Dear readers,
We would like to share a really neat video with you that sums up the phenomenon of ownership quite nicely in under 5 minutes. It was created by Christian Jarrett as part of a TED-Ed lesson on ownership and endowment.
The entire TED-Ed lesson content can be accessed here: [CLICK].
Yours,
The Science of Ownership team
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.
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.
By Bernadette Kamleitner & Stephan Dickert
As the observant readers of this ownership blog are bound to know, many aspects of our daily decisions and routines revolve around questions related to ownership. Sometimes we pay close attention to what is “ours”, other times we have little awareness of and care for whose possession something is, or we freely share consumption goods (such as food), services (e.g., giving someone a lift), and advice. But how can we make progress on a phenomenon that is enmeshed in different approaches and frameworks, we hear you ask… Fret not, because just in time another special section on Psychological Ownership has arrived to save the day and highlight some facets of the phenomenon!
We gladly announce that all the proofs of our special section have cleared the editing stage and that the contributions are now available online (http://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-behavioral-and-experimental-economics/recent-articles/); the journey that we as a team started in 2013, with the workshop on psychological ownership, has made another step forward towards providing us with a better understanding of the multifaceted influences of ownership.
The special section consists of five exciting papers and a short introduction to the topic by us (A big thank you to all contributors, reviewers, and in particular Ofer Azar for making this special section possible!). What we set out to do is to highlight the two faces of ownership, the legal and the psychological, and their various links to an explicitly varied set of economic decisions in an explicitly varied set of contexts. That is precisely what we got. Jointly the contributions manage to sketch large stretches of the vast potential scope of ownership research. The contributions help understand how legal ownership over something changes one’s attitude and treatment of one’s possessions (e.g., Arora, Bert, Podesta & Krantz, 2015), how ownership history (Wang, Ong, and Tang (2015) and congruence between oneself and the consumption good can change how much we value owning something (Thomas, Yeh, and Jewell, 2015), how psychological ownership can be a result of how financial decisions are made (Kirk, McSherry, & Swain, 2015), and whether being ostracized influences psychological ownership (Walasek, Matthews, & Rakow, 2015).
Given the pervasiveness of ownership as a phenomenon, these insights may help us to identify possible implications of changes to everyday life. And changes we see. In a time characterized by demographic change and social mobility, people are confronted with a world in which things constantly speed up: Potential de-individualization can be an ailment resulting from the speed at which our society plows forward. (Psychological) possessions could and are used to act as an antidote that is sometimes within a moment’s reach. It takes less than a second to post something on the internet and make it instantly available around the globe. It also takes less than a minute to order and potentially download nearly any digital product. For some goods, the notion of ownership history has taken on a whole new meaning.
The speed-up is not only digital, with 3D printers up and coming people not only get others to produce their customized designs, they may be able to produce them themselves. Simultaneously, whatever we make is becoming more accessible to the rest of the world than ever before. Products are on the verge of turning into agents. Many products potentially know more about us—and themselves—than we. What does this mean for the legal and the psychological face of ownership? At the recent opening symposium of SCP Vienna questions such as these have been raised. In particular, Russ Belk opened up a debate of the implications of objects becoming human like. What it means to call something our “own” may change rapidly in the future. The more we understand about it now, the better equipped we will be to use it as a key to unlocking implications of trends that engulf us as we speak.
Editor’s note:
As many of you will have come to realize, 2015 appears to become the year of special issues on ownership. The topic is bound to leave a mark on or even enter the research agenda of many additional scholars in the near future. This is exciting and we hope to bring many of them together on this blog. The future of blog contributions looks bright. I am pleased to foreshadow a couple of upcoming posts.
We are excited to announce that the proofs for our special section on Ownership in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics have already been sent to the authors. A sneak preview is soon to follow.
The special issue on Psychological Ownership in Marketing in the Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice is even one step further. It is out now and digitally available. Marko Sarstedt, one of the key figures behind this special issue, has kindly agreed to share his take on the insights the special issue provides us with. Marko has been known to many due to his intense engagement with partial least square analyses. He is not new to the ownership community either. His interest in psychological ownership has created a discussion platform that I fondly remember. Last year he, together with Colleen Kirk, organized a special session on the topic at the 2014 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS).
