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UK farm shops have received little attention in the alternative food network (AFN) literature. Farm shop environmental context was interrogated to establish its influence on the consumption experience. A holistic multi-methods approach was adopted drawing on autoethnography, an exploratory survey, G.I.S, an open-ended customer questionnaire, customer e-WOM reviews, online space rhetoric and imagery, and interviews with owners and farmers partners. Braun and Clarke's formalised approach to thematic analysis was employed. A negotiated 'transference' of trust was identified between vendor/producers and consumers, dependent on primary producers adhering to their production ethos when sourcing brought-in products. Negotiated transference of trust was identified as connected to institutional proximity, afforded to farm-sited farm shops, facilitating customers' acceptance of AFN hybridity. Farm shops met Pine and Gilmore's (1998) five factors that aid consumption experiences. These enterprises were revealed to be places of nostalgia-evoking experiential consumption (Hamilton & Wagner, 2014) realised through owner intention (e.g., retroscaping) and incidental associations (i.e., multi-sensory on-farm location). Farm shops facilitated customer escapism through a positive themed event, revealing how the materialities of the farm shop and its working farm environ establish experiential consumption; identified as a source of resistance to supermarket co-optation. Farmers' partners exhibited an entrepreneur identity in the development and running of the enterprise. Reporting positive rewards of status, emotional pride, and economic contribution to the farm business. These benefits appeared compartmentalised to the enterprise with renegotiation of reproductive work allocation unrealised. The multi-disciplinary approach employed a conceptually-driven lens, utilising convention theory and Brown's (1999) retroscape, to explore the practices and representations of alterity, experiential consumption, and patriarchy in the formation of the farm shop. The findings provide knowledge progression and promise new ways of understanding AFNs.

The aim of this study is to investigate the interrelationships between place and taste through a multi-sited ethnography of music consumption. Place and taste are important theoretical constructs that have been studied extensively across the humanities and social sciences. Yet, there is a scarcity of research that attempts to bring together these constructs in the fields of marketing and consumer research and beyond. In particular, prior consumer culture theory (CCT) research has not taken into account the spatial processes through which consumers enact, perform and further develop their tastes in the market place. More significantly, little empirical research illustrates how different consumption spaces tend to orchestrate and shape consumers’ tastes. As such, this study focuses on the context of music consumption and aims to explore spatial taste formation processes via consumers’ aesthetic experiences in popular (festival) and classical (concert hall) music places within the fields of indie and classical music consumption respectively. The emergent findings are structured upon four chapters (papers) and develop specific research objectives which revolve around the overarching aim of the study, namely the exploration of the interrelationships between place and taste. This study brings together both structural and experiential dimensions of taste and highlights the ontological significance of phenomenological understandings of space and place for marketing and consumer research.

My dissertation explores how firms can use individual longitudinal choice data to increase usage and spending in experiential goods categories, specifically in two different live events domains: art performances and sports events. In the first essay, I study how consumers choose customizable bundles of art performances while balancing preferences for the constituent items and within-bundle variety. Known as the diversification effect, consumers prefer higher levels of variety when making choices for multiple consumption occasions. This suggests that picking the right level of variety is a crucial part of art performance bundle choices. While customizability adds flexibility to consumers’ choices, due to the large number of possible bundles, it could increase consumers’ cognitive costs. Based on the proposed model, I make individualized recommendations that reflect heterogeneous preferences for not only the performances but also for the level of variety. To model consumers’ choices of art performance bundles, it is necessary to 1) characterize the performances, 2) define and measure the variety of prospective bundles, and 3) devise an efficient way of estimating bundle choices in the prohibitively large combinatorial space of possible bundles. Using natural language processing, I extract latent dimensions of the art performances that can be used to characterize the performances. I use these latent attributes to construct variety metrics that capture consumers’ perception of bundle-level variety. Additionally, I devise a novel Monte Carlo approach to integrate over the space of unobserved order in which the bundle was assembled to tame the curse-of-dimensionality in the estimation process. I find that including variety metrics substantially improves predictive performance of the model, allowing the performing arts organization to make better individualized recommendations. In the second essay, I study the cross-channel structure of the National Football League (NFL) ticket markets and consumers’ purchase channel choices with the goal of devising optimal dynamic pricing and inventory policies across different channels. Professional sports teams have widely adopted dynamic pricing policy, which resulted in significant revenue improvements. At the same time, the growth of legal secondary markets has contributed to the development of a complex market structure with multiple channels. Understanding the cross-channel structure and consumers’ channel choice process allows teams to make more informed pricing and inventory decisions. Partnering with an anonymous NFL team, I collected time-series data on the availability and pricing of tickets on primary and three major secondary channels and combine it with transaction data. I propose a three-part model to understand the supply and demand dynamics: sellers’ supply decision, buyers’ purchase decision, and channel choice to capture the evolution of the choice environment where ticket availability and prices vary over time and channels. I find that there exist significant price differences across channels even after controlling for seat quality, and that channel choices reveal differential price sensitivities, effects of time-until-game across channels, and strong past dependence. Importantly, the investigation into row-level supply decisions reveal potential cross-channel effect of sudden increase in ticket availability on the primary channel due to an unexpected buyback from the brokers, opening a window to investigate the causal effect of supply changes across the channels.

When it comes to enhancing consumer welfare, psychological research suggests that people can get a better hedonic return on their money if they opt to buy experiences instead of material possessions. While the existing literature demonstrates that experiential purchases provide more enduring happiness than material purchases in recall, the present investigation is the first to explore differences that occur before purchases have been made. It demonstrates that anticipatory states are more positive when one is thinking about future experiential consumption than when one is considering future material consumption. It further goes on to show that people often delay their consumption of upcoming experiential purchases in order to prolong these pleasurable feelings. And finally, reasons for why the anticipation of experiential purchases tends to be more rewarding are examined. People reliably talk to others more about their impending experiences than their soon-to-be-bought material goods and they derive considerable hedonic benefits from doing so. These conclusions are arrived at using diverse methods, including surveys, experiments, experience sampling, and an archival analysis. The research reported here adds to the growing body of evidence that there is more satisfaction to be had from spending on doing rather than having, and, notably, that this recommendation is robust across a rather broad time course.