrics such as churn, retention, and customer lifetime value are key drivers of firm value, as they capture the strength of customer relationships, one of the most important intangible assets in modern economies. While transparent disclosure of these metrics improves decision making and reduces information asymmetry for investors, firms continue to disclose customer information selectively, inconsistently, or not at all.

This project introduces the Customer Disclosure Index CDx, a scalable benchmark that measures the breadth and quality of customer metric disclosures in regulatory filings. Using state of the art natural language processing techniques, the index captures not only whether firms disclose customer metrics, but also how informative, specific, and comparable these disclosures are across multiple dimensions.

Applied to a large panel of firm disclosures over time, the CDx enables systematic benchmarking and empirical analysis of customer disclosure practices. The project provides valuable insights for firms seeking to demonstrate customer centricity, for investors aiming to better value intangible assets, and for regulators interested in improving transparency and comparability of key performance indicators in capital markets.

Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Bernd Skiera

Coalition loyalty programs (CLP) have emerged as an effective marketing tool to increase customer retention and encourage higher purchase frequency through redeemable point systems. Unlike traditional loyalty programs tied to single retailers, CLP allow customers to earn and redeem a common currency across many participating brands. A common tool to engage customers is mobile push notifications, which deliver promotional messages directly to smartphones via the CLP's mobile app. Prior research demonstrates that push notifications effectively increase consumer engagement with targeted brands. However, these studies largely examine firms in isolation, overlooking the dynamics of coalition platforms where multiple retailers share the same environment.

In coalition loyalty programs, a push notification promoting a specific retailer may influence not only the focal brand but also substitutes, complementary products, or unrelated offers within the app session. Such spillovers matter for both retailers and platform operators. For retailers, campaigns may unintentionally strengthen competitors but also allow them to capture traffic generated by others. For platforms, spillovers shape value distribution across partners and guide pricing decisions. Although prior research establishes that spillovers are common in multi-brand environments, large-scale randomized field experiments are particularly rare due to challenges in accessing platform-wide data.

To advance understanding of spillover effects, this project leverages a unique partnership with PAYBACK, one of the world's largest coalition loyalty programs with approximately 34 million active customers. In a preregistered large-scale field experiment, push notifications featuring promotional messages from multiple retailers were randomly sent to one million customers over three months. This design captures both direct effects on focal brand engagement and indirect spillover effects across the entire engagement funnel. The project aims to contribute empirical evidence to the literature on promotional messages in coalition loyalty programs and derive actionable implications for retailers and platform operators.

Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Oliver Hinz

Project Memeber: Arda Güler

A common element of market structure analysis is the spatial representation of firms' competitive positions on maps. Such maps typically capture static snapshots. Yet, competitive positions tend to be in flux, and market structures can evolve. Firms ' trajectories are embedded in the evolution of market structures—the series of changes in firms' positions over time relative to all other firms in a market. Identifying these trajectories contributes additional insights to market structure analysis because it reveals firms' positioning strategies, identifies emerging threats and opportunities, and provides a forward-looking perspective on competition. Yet, we show that extant approaches cannot accurately identify firms' trajectories. To unlock these insights, we propose EvoMap, a novel dynamic mapping method that identifies firms' trajectories in market structure maps. We validate EvoMap in an extensive simulation study and show that it outperforms existing approaches. Using EvoMap, we study the trajectories of more than 1,000 publicly listed firms over 20 years. EvoMap accurately reveals changes in the positioning strategies of firms such as Apple and Capital One. Moreover, our empirical study showcases how EvoMap creates a novel opportunity for market structure analysis: forecasting firms' future competitive positions based on their trajectories.

Keywords: market analysis, visualization, marketing strategy

Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Bernd Skiera

Project Members: Daniel Ringel, Maximilian Matthe

The recent US-China trade conflict has inflicted high costs on US consumers through repeated rounds of tariff increases. These mechanisms are well understood. However, trade conflicts do not occur in a vacuum and, during the Trump presidency, aggressive rhetoric accompanied them. In this project, we exploit this setting to investigate whether communication styles causally impact daily consumer behavior. In particular, we estimate how the reporting tone in the media changed US citizens’ consumption of China-associated goods—in our case, visits to Chinese restaurants. To identify causal effects, we rely on big data econometrics. We analyze a text corpus including all relevant articles from over 140 US newspapers and quantify its tone with modern textual analysis techniques.

Additionally, we use high-frequency smartphone-tracking data on restaurant visits from all 50 US states to measure consumer responses. First results show economically large and statistically significant effects and substantial variation in consumption responses across different demographic characteristics. Developing a better understanding of how reporting impacts consumption holds practical implications for publishers, policymakers, and companies that choose their communication styles on a day-to-day basis.

Keywords: Consumption, Consumer Behavior, Textual Analysis, Location Data, Trade

Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Bernd Skiera

Project Members: Celina Proffen, Lukas Jürgensmeier

The Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) market is highly attractive to players in the financial industry. Firstly, it has grown significantly over the past years, mostly driven by strong ecommerce growth. Secondly, the market offers relatively high margins by provisions, fees or interest rates, depending on the business model. This is highly interesting as the financial industry has suffered from declining margins, e.g., due to the low interest rate regime. However, the BNPL market definition is vague and far from being standardized. Therefore, this project strives to size the BNPL market given the project’s BNPL definition. The BNPL definition will also help gaining a comprehensive market overview of active market players, their strategies and BNPL product offerings.

Furthermore, the project will focus on short term online and offline BNPL solutions that are seamlessly integrated in the user’s payment journey and payment process. Thereby, the motivational factors of users or consumers to rely on BNPL offerings will be investigated since this field is largely unexplored and existing theories offer contradicting viewpoints in order to explain the success of BNPL offerings. So far, research has shown that people have an inclination to pay and consume at the same point in time. However, with BNPL people consume immediately but incur the (emotional) cost of paying for the transaction later and even more frequently, as usually BNPL offerings are installment payments over a longer time horizon. The investigation of consumer payment behavior is highly relevant not only for financial services as a monetization stream, but also for ecommerce companies as BNPL companies suggest that they help to increase sales. By combining the abovementioned investigative areas for a competitive landscape and consumer behavior, we derive a decision framework for strategic options of a potential BNPL market entry, e.g., by identifying areas of core competition, detecting potentially underserved market segments and deriving defendable differentiators for a BNPL offering.

The combination of the abovementioned topics offers intriguing new perspectives. Firstly, market dynamics and competition in the two-sided payment market, including its developing market structure and active players. Secondly, user’s motivational factors to use BNPL offerings as opposed to other payment methods and thirdly, the effects of potential integration of loyalty schemes or aspects in the payment journey.

Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Oliver Hinz

Project Members: Björn Hanneke