Dear readers,

You might have noticed that it has been rather quiet here on The Science of Ownership for the past few months. We have been occupied with a million of projects that deserve being brought to your attention.

Here is some of what has happened within the realms of ownership research in 2016 and some of what to expect in 2017. (Note that all respective references are listed in alphabetical order at the end of this post.)

Contributions to a soon-to-be-released Book on Psychological Ownership

We are happy to announce that one of our important voices of ownership, Joann Peck together with Suzanne Shu are editing an entire book on psychological ownership next year. Joann will at some point in the future hopefully be able to tell us more about when exactly the book will be launched, but being among the contributors ourselves, we already know that it features cutting-edge reviews from the likes of Jon Pierce, Ori Friedman and Colleen P. Kirk among others. As to what to expect from us: Stephan Dickert wrote a piece on ownership and economic decisions, Sophie Süssenbach and Bernadette Kamleitner wrote a piece on ownership and sustainable behaviors, and Bernadette authored another chapter on questions of psychological ownership of data with Vince Mitchell. Details about all contributions as well as the book in general will be disclosed as soon as possible, but we are certainly not lying when we say that it will be another stepping stone for the field of psychological ownership.

New Research on Ownership

This year research on ownership was present at most leading marketing and consumer research conferences. The contexts in which the concept was embedded ranged from sustainability and care for the environment to the links between specific emotions and more general affect and ownership.

For example, at the Society for Consumer Psychology Winter Conference in St. Pete Beach, FL in February this year, Sophie Süssenbach and Bernadette Kamleitner shared insights from their paper on the relationship between perceived environmental knowledge and ownership for the environment (for details see Süssenbach & Kamleitner 2016 at the end of this article). Antje Graul and Aristeidis Theotokis from Leeds University Business School presented work on the relationship between lay rationalism, psychological ownerhship and consumers’ participation in access-based consumption (see Graul & Theotokis 2016). Joshua Morris and Szu-chi Huang from Stanford talked about their research on expense ownership and financial decision-making (see Morris & Huang 2016). Joann Peck with her colleagues Bowen Ruan, Robin Tanner and Liangyan Wang gave a presentation on the impact of haptic roughness on psychological ownership (see Ruan et al. 2016). And Jaeyeon Chung and Gita Johar from Columbia Business School shared their work on how product ownership induced identity activation affects product (un)related task performance (Chung & Johar 2016). [CLICK] here to go directly to the SCP conference proceedings.

After sunny Florida in February came Nordic Oslo in May. There, our entire team attended the European Marketing Academy Conference to present two very early projects on ownership and emotions as well as ownership and brands (see the reference list for details). The conference program can be accessed [HERE].

On we went to the annual Association for Consumer Research (ACR) conference, which was held in beautiful Berlin, Germany in October this year. Again ownership was featured strongly in several contributions including one by us (see Kamleitner et al. 2016). For example, Matthew Hall and Xin Zhao shared their work on perpetual dispossession, in which they explore the concept of ownership without possession (see Hall & Zhao 2016). Elena Fumagelli, Luca Visconti and Kristine De Valck (see Fumagelli at al. 2016) talked about how our own body is connected to the concept of ownership. Rui Chen, Leonard Lee and Yuhuang Zheng presented a paper on the reversed endowment effect in living goods transactions (See Chen et al. 2016). And Colleen Kirk together with her colleagues Scott Swain and Joann Peck introduced situations in which psychological ownership leads to territorial responses (see Kirk et al. 2016). Further contributions were made by Friedman & Pesowski (2016) who talked about how ownerhship shapes children’s judgements, Atasoy & Morewedge (2016) who studied ownership in the context of digital and physical goods and Valsesia, Nunes and Ordanini (2016) who looked at the relationship between psychological ownership and consumer ratings.

Further Projects

In addition to this vast amount of conference presentations, there are also a number of new publications on psychological ownership that appeared this year. These include Dawkins et al. forthcoming, Hair et al. 2016, Hartley et al. 2016, Kim et al. 2016, Sinclair and Tinson 2017 and Spiekermann and Korunovska 2016 (for detailled references, please scroll down to the end of this page).

With so much work apparently in progress – a lot appears about to come out. We too have been busy finishing up papers on the topic. Without giving away too much, we can already tell you that the projects we and others are working on illuminate psychological ownership from an array of different lenses, including but not limited to the contexts of personal information, social networks, streaming, crowdfunding, and product design. We’ll make sure that you – our loyal readers – will be the first ones to know more about these projects once we can confidentially disclose more details about them. On this note, we would like to thank every single one of you who has contributed to The Science of Ownership so far and will continue to incorporate extraordinary scholars from all over the world as collaborators on our blog.

Finally, we plan to repeat the successful ownership workshop that we organized in 2013 by hosting yet another little ownership gathering in 2017. We are currently in the process of arranging everything. Mostly we will curate a highly interdisciplinary group of participants but there will also be some open spaces, so stay posted.

We are looking forward to a fantastic year 2017. May it start and end with a bang and feature lots of inspiring and fruitful [research] moments in between.

We wish all of you a Happy Holiday & a Joyful [and productive] New Year!

