Marketing: Sandra Laporte receives Best Paper Award from Aix Graduate School of Business

July 22, 2013

Assistant Professor Sandra Laporte (Marketing) has won a Best Paper Award for her article entitled, “Similarity as a Double-Edged Sword: The Interpersonal Hot Hand and Gambler's Fallacies in Sweepstakes,”co-written with Professors Gilles Laurent, INSEEC (France), and Barbara Briers, Tilburg University (Netherlands). She was awarded this distinction at the 40th La Londe Conference in Marketing Communications and Consumer Behavior, which is organized by the Aix Graduate School of Business, in France.

Recognized for its contribution to the knowledge of marketing and its impact in the field, the article shows that a consumer’s similarity to the previous winner can increase or decrease the perceived probability of winning and the intention to participate in a sweepstakes. When an advertisement features a previous winner with his or her demographic characteristics, potential participants think they have a better chance of winning and participate more in the next drawing if they and the previous winner have similarities, such as the same gender or first name (effect of the interpersonal hot hand fallacy). Conversely, if potential participants focus on the randomness of the drawing, they find the sweepstakes less appealing when the previous winner resembles them (effect of the interpersonal gambler's fallacy).

Professor Laporte is co-lead of the Panel HEC Montréal, a recruitment tool offered to researchers and to master’s students as part of their research project. She holds a PhD in Management Sciences and an MSc in Management from HEC Paris, as well as a Master in Marketing and Strategy from the Université Paris-Dauphine. Before joining HEC Montréal in June 2010, she also taught at HEC Paris. She specializes in consumer judgment and decision under uncertainty, the sales promotion and lottery design, as well as the impact of financial dissatisfaction on eating behaviours.