JIHOON CHO, 701 Tappan Street, (734) 277-5565 jihoonch@umich.edu www-personal.umich.edu/~jihoonch EDUCATION,, Ann Arbor, MI Ph.D. Candidate in Business Administration (Marketing), Expected 2016 Dissertation: "Essays on the Role of Customer Expectation in Service Markets" In service markets customers tend to evaluate service quality by comparing actual performance with their prior expectation, and the evaluation, in turn, can be a precursor of customers purchase behavior. Exploiting this mechanism, my dissertation demonstrates the value of customer satisfaction as a pathway bridging objective service performance to repurchase behavior and explores the evolution of customer expectation under bounded rationality that influences customers product switching behavior. Committee: Puneet Manchanda (Committee Co-Chair), Anocha Aribarg (Committee Co-Chair), S. Sriram, Dan Ackerberg, Jun Li Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Master of Professional Studies in Applied Statistics, 2009 Korea University, Seoul, South Korea Master of Science in Marketing, 2007 Dissertation: "A Two-stage Model of the Effects of Keyword Searches on Sales" Commitee: Chansu Park (Committee Chair), Janghyuk Lee, Shijin Yoo Bachelor of Business Administration, 2005 RESEARCH INTERESTS Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction and Repurchase, Strategic Customer Behavior, Structural Models, Empirical Industrial Organization 1
HONORS AND AWARDS Fellowship,, 2010 - Present Kendrick Marketing Award for Academic Achievement,, 2015 Rackham Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Nominee,, 2015 AMS Doctoral Consortium Fellow, University of Colorado at Denver, 2015 MMA Doctoral Student Teaching Consortium Fellow, University of Texas at San Antonio, 2014 Haring Symposium Fellow, Indiana University Bloomington, 2014 Quantitative Marketing and Structural Econometrics Workshop Fellow, Duke University, 2013 Data Grant from Wharton Consumer Analytics Initiative on the Hertz data, 2013 ISMS Doctoral Consortium Fellow, Özyeğin University, 2013 Best Paper Award, Korean Marketing Association, 2009 DISSERTATION CHAPTERS Essay 1: "The Value of Measuring Customer Satisfaction" (Please find the updated manuscript at www-personal.umich.edu/~jihoonch) This paper assesses the value of measuring customer satisfaction when objective service performance data are available. Unlike most previous studies that use cross-sectional self-reported survey data, this research leverages the data that consist of individual-level cross-sectional and time-series measures of objective service performance, customer satisfaction and repurchase behavior. The data come from two different - quick service restaurant and auto rental - service industries. Observing objective performance helps me validate the use of customer satisfaction as a proxy for service performance, and more importantly, to examine the value of customer satisfaction when it is feasible for firms to measure objective service performance. The availability of transactions with and without satisfaction ratings allows me to correct for the presence of within-individual selection bias, something previous research has ignored. Using these two novel data sets, I model rating incidence, satisfaction rating and interpurchase time using a simultaneous equations model. The results indicate the presence of within-individual selection. I also find that satisfaction ratings reflect objective service performance. Interestingly, despite its weak direct effect, I find a strong indirect effect of objective service performance on interpurchase time, operating through customer satisfaction. This finding sheds light on the value of customer satisfaction as a pathway bridging objective service performance to repurchase. 2
Essay 2: "The Past Imperfect: Assessing Customer Product Switching Behavior under Bounded Rationality" This paper gauges the impact of forgetting on customer expectation and product switching behavior in the auto rental industry. Existing studies emphasizing rational and adaptive performance expectation assume that customers perfectly recall all past service encounters and use them to form their expectation of service performance. A more realistic assumption, however, is that customers forget some of their past service encounters due to their limited memory. Building on this assumption of the bounded rationality, I explore customers product switching behavior in the presence of free car-class upgrades and price gaps between car-classes. Free upgrade offer is a key recovery strategy to address service failure in the auto rental industry, while its value can vary subject to the price gap between car-classes. Incorporating this price gap, I model customers recall probability of the past service encounters and examine its impact on customers car-class switching behavior. Evidence indicates that a discrepancy between actual price gap and customer expectation of the gap, rather than the price itself, is a key to determine customer switching behavior. I also find that ignoring customer forgetfulness may lead to biased inference, suggesting price gaps between car-classes erode firms revenue when in truth they do not. OTHER WORKS IN PROGRESS "The Interplay between Customers Strategic Booking Behavior and Firms Revenue Management: Evidence from the Auto Rental Industry" (With Anocha Aribarg and Puneet Manchanda, Manuscript in process) In this paper, we explore the interplay between customers strategic behavior and firms intertemporal inventory management in the auto rental industry. Auto rental firms generally offer a menu of prices that vary across different car types to meet the needs of different customer groups. Once reservations for a car class exceed the inventory level, firms provide customers with free car-class upgrades, using unsold upper-class units as a "cheap" way to avert customer complaints. Frequent free upgrades, however, may result in customer strategic booking behavior whereby customers anticipate an upgrade and book the same or lower car-class than they would have chosen, and consequently affect the inventory level of each car-class. This paper examines this dynamic trade-off between offering free upgrades to compensate for overbooking and controlling the number of reservations to meet the demand from high-valuation customers. 3
