Journal of Marketing Research

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have the potential to democratize education by improving access. Although retention and completion rates for nonpaying users have not been promising, these statistics are much brighter for users who pay to receive a certificate upon completing the course. We investigate whether paying for the certificate option can increase engagement with course content. In particular, we consider two effects: (1) the certificate effect, which is the boost in motivation to stay engaged to receive the certificate; and (2) the sunk-cost effect, which arises solely because the user paid for the course. We use data from over 70 courses offered on the Coursera platform and study the engagement of individual participants at different milestones within each course. The panel nature of the data enables us to include controls for intrinsic differences between nonpaying and paying users in terms of their desire to stay engaged. We find evidence that the certificate and sunk-cost effects increase user engagement by approximately 8%–9% and 17%–20%, respectively. Whereas the sunk-cost effect is transient and lasts for only a few weeks after payment, the certificate effect lasts until the participant reaches the grade required to be eligible to receive the certificate. We discuss the implications of our findings for how platforms and content creators may design course milestones and schedule payment of course fees. Given that greater engagement tends to improve learning outcomes, our study serves as an important first step in understanding the role of prices and payment in enabling MOOCs to realize their full potential.

Online educational platforms increasingly allow learners to consume content at their own pace with on-demand formats, in contrast to the synchronous content of traditional education. Thus, it is important to understand and model learner engagement within these environments. Using data from four business courses hosted on Coursera, the authors model learner behavior as a two-stage decision process, with the first stage determining across-day continuation (vs. quitting) and the second stage determining within-day choices among lectures, quizzes, and breaks. By modeling the heterogeneity across learners pursuing lecture and quiz completion goals, the authors capture different patterns of consumption that correspond to extant theories of goal progress within an empirical field setting. They find that most individuals exhibit a learning style whereby lecture utility changes as an inverted U-shaped function of current progress. This model may also be used as an early detection system to anticipate changes in engagement, and it enables the authors to relate learning styles to final performance outcomes and enrollment in additional courses. Finally, the authors examine how quiz-taking varies across learners in different courses and between those who have paid versus not paid for the option to earn a course certificate.

In recent years, online learning platforms (e.g., Coursera, edX) have experienced massive growth and have reached nearly 200 million learners. Although their reach is quite large, the impact of these platforms is constrained by a low level of learner engagement. In traditional face-to-face classrooms, educators aim to engage learners by asking them to participate in class discussions and share information about their identity and ideas. However, the effectiveness of these strategies in online learning platforms is uncertain. The authors examine this issue by assessing the impact of two different types of content sharing on learner engagement. The authors conduct a textual analysis of over 12,000 text postings during an 18-month period (Study 1) and a field experiment among over 2,000 learners (Study 2) in a popular Coursera offering by a large U.S. university. The results indicate that asking learners to share ideas (vs. their identity) has a stronger effect on their video consumption and assessment completion. The authors explain this “idea advantage” by suggesting that learners who share ideas (vs. identity) exhibit a greater degree of elaboration. This idea advantage is strongest for learners from English-speaking countries and those new to online learning.

Despite a rising interest in artificial intelligence (AI) technology, research in services marketing has not evaluated its role in helping firms learn about customers’ needs and increasing the adaptability of service employees. Therefore, the authors develop a conceptual framework and investigate whether and to what extent providing AI assistance to service employees improves service outcomes. The randomized controlled trial in the context of tutoring services shows that helping service employees (tutors) adapt to students’ learning needs by providing AI-generated diagnoses significantly improves service outcomes measured by academic performance. However, the authors find that some tutors may not utilize AI assistance (i.e., AI aversion), and factors associated with unforeseen barriers to usage (i.e., technology overload) can moderate its impact on outcomes. Interestingly, tutors who significantly contribute to the firm's revenue relied heavily on AI assistance but unexpectedly benefited little from AI in improving service outcomes. Given the wide applicability of AI assistance in a variety of services marketing contexts, the authors suggest that firms should consider the potential difficulties employees face in using the technology rather than encourage them to use it as it is.

Crowdfunding has emerged as a market-based solution to give frontline complex public service employees the opportunity to acquire resources by advertising project proposals for donor patrons on crowdfunding platforms. However, whether crowdfunded resources can improve offline service outcomes, and if so, how and when, remains murky. Focusing on the context of public education crowdfunding and applying theories from crowdfunding and services marketing literature, the authors conceptualize that the combination of two factors—namely, teachers’ request for resources meant to satisfy unmet heterogeneous (i.e., diverse and evolving) intellectual needs of students and donors’ screening and approval (i.e., crowd screening) of promising projects—helps improve student academic achievement. Collating novel panel data from DonorsChoose and California Department of Education, the authors show that (1) crowdfunded resources positively affect student academic achievement, (2) student academic achievement improves with the increase in the heterogeneity of intellectual needs that crowdfunded resources likely satisfy, (3) crowd screening of project proposals plays a critical role in the offline effectiveness of crowdfunded resources, and (4) crowd screening effectiveness depends on the type of project.

Marketization—the entry of the market logic into a field originally insulated from it—is a transformative force that has reshaped many fields, including education, health care, the arts, and religion. Marketization brings a unique set of challenges for established organizations: it opens a field to market-style mechanisms of consumer choice and competition, which undermines the legitimacy of established organizations, and it creates contradictory demands for organizational actions. How can established organizations adapt to marketization? To answer this question, the authors study the adaptation of five established religious schools to the marketization of education in Brazil. They develop the novel hybridization strategy of nested coupling and explain that established organizations respond to marketization by balancing competing demands for differentiation and conformity. The authors show how religious schools nest the market logic within the religious logic by reconfiguring their resources to conform to market demands while differentiating themselves through their religious orientation. Nested coupling provides a novel strategic approach for established organizations in marketized or marketizing fields, such as hospitals, museums, and schools, to capitalize on a logic that preexists marketization and to create a unique competitive positioning in the market.

