Accomplishments (1)
How should companies develop, promote, price, and deliver healthy, sustainable food products to increase market share, profitability, and sensory experience?
Research Interests
We have the opportunity to design and implement survey-based research and randomized controlled trials in partnership with a local retail establishment focused on the production, promotion, and distribution of healthy, organic food. With expertise in the areas of field experimentation, longitudinal data analysis, sensory marketing, and sustainable commerce, we aim to develop this opportunity into an operation that will generate research insights of both practical and theoretical significance. We will complement the field-based research insights this operation will generate with results from lab-based experiments involving Mechanical Turk, UVA student, and Charlottesville community samples. The data we analyze will include both objective (e.g., product choice and sales) and perceptual (e.g., consumer attitudes and feelings) measures. Additional researchers at UVA we intend to collaborate with include Peter Belmi and Inhyun Han, among others.
"I am willing to self-fund my token." – Jeff Boichuk
"I am willing to self-fund my token." – Luca Cian
Desired outcomes
Academic publications in top-tier outlets, such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Nature Climate Change, and Psychological Methods.
Student engagement
This funding will support research assistantships for a total of 3-5 students in the McIntire School of Commerce, Darden School of Business, and College of Arts & Sciences. These students will primarily focus on conducting data analyses using the R programming language, and they will leverage a GitHub organization to work in an accurate, collaborative, and reproducible manner. The prospect of presenting components of this research at conferences, such as the rstudio::conf(2019) in Austin, TX, will serve as a motivating force for these students.
Two first-year students, being funded by the USOAR program, will drive the data generation process by preparing IRB protocols, collecting survey responses from prospective/current customers, and implementing procedures in store and online (via tools on squareup.com) for randomized controlled trials.
We plan to connect with all of these students while doing extra-curricular activities (e.g., exercising, fishing) to foster a team-oriented culture and enhance student engagement.