"The Effect of Patent Expiration on Customer Brand Choice in the Pharmaceutical Industry" (With Puneet Manchanda and Ying Xie, Data analysis and modeling in process) This paper investigates the impact of drug patent expiration on customer brand choice in the pharmaceutical industry. Once the originator s patent expires, generic manufacturers can bring to market products with the same ingredient and a lower price. Using a drug patent expiration as a natural experiment, this study empirically analyzes the effect of price in two steps. First, I investigate how the price changes after the patent expiration affect customer choice of whether to visit a doctor to receive a prescription (Rx) or to visit a store to buy an over-the-counter (OTC) drug. I then quantify the impact of the price on customer brand choice conditional on the marketplace choice. Evidence indicates that customer price sensitivity in the OTC marketplace increases after the patent expires, while not all customers switch from the Rx to the OTC marketplace to take advantage of the price drop. CONFERENCE AND SEMINAR PRESENTATIONS "Does Employee Engagement Lead to Higher Customer Satisfaction and Spending?" Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, June 2014 "The Role of Free Car-Class Upgrades in the Auto Rental Industry" IO Lunch,, April 2014 Marketing Brown Bag,, March 2014 "The Value of Measuring Customer Satisfaction" INFORMS Marketing Science Conference, Istanbul, Turkey, July 2013 ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE,, Ann Arbor, MI Graduate Student Research Assistant (Marketing), 2010-2014 Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Research Assistant (Professor Benjamin Ho), 2007-2008 Korea University, Seoul, South Korea Research Assistant (Professor Chansu Park), 2006-2007 4
TEACHING INTEREST Marketing analytics, Marketing research, Quantitative Modeling, Service management, Customer Relationship Management, Marketing management, Pricing TEACHING EXPERIENCE,, Ann Arbor, MI Instructor MKT300: Marketing Management, non-bba elective course, Spring 2014, Winter 2013 (Instructor Rating: 4.24/5.00) Teaching Assistant MKT325/625: New Product and Innovation Management (BBA/MBA), Winter 2014 MKT408/608: Pricing Strategy and Tactics (BBA/MBA), Fall 2014, Fall 2013 MKT601: Strategic Marketing Planning (MBA), Winter 2013, Winter 2012 EMBA21: Strategic Marketing Planning (Executive MBA), Summer 2014 MKT603: Strategic Brand Management (MBA), Fall 2011 INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE Samsung Life Insurance, Seoul, Korea Pension Fund Manager, 2009-2010 NHN Corporation, Seoul, Korea Online Market Research Analyst, 2008 Phoenix Communications Inc., Seoul, Korea Junior Media Planner, 2005-2006 Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade, Seoul, Korea Research Assistant, 2003 COMPUTER SKILLS R, SAS, GAUSS, STATA, C++, and Matlab 5
GRADUATE COURSEWORK Economics Courses Empirical Industrial Organizations I (Y. Fan / N. Lazzati) Empirical Industrial Organizations II (J. Fox / D. Ackerberg) Econometrics I (H. Daouk) Econometrics II (N. Kiefer) Microeconomic Theory I (Y. Masatlioglu) Microeconomic Theory II (D. Nakajima) Microeconomic Theory III (S. Salant) Applied Econometrics (D. Ackerberg) Applied Microeconometrics (J. Smith) Mathematical Economics (T. Mitra) Labor Economics I (M. Stephens / J. Bound) Statistics Courses Applied Bayesian Inference (T. Johnson) Statistical Computing (H. Kang) Computational Statistics (Y. Atchade) Applied Stochastic Processes (S. Kim) Applied Spatial Statistics (V. Berrocal) Applied Survival Analysis (J. Booth) Marketing Courses Structural Models I (P. Manchanda) Structural Models II (S. Sriram) Empirical Modeling Using Bayesian Methods (A. Aribarg) Choice Theory and Stochastic Models (F. Feinberg) Marketing Models (Y. Park) Social Influence and CCT (D. Wooten) Cognition, Memory, and fmri (C. Yoon) Advertising and Branding (R. Batra) Sensory Marketing (A. Krishna) 6
REFERENCES Puneet Manchanda (Committee Co-Chair) Isadore and Leon Winkelman Professor of Marketing, Chair of Marketing 701 Tappan Street, R5490 Phone: (734) 936-2445 Email: pmanchan@umich.edu Anocha Aribarg (Committee Co-Chair) Associate Professor of Marketing 701 Tappan Street, R5478 Phone: (734) 763-0599 Email: anocha@umich.edu S. Sriram Associate Professor of Marketing 701 Tappan Street, R5474 Phone: (734) 647-6413 Email: ssrira@umich.edu Ying Xie Associate Professor of Marketing Naveen Jindal School of Management University of Texas at Dallas 800 W Campbell Road, JSOM 3.214 Richardson, TX 75080 Phone: (972) 883-5839 Email: ying.xie@utdallas.edu Dan Ackerberg Kempf Professor of Economics 701 Tappan Street, R3418 Phone: (734) 764-2357 Email: ackerber@umich.edu Jun Li Assistant Professor of Technology and Operations 701 Tappan Street, R6372 Phone: (734) 763-4612 Email: junwli@umich.edu 7