William Boulding
Duke University
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Publication
Featured researches published by William Boulding.
The New England Journal of Medicine | 2013
Matthew Manary; William Boulding; Richard Staelin; Seth W. Glickman
Despite criticism of patient-satisfaction measures, patient-experience surveys that are designed and administered appropriately provide robust measures of the quality of health care and offer insight into a dimension thats otherwise difficult to measure objectively.
Journal of Marketing Research | 1994
William Boulding; Eunkyu Lee; Richard Staelin
The authors consider the effects of three marketing communication activities on nonproduct based differentiation. Specifically, they examine whether advertising, sales force, and promotion activiti...
Journal of Marketing | 2006
Eyal Biyalogorsky; William Boulding; Richard Staelin
In this research, the authors examine the phenomenon of escalation bias in the context of managing new product introductions. In particular, they identify three general paths—Decision Involvement Inertia, Decision Involvement Distortion, and Belief Inertia Distortion—that can lead managers to escalate their commitments. The authors test the relative strength of these paths in driving observed escalation behavior. The results show that involvement with the initial decision, a key construct in numerous explanations for escalation behavior (e.g., agency theory, self-justification), is not a necessary condition to induce commitment to a losing course of action (i.e., escalation bias). Rather, the authors find that the driving force behind escalation behavior is improper use of initial positive beliefs in the face of negative new information. This insight has implications for the groundwork necessary for organizations to design systems, policies, and procedures to help them avoid the trap of escalation bias that is often associated with major strategic decisions.
Marketing Science | 2008
William Boulding; Markus Christen
Existing literature discusses a number of possible pioneering cost advantages and disadvantages. In this paper, we empirically test three different sources of long-term pioneering cost advantage---experience curve effects, preemption of input factors, and preemption of ideal market space---and three different sources of pioneering cost disadvantage---imitation, vintage effects, and demand orientation. We disentangle these sources by breaking total cost of a business unit into three different components---purchasing, production, and selling, general, and administrative SG&A costs---and identifying conditions that intensify or reduce the effect of the proposed source. Using two samples of business units, one for consumer goods and one for industrial goods, we find support for five of the six sources of pioneering cost advantage and disadvantage in both samples, while the advantage due to preemption of ideal market space is limited to the consumer goods sample. The unconditional analysis shows a pioneering purchasing cost advantage but even larger pioneering production and SG&A cost disadvantages. The complexity of our obtained findings suggests that managers need to think carefully about their particular conditions before making assumptions about the cost and, therefore, profit implications of a pioneering strategy.
Marketing Letters | 1994
William Boulding; Marian Chapman Moore; Richard Staelin; Kim P. Corfman; Peter R. Dickson; Gavan J. Fitzsimons; Sunil Gupta; Donald R. Lehmann; Deborah J. Mitchell; Joel E. Urbany; Barton A. Weitz
This goal of this paper is to establish a research agenda that will lead to a stream of research that closes the gap between actual and normative strategic managerial decision making. We start by distinguishing strategic managerial decision making (choices) from other choices. Next, we propose a conceptual model of how managers make strategic decisions that is consistent with the observed gap between actual and normative decision making. This framework suggests a series of interesting issues, both descriptive and prescriptive in nature, about the strategic decision-making process that define our proposed research agenda.
Journal of Marketing Research | 2006
Bart J. Bronnenberg; Carl F. Mela; William Boulding
Retail pricing data combine multiple decisions (e.g., regular pricing and discounting) that are possibly made by multiple decision makers (e.g., retailers and manufacturers). For example, temporary price reductions (high-frequency price changes) can be used to price discriminate in the short run, whereas regular price adjustments (low-frequency price changes) might reflect changes in long-term costs or demand. Time disaggregation cannot disentangle these factors, because frequency aggregation exists even when data are analyzed at the lowest possible level of temporal aggregation. Because little is known about the nature of pricing interactions across various planning cycles, this article develops several empirical generalizations about the role of periodicity in pricing. Using week-store stockkeeping-unit-level price data in 35 grocery categories, the authors find that (1) cross-brand correlation in prices occurs at multiple planning horizons, and the planning horizon of the predominant interaction does not typically coincide with the sampling rate of the data; (2) aggregating pricing interactions across frequencies obscures distinct and different interactions; (3) pricing interactions are related to category- and brand-specific factors, such as mean interpurchase times; (4) regular price changes explain most of the variation in prices; and (5) periodicity can affect inferences about the nature of competition within a category. The authors conclude by discussing several practical marketing applications for which marketing decisions across frequencies have relevance.
