Research at Terry College of Business

Featured Faculty

Vanessa M. Patrick

Assistant Professor of Marketing

"Art Infusion: The Infusion of Art on the Perception and Evaluation of Consumer Products."
(Co-authored with Terry doctoral student Henrik Hagtvedt. Forthcoming in Journal of Marketing Research.)

Art has always had the ability to arouse our imagination and capture our attention. It is therefore not uncommon to see art images being used to promote unrelated products. For example, Beers uses art to convey the idea that diamonds, like paintings, are unique works of art. Indeed, sometimes art is created for the sole purpose of marketing a product, as was the case with the Absolut Vodka advertising campaign. Our paper provides insight and understanding of the strategic use of art to meet marketing objectives.

In a series of three studies we report in this article, we investigate the phenomenon of art infusion, which we define as the influence that the presence of art has on consumer perceptions and evaluations of products associated with it. Several theoretical perspectives shed light on how the properties of art may spill over on to products, including classical conditioning, halo effects, and emotional contagion. In line with these perspectives, we propose that visual art influences consumer evaluations of products with which it is associated. More specifically, we propose that perceptions of luxury spill over from art to products, thereby creating more favorable evaluations of these products in consumers' minds.

The objective of Study 1 was to demonstrate that the presence of visual art leads to enhanced evaluations of consumer products via a spillover of luxury perceptions. We surveyed 100 patrons of a local restaurant. The product to be evaluated was a typical set of silverware (a set of a spoon, fork, knife, teaspoon, and steak knife), exhibited in a custom-made black velvet box with white satin lining. The top of the box had a print of either Van Gogh's "Café Terrace at Night" (art image) or a photograph of a café at night (non-art image). Participants were fleetingly exposed to the front face of the box before it was opened and then answered a set of questions about the silverware. Results revealed significantly higher product evaluations and perceptions of luxury occurred in the art condition.

In Study 2, 107 participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions regarding an advertisement for bathroom fittings. The first featured the painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring" by Johannes Vermeer; the second featured a photograph of Scarlett Johansson posing as the "Girl with a Pearl Earring"; the third featured no image at all. Thus, content was matched for the two visual images. Results revealed that product evaluations and perceptions of luxury in the "art image" condition were significantly higher than those in the "photograph" and "no image" conditions.

In Study 3, seventy-six undergraduates participated as research subjects and the experimental stimulus was a soap dispenser. In this study, we were interested in comparing art images that were positive or negative in content. The target product was a soap dispenser. There were three experimental conditions. In the first, the soap dispenser had the painting "Palazzo da Mula" by Claude Monet on it (positive art image). In the second, the dispenser displayed a photograph of buildings overlooking a Venetian canal (positive photograph). In the third condition, the soap dispenser displayed J.M.W. Turner's painting "The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons" (negative art image). The study revealed that both artworks (whether the images were positive or negative) resulted in more positive evaluations of the product than the photographic image did. These results, then, suggest that it is the artwork itself, rather than the content of the specific images, that creates perceptions of luxury.

Robert J. Vandenberg

Professor of Management

"The Effectiveness of High Involvement Work Processes"

For a variety of reasons (e.g., employee realignment due to mergers and acquisitions), corporations have been seeking to shrink the size of their work forces while increasing their effectiveness. One strategy pursued in achieving these goals is the adoption of high involvement work processes (HIWP). These processes have been the focus of my research in a related set of published studies; the links to the abstracts of those studies appear below.

An organization can be said to have high involvement work practices in place when employees at all hierarchical levels mutually understand that they: (a) possess the power to make decisions and act upon them; (b) can access the information sources needed to effectively undertake those actions; (c) have opportunities to update their knowledge to sustain their effectiveness; and (d) are rewarded for improving the effectiveness of the organization as a whole. We argue that soliciting employee participation in decision-making and empowering workers to act autonomously has numerous benefits for employees and organizations alike.

