At the upcoming Society for Consumer Psychology (SCP) conference in Huntington Beach, CA, there will be a session dedicated to the topic of psychological ownership. The session is called “Experiencing ‘MINENESS’: Extensions of Psychological Ownership in New Consumer Contexts” and is chaired by Ipek Demirdag, University of California Los Angeles. According to the conference website, it includes the following talks: “Creating Ownership Where Ownership Does not Exist: Psychological Ownership Increases Enjoyment in Sharing Economy” (Demirdag and Shu); “Virtual Touch Facilitates Psychological Ownership of Products in Virtual Reality” (Luangrath, Peck, Hedgcock, and Xu); “‘It Can (Cannot) Be Mine’: How a Person in a Photo Impacts the Viewer’s Perception of a New Experiential Product” (Lu, Peck, and Barfield); and “Psychology of Heritage: The Endowment Effect for Extraordinary Goods” (Christensen and Shu). The session will take place on Saturday 7 March from 9:10 to 10:30 am at Salon F of Hyatt Regency Hotel in Huntington Beach, CA. If you are attending the conference, don’t forget to mark your calendars. We are excited to hear more about current developments in psychological ownership research!
Category Archives: Events
Update: The Future of Ownership Research – Insights from the Opening & Closing Forums
The collaboratively discussed insights from the Opening and Closing Forums, which where held within the scope of “The Future of Ownership Research” workshop this July 2017, are now readily available to download.
You can either click [HERE] to download the full summary or go to the event’s page to do so.
A visual summary of the Closing Forum is provided below.
On this note we would like to thank all participants for collaborating so effortfully with us on this! We believe that the questions that were raised will guide us towards a prosperous future in ownership research!
“The Future of Ownership Research” Workshop 2017
As already announced earlier this month, our team hosted an interdisciplinary workshop on ownership research at the WU Vienna University of Economics and Business in collaboration with our colleagues Joann Peck (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Stephan Dickert (Queen Mary University of London).
The Origanizational Committee
The workshop took place on July 7th and 8th and we are now happy to be able to share the highlights of this special get-together with you. You will find a detailled report by [CLICKING HERE]. Alternatively, you can also reach the page through the main navigation under the “events” tab.
We are still in the process of adding more material as we go so make sure to check back regularly for new insights on the future of ownership research.
“The Future of Ownership Research” – Workshop at WU Vienna
Dear readers,
as aleady announced earlier this year, we are hosting a workshop on ownership research titled “The Future of Ownership Research” at the Vienna University of Economics & Business (WU Vienna), which will take place this Friday and Saturday, July 7th + 8th.
TheScienceofOwnership.org will of course cover the workshop in more detail, so be prepared to read more about it soon.
Detailled information about the speakers and the program can be found [HERE].
We are looking forward to providing you with an update soon.
– The Science of Ownership Team
The Future of Ownership Research – Workshop held on July 7-8 2017
If you find yourself reading this post, I am quite sure you know that ownership is a concept that is fundamentally linked to almost all transactions in our society. Every economical transaction also involves a transfer of ownership.
On this note, the Institute for Marketing & Consumer Research (m.core) from WU Vienna is hosting a small-scale workshop on (psychological) ownership that will be held on July 7th-8th, 2017. In addition to Bernadette Kamleitner and Monika Koller (m.core) we are happy to announce that Stephan Dickert (Queen Mary University of London) and Joan Peck (University of Wisconsin-Madison) will also be part of the organization committee.
Within the scope of the workshop, which is being held for the second time his year, we aim to bring together researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds to facilitate a fruitful discourse on the phenomenon, its variants, its antecedents and its consequences. The goal is to jointly move towards a much-needed unified theory of ownership and to shape the future of ownership research.
If the above description makes you feel like this workshop is also a bit yours (pun intended) then you should apply for one of our travel scholarships. They are available for early career scholars and PhD students.
