Wharton-SMU Research Center

In-House Seminar

Guest Speaker:

Professor Stephen J. Hoch
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Topic:

B-to-C Online Spending Behavior: Research from the Wharton Virtual Test Market

Chairman:

Associate Professor Augustine H H Tan
Deputy Director, Wharton-SMU Research Center

Venue:

Seminar Room 5, Singapore Management University, 11 Evans Road, Singapore 259368

Date:

Thursday, 21 June 2001, at 4.30 pm

Reservation:

This seminar is free. Places are limited. Please confirm your attendance by Wednesday, 20 June 2001, 12 noon with Ms. Lim Lih Yeng at lylim@smu.edu.sg or telephone: 822-0197.

About the seminar:

Electronic commerce is no longer new. People have been able to buy things over the Web for more than five years now - Amazon.com opened for business in July 1995. Growth in access to the Internet has been dramatic. Currently, over 130 million adults and children in the U.S. have access to the Web from home, almost half the total population. In fact, so many people have already accessed the Internet that growth in the US online population has to slow down in the near future. Based upon an analysis of data from the Wharton Virtual Test Market (WVTM), the speaker will discuss trends in and determinants of consumer online spending. The WVTM is an ongoing annual online survey of approximately 10,000 consumers. The sample is representative of the US internet user population, and based upon three key drivers --- the number of internet users; the number of online transactions per online consumer; and the dollar amount of individual transactions --- allows the project team to predict aggregate B-to-C online spending. In addition, the team utilizes the data to identify key determinants of online spending. The key factors fall into four basic categories: demographics; general online savvy; the level of online paranoia; and the switching costs that a consumer must incur to turn offline into online transactions. Finally, the speaker will discuss transaction data from a nationwide online grocer which allow them to conduct a spatial and temporal analysis of adoption of internet grocery retailing services.

About the speaker:

Professor Stephen J. Hoch is the John J. Pomerantz Professor of Marketing, and the Marketing Department Chairperson at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.  He joined the Wharton faculty in 1995. His previous appointments were with University of Chicago and Northwestern University.

His research interests are in retail merchandising, assortment, pricing, and promotion strategy; decision support systems and the psychology of forecasting; psychology of self-control; consumer behavior and learning; private label products.  His current projects are in Internet pricing and auction mechanisms; perception of inflation; positioning of store brands; Internet shopping experiments.