ccording to a recent analysis for in-cites, Professor Donna Hoffman of Vanderbilt University had the highest percent increase in total citations in the field of Economics & Business. Currently, Professor Hoffman’s record in the ISI Essential Science Indicators Web product includes 12 papers cited a total of 279 times to date in the field of Economics & Business and 4 papers cited a total of 82 times to date in the field of Computer Science. Her most-cited papers were done in collaboration with Professor Tom Novak, and deal with the concept of the Internet as a consumer environment. In 1994, together with Professor Novak, Hoffman founded Vanderbilt’s eLab, the nation’s first academic center for the study of the Internet. In the interview below, Hoffman and Novak discuss their highly cited, groundbreaking work.

  Why do you think your work is highly cited?

“As we continued to experiment with the Web more and more, we began to believe that the Internet was a revolution in democratic communication and the most important innovation since the development of the printing press.”

  What are the circumstances which led you to your work?

In May 1993, we heard about this cool new program called X-Mosaic. At the time, this early browser only ran on UNIX workstations.

Like most computer/techno geeks at the time, we were using Archie and Veronica and Gopher and lots of FTP and other arcane programs to get stuff off the Net. Anyone who has used these apps on UNIX knows how cludgy they are, but that’s all there was. So, we installed Mosaic and were instantly and irrevocably blown away. It was literally thrilling when we first started visiting remote destinations on the Web.

Perhaps because of backgrounds that are unique for most marketing professors (we got our Ph.D.s in psychology from the L.L. Thurstone Psychometric Lab at the University of North Carolina, emphasizing behavioral statistics and quantitative models) we were immediately struck by the possibilities. Because we were already heavy Internet users, we knew that the National Science Foundation was getting out of the backbone business and that the Net would soon have commercial traffic as its backbone. We understood the original geek Net culture and we also understood consumer behavior and commerce because we were, after all, business professors, and it just hit us that the Web browser was going to revolutionize user behavior on the Internet and so much more.

So, we did what pretty much every UNIX geek in 1993 did—we set up one of our workstations as a server, "published" content to it, and then read the logs every day, absolutely amazed that people from all over the world were coming to "visit" and that we could interact with them. The best way to describe it was as a liberating experience.

As we continued to experiment with the Web more and more, we began to believe that the Internet was a revolution in democratic communication and the most important innovation since the development of the printing press.

That led us to think about what this could mean for consumer behavior and the strategic marketing implications of commercializing the Internet. In 1994, we wrote an unpublished strategic paper analyzing several popular scenarios of the day (like Interactive TV and closed, proprietary networks like CompuServe and AOL at the time), along with the Internet, and predicted that the open decentralized Internet would come to dominate.

After we wrote that paper, we started to think more deeply about the implications of the commercialization of the Internet, particularly from the consumer’s perspective. That led to our research on the conceptual foundations of the marketing implications of computer-mediated environments, which was published in the Journal of Marketing in 1996 ("Marketing in hypermedia computer-mediated environments: conceptual foundations," J. Marketing 60[3]: 50-68, July 1996). That was hard to get published!

Later, we decided to test the model we laid out in the 1996 J. Marketing paper, and that led to the 2000 Marketing Science paper ("Measuring the customer experience in online environments: a structural modeling approach," Market. Sci. 19[1]: 22-42, WIN 2000).

  Can you describe the significance of this work for your field?

One reason might be that it introduced the idea that the "customer experience" is very important in the Internet environment. Because the work has a strong measurement component, it is relatively easy for other researchers to build on those constructs. Another is our discussion that online consumer behavior could contain both goal-directed and non-directed motivations and that both need to be studied and modeled for the fullest account.

In general, we think our work indicates that there is something special about the Internet that makes it more than "just another marketing channel"—figuring out the nature of what is special is what has been driving much of the innovative work this area.

  Where do you see this research going 10 years from now?

Ten years is very hard to predict, because our field represents a moving target and new ideas come faster than the time to develop them. In our own work, we continue to explore how consumers experience the online environment. We are very interested in the information processing aspects of this experience, such as when consumers are processing information experientially compared to rationally. Some of our work is more theoretical and explores the conceptual issues with these processing modes, and some of it is more applied, exploring how, for example, consumers process online reviews, or measuring the cognitive costs of online search.

We built a virtual laboratory (eLab) in the last couple of years, along with an online panel that now has over 18,000 respondents in it. eLab allows us to test some reasonably sophisticated theories about online behavior in very rich virtual environments. And this year, we launched the new Vanderbilt University Sloan Center for Internet Retailing, which gives us an opportunity for direct interaction with companies whose business issues further inform our research on online consumer behavior.

In addition, we remain interested in the consumer welfare implications of the Internet. Much of our work focuses on the marketing implications of commercializing the Internet, but we have always been interested in where consumer rights intersect (or sometimes clash) with marketing and business interests. These intersections lead to some very interesting policy questions. In the past, we have examined these questions in the context of the digital divide and consumers’ right to information privacy in online environments.

Going forward, we can predict with some degree of confidence that society will face even larger social and economic issues as the Internet becomes more and more essential to daily life. This suggests some very interesting projects, some of which we have just begun to examine!

  What lessons would you draw from your work to share with the next generation of researchers?

Probably the most important lesson is that it is very important to follow your heart and passions. Our early research efforts were met with derision and disbelief. But if you work on problems that interest you and that you believe in, you can’t go wrong.

Donna L. Hoffman, Ph.D.
Professor of Management (Marketing) and Co-Director, eLab
And
Thomas P. Novak, Ph.D.
Professor of Management (Marketing) and Co-Director, eLab
Vanderbilt University
Owen Graduate School of Management
Nashville, TN, USA

• Read comments from Thomas Novak and Donna Hoffman as they discuss their emerging research front in economics & business.
• Donna Hoffman is also listed among the most-improved scientists for the month of July 2003 in the field of economics & buisness.