To get more about the workshop visit our official homepage here [CLICK]
To get the details about how to apply for scholarships click here [CLICK]
News from the World of Ownership
We acknowledge that it has been rather quiet here on The Science of Ownership in the past couple of weeks. Fortunately, we are able to counteract this inactivity today by providing our readers with two fantastic updates:
(1) Special Section on Ownership in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics
The Special Section on Ownership in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics has finally been published with the October 2015 issue (Volume 58). For the interested reader we strongly recommend a peak into the articles, which are online at: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-behavioral-and-experimental-economics/recent-articles
A great introduction to the topic co-authored by the editors of this special section Bernadette Kamleitner and Stephan Dickert can be found here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804315000701
(2) Special Session on Psychological Ownership at ACR 2015
Together with hundreds of consumer researchers from across the globe, we traveled to the ACR Association for Consumer Research North America Conference 2015 in the beginning of October this year. Apart from enjoying New Orleans, LA, where the conference was held, we listened to lots of great presentations and talked to amazing researchers, which made it really hard to leave afterwards.
What got us really excited, though, was the chance to witness that research on psychological ownership in the consumer behavior domain is getting more visible and popular by the day. At this year’s conference, our US colleagues organized yet another symposium that focused on this topic. The special session, which was chaired by Jaeyeon Chung from Columbia Business School, particularly focused on the “Antecedents and Consequences of Psychological Ownership” and included work from names that are no strangers to the field: Joann Peck (University of Wisconsin – Madison), Suzanne Shu (UCLA), Liad Weiss (University of Wisconsin – Madison), Gita Johar (Columbia Business School), Jaeyeon Chung (Columbia Business School), Yanping Tu (University of Chicago) and Ayelet Fishbach (University of Chicago). We were lucky to be able to publish an outline of the special session including an introduction to the session as well as short abstracts of the individual talks. Thank you, Jaeyeon, for helping us out and thank you to the others who agreed to make this information available here on The Science of Ownership.
You can find all information about the special session at here.
Exposing myself and my research at conferences – or: I have no dog, but a PhD topic to take care of
Going to conferences is always exciting (like going to the VHB conference 2015 and participating in the Ownership Symposium). It is particularly exciting, if you are about to present something that is of great importance to you – something like YOUR dissertation project. A project you already spent a lot of thought and effort on (personal investment), you (think you) know the topic very well (intimate knowledge), and to a certain extent you feel like influencing this area of research through your (anticipated) contribution (perceived control). These very well-known experiences (Pierce, Kostova, & Dirks, 2003) of course make your dissertation project something special to you, make you feel like you own this very niche of research interests – it became a reflection of yourself, part of who you are (Belk, 1988). This is what makes presentations so exciting, because it feels like offering something private and very personal to others.
However, who really enjoys sharing his/her very personal and intimate details with a rather unknown audience? It might feel like this nightmare, where you are standing on a stage and suddenly notice that you are naked, finally comes true. The very moment when you present YOUR topic, your own flesh and blood, to a greater audience, you open up yourself for (constructive) critique and, suddenly, you start to totter about your feelings of ownership. Did I really spend enough thought and effort on it? Do I really know the topic well, or do the others know it better? Is my expected contribution really as impactful as I thought it might be? In essence, when you present your topic, you let others tackle your knowledge about, your investment in, and your influence on your research area. It might be like your feelings of ownership for your research and topic are questioned.
But why at all do I voluntarily face or even seek these confrontation(s)? I suspect that I have been tricked by ownership, as my answer to this question is – because it is MINE (my dissertation topic). It is mine and I want to take care of it, I am proud of it, I feel responsible for it and no matter what, I will try to do the best for it. Even if this means that I have to undergo potential embarrassing and uncomfortable situations. I will go and take the extra step, neglect related costs and focus on the benefits. At the end we, my project and me, will mutually prosper from being exposed to “our community” (the scientific community) and flourish from the feedback we will get. Somewhat this makes me feel a little like a new dog owner, but instead of a dog, I have a PhD topic to take care of and instead of the veterinarian, I visit conferences.
Editor’s note:
- For more information about Sophie and her research please visit her website at www.wu.ac.at/mcore/ueber-unsabout-us/team/mag-sophie-suessenbach
- For references to the articles mentioned in this post, please visit our Links & Resources Section
To Have Or To Be: Upcoming Symposium at the 77. VHB Jahrestagung
We are delighted to announce that our proposed symposium on ownership with the title “To have or to be: the influence of (psychological) ownership on economic behavior” has been accepted for participation at the 77. VHB Jahrestagung at WU Vienna from May 27 – May 29, 2015.
The symposium will highlight the role of the psychological experience of an object as MINE or OURs in economic decision-making and discuss its breadth from various different lenses. More information on the speakers and the topics will follow soon. A short abstract summarizing the contents can be found in our event section here.
The Science of Ownership 