NIBS post doc (UEA) Mengjie Wang presented, "The determinants of consumer engagement" at the CeDEx Brown Bag Seminar in Nottingham on 29 November 2018.  This project is funded by the NIBS small grant scheme and it aims to investigate what makes some consumer search problems more engaging than others.   

In the funding bid, Bob Sugden explains, "The extent to which consumers engage with different kinds of decision problem is a topic of serious concern to industry regulators.  There is a lot of evidence suggesting that in many markets (e.g. energy, telecoms, financial services) consumers find it hard to maintain interest and motivation when choosing between alternative offers, and that this is an obstacle to competition.  Intuitively, however, it seems clear that some consumer decision problems are very engaging.  Many people actually enjoy shopping for consumer goods (e.g. clothes, cars, electronic goods) and services (e.g. restaurants, hotels, holidays)". 

By presenting at the peer-to-peer Brown Bag sessions this allowed Mengjie and the team to gain valuable input into the design of the research experiments.

Research results were presented by Mengjie and Ted at the NIBS Autumn Workshop 2021 (15-16 September) where the following were presented:

• Ted Turocy – The determinants of consumer engagement: valuing engagement
• Mengjie Wang – The determinants of consumer engagement: a price prediction approach

Named collaborators on this project are: Robert Sugden, Amelia Fletcher, Bruce Lyons, Theodore Turocy, Mengjie Wang.