Medical Care | 2009
Seth W. Glickman; William Boulding; Jason M.T. Roos; Richard Staelin; Eric D. Peterson; Kevin A. Schulman
Background:Pay-for-performance programs typically rate hospitals using a composite summary score in which process measures are weighted by the total number of treatment opportunities. Alternative methods that weight process measures according to how hospitals organize care and the range for possible improvement may be more closely related to patient outcomes. Objectives:To develop a hospital-level summary process measure adherence score that reflects how hospitals organize cardiac care and the range for possible improvement; and to compare associations of hospital adherence to this score and adherence to a composite score based on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services scoring system with inpatient mortality. Research Design and Subjects:Hospital-level analysis of 7 process measures for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and 4 process measures for heart failure at 4226 hospitals, and inpatient mortality after AMI at 1351 hospitals in the United States. Data are from the Hospital Compare and Joint Commission Core Measures databases for October 2004 through September 2006. Measures:Associations between composite scores based on Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services methodology and alternative adherence scores with inpatient survival after AMI. Results:In principal components analysis, hospital cardiac care varied between hospitals largely along the lines of “clinical” (ie, pharmacologic interventions) and “administrative” (ie, patient instructions or counseling) activities. A scoring system reflecting this organization was strongly associated with inpatient survival and fit the mortality data better than the composite score. Higher administrative activities scores, holding the clinical activities score fixed, were associated with lower survival. Conclusions:In-hospital cardiac care is organized by clinical and administrative processes of care. Pay-for-performance schemes that incentivize hospitals to focus on administrative process measures may be associated with decreased adherence to clinical processes. A pay-for-performance scheme that acknowledges these factors may be associated with improved inpatient mortality.
Management Science | 2009
William Boulding; Markus Christen
Previous research suggests firms can build a market share advantage by preempting later entrants with a broad product line and expanding rapidly into related markets. Whether such a strategy leads to a pioneering profit advantage relative to followers also depends on its cost effects. In this paper, we examine when the market share advantage of a pioneering firm with a broad product line strategy translates into a profit advantage by examining the cost effects of this strategy. Using the profit impact of marketing strategies data and an estimation method that controls for various unobserved factors, we find significant differences between different industry settings. From these contrasting findings, we generate an emerging theoretical framework that we subject to empirical testing. We conjecture, and empirically verify, that creating a broad product line with a versioning strategy---creating variety from a standard product in anticipating customer demand---does not increase the pioneering cost disadvantage, and thus results in a pioneering profit advantage. On the other hand, with a tailoring strategy---creating variety by customizing a product to actual customer demand---a broad product line substantially increases the pioneering cost disadvantage, thereby making a preemption strategy counterproductive.
Marketing Science | 2012
Alexandre Belloni; Mitchell J. Lovett; William Boulding; Richard Staelin
Each year in the postsecondary education industry, schools offer admission to nearly 3 million new students and scholarships totaling nearly
Marketing Letters | 1992
William Boulding; Eunkyu Lee
100 billion. This is a large, understudied targeted marketing and price discrimination problem. This problem falls into a broader class of configuration utility problems (CUPs), which typically require an approach tailored to exploit the particular setting. This paper provides such an approach for the admission and scholarship decisions problem. The approach accounts for the key distinguishing feature of this industry---schools value the average features of the matriculating students such as percent female, percent from different regions of the world, average test scores, and average grade point average. Thus, as in any CUP, the value of one object (i.e., student) cannot be separated from the composition of all of the objects (other students in the enrolling class). This goal of achieving a class with a desirable set of average characteristics greatly complicates the optimization problem and does not allow the application of standard approaches. We develop a new approach that solves this more complex optimization problem using an empirical system to estimate each students choice and the focal schools utility function. We test the approach in a field study of an MBA scholarship process and implement adjusted scholarship decisions. Using a holdout sample, we provide evidence that the methodology can lead to improvements over current management decisions. Finally, by comparing our solution to what management would do on its own, we provide insight into how to improve management decisions in this setting.