ASA Connect

he American Statistical Association's (ASA) Marketing Section (bit.ly/asamarketingseminar) is pleased to announce an online seminar series for Spring 2025. Our goal is to facilitate research, spark interest, and encourage discussions on the interactions between marketing and statistics, given the exciting and rapid developments in both fields. 

The webinars will take place on Tuesday evening from 9pm-10pm Eastern Time (45-min presentation and 15-min Q&A). You can join via Zoom at https://iu.zoom.us/j/86585464223. Below is the list of speakers and dates for the Spring:

- Feb 25: Daniel McCarthy (UMD)

- March 11: Mohsen Foroughifar (Toronto)

- April 8: Sam Levy (Univ of Virginia)

- April 22: Mingyung Kim (Ohio State University)

- April 29: Shane Wang (Virginia Tech)

Please mark your calendars and feel free to share this invitation with anyone interested in the webinars.

First speaker: Daniel McCarthy

Daniel McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. Dan popularized customer-based corporate valuation, a "bottom-up" approach to valuing firms by assessing the value of their customers. His other areas of research focus include data fusion, data privacy, missing data problems, machine learning, and causal inference.

Title: "The Impact of Subscription on Spending and Share-of-Wallet: Evidence from Restaurant Delivery." 

(Joint work with Yeohong Yoon, Young-Hoon Park, and E. Shin Oblander).

 

Abstract: Subscription services are growing in popularity, yet their competitive implications are relatively understudied. This paper investigates the effects of a restaurant delivery company's subscription program on consumer spending within and across categories, and how these effects are moderated by spending at competing firms. Using individual-level transaction data over 17 months, we find that signing up significantly increases focal firm spending, with a persistent-yet-declining effect over time that is consistent with subscriber churn dynamics. This increase is driven by more orders within the restaurant delivery category and higher share-of-wallet to the focal firm. Multihomers (customers of both focal and competing firms before signing up) show a larger and more persistent increase in spending at the focal firm after signing up than singlehomers (customers of the focal firm alone before signing up), who exhibit a smaller and statistically insignificant lift after six months. Moreover, singlehomers increase their spending at competing firms after signing up, whereas multihomers decrease theirs. Signing up does not significantly affect spending in adjacent categories such as grocery deliveries and restaurant dine-in. These results suggest that a subscription service can positively impact not only the firm offering the subscription but also competing firms, but only when multihoming is low.