In one study using over 90 life insurance companies, we found that returns on assets (ROA) and gains in net premiums written were strongest -- and employee turnover was lowest -- when all four of the attributes identified above were clearly present throughout the organization. Interestingly, even having one missing element led to the same poor outcomes as having no high involvement work practices at all. Thus, managers can not simply pick and choose selectively from HIWP to get desired outcomes, but must consistently integrate these practices throughout the firm. Indeed, traditionally-managed organizations (in which only top management was involved in decision making) greatly underperformed organizations in which the predominant management system was HIWP.

Building on this initial work, our subsequent studies suggest that high involvement work practices should best be viewed as a kind of work climate. In firms with HIWP work climates, employees develop a common view of their organizations, agree on their respective work roles, and understand how working together achieves organizational goals. Furthermore, our results suggest that achieving such a climate of involvement does not happen by decree, HR mandates, or by simple changes in policies or procedures. Rather, the work-unit managers are critical. Regardless of how serious top management is about adopting a HIWP culture, if the work-unit managers believe their direct reports are incapable of working under HIWP conditions, they will undermine its implementation within their units. Thus, the adoption of HIWP requires extensive training of unit managers as to what the new "management" rules are and what they are expected to do.

Finally, we found some interesting limitations to the use of high involvement work practices. Specifically, we found that HIWP works poorly in units with low goals and aspirations and that the introduction of HIWP into these weak units can actually result in even poorer performance. In addition, the benefits of HIWP are not likely to be evident in two or three months. Rather, it may take two or three years for the culture change to impact organizational effectiveness.

George Selgin

Professor of Economics

"Good Money: Private Enterprise and the Foundation of Modern Coinage"
(Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press and the Independent Institute.)

Economists generally believe government monopolies are wasteful and unnecessary, with few exceptions. One such exception concerns the minting of coins, which has, except in very rare cases, been monopolized by governments since ancient times. According to most economists, this particular government monopoly is necessary, for without it economies would fall victim to Gresham's Law. In short, without a governmental monopoly on minting coins, "bad money" would drive "good money" out of circulation.

In my forthcoming book, I challenge this conventional view by investigating one of those rare instances in which the minting of coins was, in fact, left to private enterprise. At the onset of Great Britain's Industrial Revolution, flawed Royal Mint policies and procedures left British factory and mine owners begging for coins with which to pay their workers. The coin shortage was threatening to derail British industrialization when private entrepreneurs (including Matthew Boulton of Boulton & Watt fame) came to the rescue. These entrepreneurs set up their own mints and supplied other businessmen with custom-made commercial coins or "tradesman's tokens." These coins -- mostly copper pennies and halfpennies -- made up the bulk of Great Britain's coins for wage and retail payments from 1787 to 1821, after which they were legally suppressed.

Far from being "bad" money, Great Britain's commercial coins were the highest quality coins for everyday use ever issued in Great Britain-or anywhere else-up to that time and continue to be eagerly collected by numismatists. In fact, merchants so much preferred these commercial coins to official coins that they typically charged double the price when customers and clients offered the latter in payment. First, they were heavier than official coins. Second, commercial coins boasted better engravings than their regal counterparts, which made them much harder to counterfeit. Finally, unlike Royal Mint products, commercial coins were redeemable on demand in gold or banknotes. Consequently, merchants who received commercial coins in payment didn't have to fear getting saddled with unnecessary inventories of useless copper.

In short, Great Britain's commercial coinage system appears to have been in practically every respect a vast improvement over the official system it temporarily supplanted. This is particularly remarkable because these commercial coins were never officially sanctioned by the British government. Moreover, after having suppressed private coinage, the British government was able to modernize its own official coinage system to meet the requirements of an industrial economy only by replicating the technical and administrative procedures that Great Britain's private coiners had pioneered. Ultimately, other nations eventually followed Great Britain's lead in coinage policies and procedures.

My book, which is based on extensive archival research, tells the full story of Great Britain's commercial coinage system for the very first time. In doing so it explodes many myths concerning commercial coins and the technology and economics behind them. Most of all, it challenges fundamental beliefs upon which modern government currency monopolies rest. The challenge is timely, as government monetary authorities today find themselves struggling to defend their monopolies from private-sector alternatives (e.g., digital money, cash cards, and electronic funds transfers). Perhaps the most fundamental question my research raises is: "Why should governments be in the currency business at all?"