In determining artwork prices, the identification of characteristics of the artist is crucial. While the impact of demographic profiles of artists has been examined in the literature on art pricing, the relationships among artists have been highly disregarded. In the current research, the authors focus on the measures of network centrality derived from group exhibitions in order to investigate their influence on artwork prices. The analysis results suggest that degree centrality and closeness centrality positively affect artwork prices, whereas betweenness centrality has an adverse effect. Moreover, network centrality values play a more important role in explaining artwork prices than historical reputation indexes such as gender, nationality, time elapsed after death, and main residencies of the artists. This study contributes to branding literature, while also providing art marketers with valuable insight into artist branding.

As customer loyalty becomes a key to the profitability, companies in game industry have shifted its marketing focus from acquisition to retention of customers. The present study investigates the factors presumably affecting reacquisition of the lost customers using actual transactional data. The research interest lies in not just regaining the lost customers but also keeping them. One of the objectives of the current paper is to figure out who would “stay alive” (i.e. keep using the service) after responding to the reacquisition campaign. Since few customers actively respond to a reacquisition campaign, the distribution of the response measurement is highly skewed. To handle this problem, this study uses “quantile regression (QR)” method in estimating the model. For the analyses of gamers’ real behavior, a dataset on one of the most successful online games in Korea, Sudden Attack, was utilized. This study focused on the customers who became inactive, i.e., no log-ins, during the 12-week period of April 19th to July 11th, 2012. Some of them returned when the win-back campaign was conducted beginning July 12th until August 8th (“Period 1”), and others didn’t. And further, some of those who returned stayed active (i.e., logged in) during the 4-week period after the campaign was over (“Period 2”), and others left again. In each of the four cases, a random sample of 1,000 users was drawn for the analysis. The estimation model includes four sets of variables: demographic variables (age, location), RFM variables (recency, frequency, monetary value), behavioral variables (level, experience, number of chats, kill per death ratio), and social variables (number of friends, number of gifts). The analyses confirmed their linear and/or non-linear effects in Period 1(win-back) and Period 2 (retention).

To lead a movie to success, managers must understand why consumers buy tickets. Some go to the movies due to trailers or movie posters, others watch movies triggered by their friends’ recommendation. Using Bass (1969)’s terms, we may categorize the former type of consumers into innovators who are influenced by external factors such as advertisements and media reports. We may label the latter type as imitators who are affected by internal factors such as word-of-mouth (WOM). Consumers in the digital era, regardless of their motivation types, easily obtain information related to movies through webpages or social networking services. Therefore, marketers should focus on how online information influence the diffusion of products. Additionally, each country has a unique cultural background, thereby resulting in different consumer behavior. Based on the prior arguments, we expect that the US movie market would show higher innovation effect and lower imitation effect compared to the Korean movie market. Opposite to the hypothesis, there are no significant differences in the innovation effect between the two markets. However, as expected, the imitation effect of US is significantly lower than that of Korea. In both markets, the advertising level and the publicizing level do not show any significant effect on the innovation effect. However, the two variables have significant and positive effect on the market potential. As predicted, the gender and the age heterogeneity of WOM are revealed to affect the imitation effect in the hypothesized direction. Product availability, measured with the number of screens, has a positive relationship with the innovation effect in the US market and with the market potential in both markets. Lastly, seasonality shows a positive association with the imitation effect in the US market and with the market potential in the Korean market. The current research tries to explore key differences in the diffusion patterns of movies between the US and Korean markets by applying Bass diffusion model. Further, this study aims to discover the factors that bring about the innovation and the imitation effects in both markets. By employing data available online, the current study could provide practical implications on how to manage information delivered through online channels.

Unlike older generation whose consumption of music was bounded by their local culture, today’s young consumers access music beyond cultural boundaries. Many successful pop music in cyber space attracted billions of listeners from all over the world. The young generation born and raised in the digital age, are often thought to have altered sensory-neural characteristics because of their extensive use of electronic device since early childhood. This study investigates a perceptual saturation hypothesis which posits that in order to capture the young generation’s hard-to-get attention, online music must present a high level of energy and rhythm that is near the point of perceptual saturation. We conducted a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) experiment with sixty-four young adults and found that total cerebral blood volume over prefrontal brain area was higher for a song that presents acoustic intensity near the point of perceptual saturation than a counterpart stimulus with lower levels of acoustic intensity. The degrees of prefrontal hemodynamic randomness decreased significantly while the participants listened to YouTube music that provided high levels of acoustic stimulation. Online popularity, recorded as the number of daily hits, was positively correlated with the total cerebral blood volume and negatively correlated with hemodynamic randomness.