Student loans defer the cost of college until after graduation, allowing many students access to higher lifetime earnings and colleges and universities they otherwise could not afford. Even with student loans, however, the authors find that students psychologically realize the financial costs of a college education long before their loan repayments begin. This early cost realization frames financial decisions between most pairs of colleges as an intertemporal trade-off. Students choose between investments with (1) smaller short-term costs but smaller long-term returns (a lower-cost, lower-return [LC-LR] college) and (2) larger short-term costs but larger long-term returns (a higher-cost, higher-return [HC-HR] college). The authors find that early cost realization increases preferences for LC-LR colleges—preferences that could reduce lifetime earnings—in both simulations and experiments. Preferences for LC-LR colleges are pronounced among financially impatient students and in choice pairs of LC-LR and HC-HR colleges where the equilibrium is set at a low-discount-rate threshold. A return-on-investment strategy, future uncertainty, and debt aversion cannot explain these results. A decision aid synchronizing the psychological realization of costs and benefits reduced preferences for LC-LR colleges, illustrating that the preference is constructed and receptive to interventions.

Front-of-package and on-shelf nutrition labeling systems in supermarkets have been shown to lead to only modest increases in the purchase of more nutritious foods. Educational campaigns may increase the use of these types of product labels if (1) there is a lack of consumer awareness and/or understanding of the labels, and (2) the information provided leads consumers to prefer different products. The authors study a large-scale national campaign for the Guiding Stars nutrition labels conducted by a grocery retailer in Canada that implemented the labels. Using detailed household transaction data, the authors find only a small increase in the purchase of higher star–rated foods during the campaign, driven by produce purchases, and 60% of the effect disappears after the campaign’s conclusion. Exit surveys were conducted outside of stores before and after the campaign to explain the limited response. Awareness and understanding of the nutrition labeling system increased marginally after the campaign, but there was no increase in self-reported use.

One of the greatest challenges in education marketing is designing effective marketing messages, especially when targeting consumers with different cultural backgrounds. This research examines the impact of power distance belief (PDB) on the persuasiveness of affective appeal versus cognitive appeal in education marketing messages. The authors theorize that low-PDB consumers tend to prefer education products presented with affective appeal because of their process learning mindset, which focuses on self-discovery and self-development. By contrast, high-PDB consumers tend to prefer education products presented with cognitive appeal because of their outcome learning mindset, which focuses on acquiring skills and social/economic gains relevant to such skills. These effects were supported by converging results from four experiments, a field study, and a content analysis across 37 countries using a wide range of education products and services. This research contributes to the literature on PDB, education, and cross-cultural consumer behavior and provides guidelines for global education marketers.

This research documents systematic gender performance differences (GPD) at a top business school using a unique administrative data set and survey of students. The findings show that women’s grades are 11% of a standard deviation lower in quantitative courses than those of men with similar academic aptitude and demographics, and men’s grades are 23% of a standard deviation lower in nonquantitative courses than those of comparable women. The authors discuss and test for different reasons to explain this finding. They show that a female instructor significantly cuts down GPD for quantitative courses by raising the relative grades of female students. In addition, female instructors increase women’s interest and performance expectations in these courses and are perceived as role models by their female students. These results provide support for a gender stereotype process for GPD and show that faculty can serve as powerful exemplars to challenge gender stereotypes and increase student achievement. The authors discuss several important implications of these findings for business schools and for society.

Curriculum is at the core of school quality. Curriculum changes often attempt to cater to local preferences while adhering to national standards. This tension often drives a school’s decision to invest in curriculum changes even though little is known about how such changes affect student performance. To examine these interrelated issues of product quality and performance in the education sector, the authors analyze the effect of the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act on students’ science test performance in nationally administered tests. The law allowed the teaching of creationism as an alternative “theory” to evolution in Louisiana schools. Using detailed data on Louisiana schools, the authors employ a difference-in-differences strategy to document that science test achievement declined after the law was passed, relative to schools in neighboring Texas. The effect of the law was driven by regions with high internet penetration and low parental education levels. After the change in policy, Louisiana students were more likely to seek out information on the internet using search terms that led them to web pages that reinforced a creationist message.

The authors use data from a field study concerning an online salesperson training program to investigate (1) the overall impact of program participation on sales performance for two kinds of products, “Focus” and “Other” (the direct impact); (2) heterogeneity in the impact of program participation across salespeople; and (3) spillover effect of program participation by others in the vicinity on salesperson performance (the indirect impact). The program contains short-duration training modules accessed via an online platform. Salespeople choose whether to take any module, how many modules to take, and when to take them. Results show that although training improved sales performance, the average impact of training on Other product sales was immediate, significant, and positive, and that on Focus product sales was delayed. Further, the impact of training diminishes over time. The authors find significant heterogeneity in the impact of training across salespeople and regions. Finally, the results show a mixed spillover effect of training by peers. There is a positive spillover effect on sales of the focal salesperson with an increase in the total number of trainings taken by peer salespeople, and a negative or no spillover effect with an increase in the number of peer salespeople taking training.