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Conferences & lectures

Shifting to a Platform Business: How Empathy Mitigates Consumer Risk

Concordia University Research Chair in Consumption and Markets presents Markus Giesler


Date & time
Friday, November 27, 2015
10:30 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Speaker(s)

Markus Giesler

Cost

This event is free

Contact

Zeynep Arsel
514-848-2424 ext. 2956

Where

John Molson Building
1450 Guy
Room MB-1.437

Wheel chair accessible

Yes

How is a sharing market created? Although sharing has been theorized as a fundamental consumer behavior, it is not an uncontested construct, nor is it a completely natural human practice. Moreover, managers of sharing business platforms are often confronted with harsh criticism and resistance from important stakeholder groups, including regulators and consumers when risk is shifted from the traditionally company onto individual market actors.

Building on the sociology of empathy and an institutional analysis of the ridesharing company Uber, this paper introduces market empathization as a process through which platform businesses are repositioned from the institutional domain to the domain of individual empathy. We identify four interrelated processes that address each of the stakeholder complaints and help establish a sharing market: humanization, universalization, prototyping, and contracting.

This study provides both managerial and theoretical implications for the sharing and market systems literatures.

About the speaker

Markus Giesler is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Schulich School of Business and chair of the marketing department. His research, which focuses on market creation and customer experience design, has been funded by major grants, published in top-tier academic journals, and featured in the global media. He blogs at markus-giesler.com.


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