Yours,

The Science of Ownership Editorial Team

Featured References

Conference Presentations

Atasoy, Ozgun & Morewedge, Carey (2016). Better to Have a Book in the Hand Than Two in the Cloud: Consumer Preferences for Physical Over Digital Goods. The Association for Consumer Research Conference (ACR) 2016, Berlin, Deutschland, 27.10.-30.10.

Chen, Rui, Lee, Leonard & Zheng, Yuhuang (2016). The Reversed Endowment Effect in Living-Goods Transactions. The Association for Consumer Research Conference (ACR) 2016, Berlin, Deutschland, 27.10.-30.10.

Chung, Jaeyeon & Johar, Gita V (2016). The Bounded Self: Effects of Product-Ownership Induced Identity Activation on Product (Un)Related Task Performance. SCP Winter Conference, St. Pete Beach, FL, USA, 25.02-27.02.

Friedman, Ori, Pesowski, Madison (2016). Ownership Shapes Children’s Judgments about Material goods. The Association for Consumer Research Conference (ACR) 2016, Berlin, Deutschland, 27.10.-30.10.

Fumagalli, Elena, Visconti, Luca M. & De Valck, Kristine (2016). To Me or Not to Me: Personal Body as Contested Ownership. The Association for Consumer Research Conference (ACR) 2016, Berlin, Deutschland, 27.10.-30.10.

Graul, Antje & Theotokis, Aristeidis (2016). Mine is mine and yours is mine: Understanding the relationship between lay rationalism, psychological ownership and consumers’participation in access-based consumption. SCP Winter Conference, St. Pete Beach, FL, USA, 25.02-27.02.

Hall, Matthew & Zhao, Xin (2016). Perpetual Dispossession: An Exploration of Ownership without Possession. The Association for Consumer Research Conference (ACR) 2016, Berlin, Deutschland, 27.10.-30.10.

Kamleitner, Bernadette and Süssenbach, Sophie and Thürridl, Carina and Ruzeviciute, Ruta (2016). The fine line between me and mine: Brand psychological ownership as a distinct and powerful construct. European Marketing Academy (EMAC), Oslo, Norway, 24.05.-27.05.

Kamleitner, Bernadette, Süssenbach, Sophie, Thürridl, Carina, Ruzeviciute, Ruta (2016). This Brand is MINE: Brand Psychological Ownership as a Distinct Construct and Powerful Driver of Consumer Behavior. The Association for Consumer Research Conference (ACR) 2016, Berlin, Deutschland, 27.10.-30.10.

Kirk, Colleen P., Swain, Scott & Peck, Joann (2016). You Stepped on My Toes: When Does Psychological Ownership Lead to Territorial Responses? The Association for Consumer Research Conference (ACR) 2016, Berlin, Deutschland, 27.10.-30.10.

Morris, Joshua & Huang, Szu-chi (2016). When Your Hands Are Tied: The Impact of Expense Ownership on Financial Decisions. SCP Winter Conference, St. Pete Beach, FL, USA, 25.02-27.02.

Ruan, Bowen, Peck, Joann, Tanner, Robin & Wang Liangyan (2016). Grip not to Slip: How Haptic Roughness Leads to Psychological Ownership. SCP Winter Conference, St. Pete Beach, FL, USA, 25.02-27.02.

Süssenbach, Sophie, Kamleitner, Bernadette (2016). I know it, I own it and I care for it: How perceived environmental knowledge strengthens ownership for the environment. SCP Winter Conference, St. Pete Beach, FL, USA, 25.02-27.02.

Thürridl, Carina, Kamleitner, Bernadette, Dickert, Stephan, Ruzeviciute, Ruta & Süssenbach, Sophie (2016). Happy, possessive and loyal: From consumption affect to brand loyalty. European Marketing Academy (EMAC), Oslo, Norway, 24.05.-27.05.

Valsesia, Francesca, Nunes, Joseph & Ordanini, Andrea (2016). I Got Here First! Feelings of Psychological Ownership and Consumer Ratings. The Association for Consumer Research Conference (ACR) 2016, Berlin, Deutschland, 27.10.-30.10.

Journal Publications

Dawkins, Sarah, Tian, Amy Wei, Newman, Alexander & Martin, Angela (forthcoming). Psychological ownership: A review and research agenda. Journal of Organizational Behavior.

Hair, Joe F., Barth, Kati, Neubert, Doreen & Sarstedt, Marko (2016), Examining the Role of Psychological Ownership and Feedback in Customer Empowerment Strategies. Journal of Creating Value, forthcoming.

Hartley, Phillip, Sun, Jie & Raggio, Randle D (2016). Psychological ownership as a crisis management advertising appeal – antecedents, outcomes, and moderators. Journal of Marketing Communications, 1-15.

Kim, Sangmi, Kim, Seong-Gyu, Jeon, Yoonsin, Jun, Soojin & Kim, Jinwoo (2016). Appropriate or Remix? The Effects of Social Recognition and Psychological Ownership on Intention to Share in Online Communities. Human–Computer Interaction, 31 (2), 97-132.

Sinclair, Gary & Tinson, Julie (2017). Psychological ownership and music streaming consumption. Journal of Business Research, 71, 1-9.

Spiekermann, Sarah & Korunovska, Jana (2016). Towards a value theory for personal data. Journal of Information Technology.