Kapoor, Anuj Pal

Political choice has huge importance, either expressed in the balloting place or in the exit poll, in bringing a political party to power and thus impacting the economy and society's welfare. Research in leadership and decision-making suggests that the physical characteristics and traits of an individual influence the consumer's trustworthiness. Despite being a less explored research area, studying the impact of specific verbal and non-verbal cues of a political leader through a technological lens, such as eye-tracking has been sparsely talked about. Three sets of experiments were conducted to study voters' visual attention and reactions to gage their willingness to vote. First, an eye-tracking tool was used to record the visual attention and regions of interest (ROI) of voters. Subsequently, a short survey was used to analyze the “willingness to vote”, followed by a pilot study on their attention to non-verbal cues from the candidate. Also, a sentiment analysis of the voters was gathered from social media platforms. The present study analyzed the non-verbal aspects of a political leader with regard to voting intention and found that even a few of the non-verbal cues have an influence on the willingness to vote for a candidate. The findings contribute to the literature of neuro-politics and decision-making by analyzing voters' experiences of two political leaders, Narendra Modi (NaMo) and Rahul Gandhi (RaGa) based on non-verbal cues. Political parties and candidates should focus on non-verbal cues to increase their chances of winning elections. In addition, practitioners from the industry should incorporate appropriate non-verbal cues while designing ad campaigns, personal branding, PR campaigns, and CEO addresses.

Online furniture rental platforms are expanding choice and convenience, allowing customers to rent from a wide array of providers with the click of a button or tap of a finger. The business of online furniture rental is undergoing rapid change as new online platforms race to capture markets and customers across most of the metropolitan cities in India. The paper aims to investigate attributes for online furniture rental platforms by proposing and empirically testing platform attributes-conversion model, examine how platform characteristics influence the renting decision of a consumer and how it subsequently lead to conversion. A mix method design was adopted for the study and a pilot study comprising of 341 respondents was carried out. The study focuses on six key attributes - occupational mobility, psychological ownership, complementary services, social gratification, perceived value, and customization, while identifying the most important attributes for renting furniture online.

Cart abandonment is a phenomenon which has perplexed online retailers since the inception of online shopping. Over time, the current phenomenon has become even more complicated, giving rise to a newer form of abandonment, check-out abandonment. While cart abandonment is a known term in online retailing, check-out abandonment is still not much known. Analyzing the responses of 267 users shopping on one of the largest online retailers in India, the study used structural equation modeling to reveal the two types of abandonment phenomenon's and their underlining factors. The study further investigates the two type of abandonment phenomenon's and identify related drivers leading to cart and check-out abandonment. Empirical results reveal that cart abandonment is a result of multiple variables starting from cross channel price disparity, free shipping, ratings and review to platform aesthetic design. Whereas check-out abandonment, is a result of shipping policy and account fatigue. In addition, ‘single females’ were identified to abandon their shopping process before the check-out page whereas ‘married males’ were identified to abandon their carts post the check-out page. The study discusses contribution to theory and provides future research directions for marketers, especially online retailers.