Colleen, too, has kindly agreed to join us as a guest blogger and to share some thoughts that her intense engagement with psychological ownership has inspired. We are very excited to have her. She is the only person who has managed to contribute to both special issues. Given that the deadlines were not too far apart this really is a noteworthy feat.
So stay posted and of course post yourself or let us know if there is anything you want to share about ownership. And as always, if you haven’t yet become a “face of ownership” but would like to, simply drop us a line with your photo attached.
Best, Bernadette
We would like to remind you that the submission deadline, which is April 1, 2015, for the special issue on Consumer Ownership & Sharing in the new Journal of the Association of Consumer Research is approaching fast.
The second issue of the very first volume of this brand new journal of the consumer research field is edited by non others than Russell W. Belk and Linda L. Price. Empirical and conceptual papers are sought addressing aspects and issues in the areas of ownership and sharing by consumers. All relevant theoretical perspectives and empirical methods are welcomed.
More information can be found in our Call for Papers section or by downloading the corresponding PDF right here.
The Science of Ownership has been up and running for about two months now and we are very happy to have already sparked the interest of so many great people out there, who are either working on the topic of ownership themselves or simply want to know more about it.
In this sense, we say thank you and look forward to an amazing year 2015, with many more Faces, Features, Contents, Call for Papers, Publications and Postings. It is going to be OUR year.
Best wishes – yours truly,
The Science of Ownership – Team
Welcome to The Science of Ownership – a blog about state-of-the art information on ownership in research & practice from a non-legal perspective!
When we talk about ownership, we usually refer to it as a psychological phenomenon. In a nutshell, we refer to the feeling that something is “mine”, a feeling that everybody knows and is able to relate to. Research on ownership has increased in popularity over the past years. There have been 3 special issue calls on ownership in the last year alone! So people are interested but the field is diverse and sometimes incoherent in terms of interpretations and conceptualizations. In part, this is because people across disciplines have been working on it. With fundamental cultural and societal developments and changes such as collaborative consumption, the sharing economy, co-creation of value and the homogenization of global lifestyles ahead of us, collecting, understanding and synthesizing the myriad of insights has become essential.
We have, therefore, declared it a number one priority to merge existing knowledge by building a community of researchers, as eager as us, devoted to looking across disciplines and to developing a common understanding of ownership as a psychological phenomenon.
The Science of Ownership was created to provide a “one-stop-information-shop” on all things related to the broad academic field of ownership from a non-legal perspective. If you are not familiar with the topic but overwhelmingly curious, you might want to visit the About section first, which features information about this blog as well as the topic per se.
Based on our vision to build a network of people with the common goal to advance our understanding of ownership, we are also going to feature and introduce affiliated researchers and partners on this site. Under Faces & Voices you will find two subpages called Community and Featured. On the Community page, you will find an overview of people who are in one or the other way affiliated with ownership research in general and with this blog in particular. Anyone interested to contribute or appear on this blog is welcome to join our community. Contact us and you will be added to this very page.
On the Featured page, you will find interviews with leading scholars and those who have advanced the field of ownership.
Of course there will also be featured articles and posts on the topic, either written or curated by our contributing team. For those interested in the details there will be a comprehensive, frequently updated reference list on publications touching the topic of ownership. Again we are grateful for any pointers. There is also a growing collection of useful links, resources and happenings.
Finally, we consider this project a collaborative and dynamic one, which means that we intend to prosper and grow without strict limitations. There is much more to come in the future.
Behind this blog stands a passionate group of researchers from the Institute for Marketing & Consumer Research – or m.core if you prefer it short – at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business. Headed by Prof. Bernadette Kamleitner, our team consists of associate professors, PhD students, as well as international research partners and is constantly growing and evolving.
Some of us have dedicated their entire careers to the topic of ownership, some of us are exploring it in new and innovative contexts, some of us are old stagers already and some of us have just started. Independent of age, experience, context or expertise, we share one common attitude though: all of us are in this 100%. The diversity that we represent in our research will benefit this project and we are looking forward to add to this mixture by inviting you to join our community. For more information about the contributing team of The Science of Ownership click here.
The topic is massive, it has occupied many minds and so should this blog. This blog is a collaborative project, we cordially invite YOU to contribute as well – either as a guest author, content and resource scout, or featured as an affiliate and community member. Click here to directly contact us if you are interested in joining the community or want more information on the various collaboration options we provide!
The Science of Ownership 