Vahid Yousefi

Executive Cognition and Market-Based Assets: The Influence of CEO Overconfidence on Brand, Social, and Knowledge Equity

Vahid Yousefi & Thomas Brashear Alejandro

Intangible market-based assets now drive most of a firm's value, yet we know little about how the people at the top shape them. Grounded in Upper Echelons Theory, this project separates CEO overconfidence into overestimation, overplacement, and overprecision, and shows how each builds or erodes a firm's brand, social, and knowledge equity — with CMO presence and CEO emotionality as key moderators. It draws on a large panel of U.S. public firms (ExecuComp, Compustat, Capital IQ, ESG indicators, and earnings-call transcripts), complemented by a matched event-study design.
Stage: data collection is currently in progress.

You Are Who You Read and Where You Publish

George Milne, Vahid Yousefi, Bruce Weinberg, & Kyungin Ryu

This project maps the intellectual structure of marketing scholarship by analyzing the publication and citation records of leading marketing scholars collected from Google Scholar. Using scholars’ publication patterns across core marketing journals, we identify five distinct research “tribes” within the field. The goal is to make the hidden structure of academic marketing more visible, helping PhD students recognize their intellectual community, clarify their research interests, and navigate early career choices more deliberately.

Stage: data has been collected and analyzed; the manuscript is in preparation.

A Meta-Analytical Assessment of the Push–Pull–Mooring Theory

Vahid Yousefi, Samira Yaabdollahi, & Hossein Hashemi Bahramani

This project uses meta-analytic methods to synthesize empirical research on push, pull, and mooring factors among salespeople and frontline employees. Drawing on prior studies, we classify the forces that create pressure to leave, attract employees toward alternatives, or keep them attached to their current roles. The project aims to clarify how these forces operate across boundary-spanning work contexts and to identify where the literature offers strong evidence, inconsistent findings, or opportunities for future theory development.

Stage: data has been collected and initial meta-analyses have been conducted; the manuscript direction is currently being refined.

Losing Control Behind the Wheel: How Subscription Models Shape Consumer Ownership and Fairness Perceptions

Samira Yaabdollahi & Vahid Yousefi

As firms increasingly shift from product-oriented to service-oriented strategies, many are embedding add-on features into physical products while restricting access through subscriptionbased activation. This research examines how consumers respond to this emerging purchase model in the automobile industry. Study 1 uses web-scraped Reddit discussions and topic modeling to explore consumers’ reactions to subscription-based locked features, identifying perceived price unfairness and reduced psychological ownership as two central areas of concern. Building on these findings, Study 2 uses a scenario-based experiment to examine how subscription-based access, compared with upfront payment, influences consumers’ purchase intentions through these two mechanisms. The experiment also investigates whether feature innovativeness and feature type, specifically safety versus convenience, shape consumers’ responses to subscription-based add-on features. The research contributes to the literature on psychological ownership and pricing by showing how firms’ continued control over features embedded in legally owned products can transform a pricing decision into broader judgments about fairness, control, and ownership.

Stage: data has been collected and analysis is in progress.