Daniel Mochon
Associate Professor & Area Coordinator
Biography
Professor Mochon's research focuses on consumer behavior and decision making. He is interested in understanding how human biases inherent to people’s decision making processes affect the choices and judgments they make. He has conducted research in domains such as online dating, health, financial decision making, subjective well-being and consumer perceptions of value. This research has been published in both leading marketing and psychology journals.
Professor Mochon is also interested in how new online tools affect the way people communicate with each other and with businesses. He teaches a course on social and online marketing which examines these issues. He has also conducted research on these topics and consulted with various online companies to help them apply insights from consumer behavior.
Education
Sloan School of Management, MIT
Brown University
Articles
What are likes worth? A Facebook page field experiment
2017
Despite the tremendous resources devoted to marketing on Facebook, little is known about its actual effect on customers. Specifically, can Facebook page likes affect offline customer behavior, and if so, how? To answer these questions, the authors conduct a field experiment on acquired Facebook page likes and find them to have a positive causal effect on offline customer behavior.
Health Intervention
2016
We examine the extended effects of an incentive-based behavioral health intervention designed to improve nutrition behavior. Although the intervention successfully improved the target behavior, less is known about any spillovers, positive or negative, that impacted the program’s net benefit.
Healthier by Precommitment
2014
We tested a voluntary self-control commitment device to help grocery shoppers make healthier food purchases. Participants, who were already enrolled in a large-scale incentive program that discounts the price of eligible groceries by 25%, were offered the chance to put their discount on the line.
The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love
2012
In four studies in which consumers assembled IKEA boxes, folded origami, and built sets of Legos, we demonstrate and investigate boundary conditions for the IKEA effect—the increase in valuation of self-made products. Participants saw their amateurish creations as similar in value to experts' creations, and expected others to share their opinions.
Bolstering and restoring feelings of competence via the IKEA effect
2012
We examine the underlying process behind the IKEA effect, which is defined as consumers' willingness to pay more for self-created products than for identical products made by others, and explore the factors that influence both consumers' willingness to engage in self-creation and the utility that they derive from such activities.
Media Appearances
Meatballs and DIY bookcases: The psychology behind Ikea’s iconic success
Daniel Mochon, a researcher and associate professor of marketing at Tulane University’s business school, calls this the “Ikea effect.” “We come to overvalue the things that we have created ourselves,” Mochon told Shankar Vedantam, the host of NPR’s podcast “Hidden Brain"...
Why You Love That Ikea Table, Even If It's Crooked
"Imagine that, you know, you built a table," said Daniel Mochon, a Tulane University marketing professor, who has studied the phenomenon. "Maybe it came out a little bit crooked. Probably your wife or your neighbor would see it for what it is, you know? A shoddy piece of workmanship. But to you that table might seem really great, because you're the one who created it. It's the fruit of your labor. And that is really the idea behind the Ikea Effect..."
