If you’re looking to furnish your home with vintage furniture or expand a collection of treasured memorabilia, new research from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and the Cornell University SC Johnson College of Business suggests those items could end up being cheaper if buyers emphasize a mutual connection to the past.

The research also has implications for sustainability.

“While a good gains value through association with an individual owner, it also gains value through its connection with a collective past,” said Kate Christensen, assistant professor of marketing at the Kelley School. “But connecting to the people who came before changes the value of objects. Sellers value the good more, but they will accept less from a person who also values that good because they want the link to the people who came before them — the heritage connection.”

Christensen is the lead author of the article, “The Role of Heritage Connection in Consumer Valuation,” recently published by the Journal of Marketing Research. Her co-author is Suzanne Shu, the John S. Dyson Professor in Marketing and dean of faculty and research at Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business.

“It’s long been known in behavioral economics that owners will often over-value an item,” Shu said. “Yet, we were observing almost an opposite pattern: Owners were willing to take a below-market sales price if the buyer was somehow connected to the object’s past.

“Even more surprising was that they’re offering a lower sales price to people who they think are likely to value the item the most. From an economic perspective, it’s an interesting demonstration of how people are willing to trade between money and emotional connections. From a marketplace perspective, it gives us insight into the selling and donating of the heirlooms retirees may be trying to get rid of.”

They conducted their study with Cornell alumni at a reunion weekend, with sellers in Facebook Marketplace and with CloudResearch-approved participants on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform.

Past research has found that owners who are highly attached to sentimental items demonstrate heightened sensitivity to the future usage of their goods. This research suggests that sellers find it easier to part with an item when selling to buyers who share a connection to the item’s past.

Christensen and Shu’s research is applicable to markets that involve resale, such as the $43 trillion U.S. housing market and the $450 billion collectibles market.

“To get a discount on an older house, real estate agents might encourage their clients to use homebuyer ‘love letters’ that emphasize their experience living in a house from the same time period and their goal of staying connected to the past while enjoying the house,” Christensen said.

But the research could have significance beyond the hunt for a good bargain.

“While we analyze buying and selling of consumer goods in this paper, our work has implications for sustainability,” Christensen said. “While individuals sell goods, governments sell land, oil, water and mining rights. This research suggests that emphasizing a natural resource’s connection to generations past and the people who came before may make citizens value the land more and may make them more concerned about who gets the rights to the resource.

“We hope that understanding the link between the past and the present will pave a way to understanding how to preserve and protect our future.”

Nearly everyone has a possession that connects them to the past. For Christensen, that item was her grandmother’s teacups. Her research confirmed her own feelings that there is a distinction between selling to a collector and to someone who wants to maintain the same connection to those who came before them.

“Novelist William Faulkner famously wrote, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’” she said. “This is true in the marketplace, where the past has been mostly ignored. We found that a heritage connection — a seller’s link to the people who came before them — affects the decisions consumers make in a marketplace.”

GDERM Clinic is pleased to introduce the game-changing, triple FDA-approved Sofwave skin tightening and skin lifting technology to the Cagayan Valley region.

Sofwave delivers FDA-cleared Synchronous Ultrasound Parallel Beam SUPERB technology. The high-frequency, low-divergence ultrasound waves and heat reach the deeper layers of skin where collagen production and skin tightening are stimulated. This helps reduce fine lines and wrinkles and lift the eyebrows, neck, and submental (under the chin) area, no matter the skin type or skin color.

“We’re taking skin rejuvenation to the next level with Sofwave.  It’s non-invasive and can fit into an active lifestyle. Patients love the fact that they can have the treatment and go back to their daily routine right after,” said Dr. Mark Gerald R. Serrano, Medical Director of GDERM Clinic.  “The treatment is done within 30-45 minutes and there’s no downtime. Patients can see and feel the difference after one session.”

Award-winning technology

In 2022, Sofwave’s game-changing technology was recognized at Cosmopolitan’s Holy Grail Beauty Awards, NewBeauty’s Beauty Awards and SHAPE’s Skin Awards. Sofwave™ was also awarded by Elle in 2021.

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About GDERM Clinic

Established in 2019, GDERM Clinic aims to provide quality dermatologic care to residents of Isabela and the rest of the region through world-class clinical and aesthetic treatments.

Dr. Mark Gerald R. Serrano is a board-certified dermatologist. He finished his dermatology training at the National Specialty Center for Dermatology of  Jose R. Reyes Memorial Medical Center.

For some people, wigs are a fun and colorful fashion accessory, but for those with hair loss from alopecia or other conditions, they can provide a real sense of normalcy and boost self-confidence. Whether made from human or synthetic strands, however, most hairpieces lose their luster after being worn day after day. Now, researchers in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces report a new way to make wigs more durable and long lasting.

Wigs come in all colors of the rainbow and in every style imaginable. Some cover the whole head, while others are “extensions,” sections of hair that clip onto existing locks to make them look fuller or longer. Hairpieces can be made of real human strands or synthetic materials, but either way, washing, UV exposure from the sun and repeated styling can cause these products to become dry and brittle.

To extend the wearable life of wigs, some researchers have spray-coated a layer of graphene oxide on them, whereas other teams have immersed wig hairs in a keratin/halloysite nanocomposite. Because it’s difficult to cover an entire hairpiece with these methods, Guang Yang, Huali Nie and colleagues wanted to see if a nanocomposite applied with a tried-and-true approach for coating surfaces with ultrathin films — known as the Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) technique — could improve coverage and increase durability.

The researchers first developed a keratin and graphene oxide nanocomposite as the coating material. To coat hairs with the LB method, they dipped a few human or synthetic hairs into water in a special apparatus with moveable side barriers. After the nanocomposite was spread on the water’s surface with an atomizer, the barriers were moved inward to compress the film— like the trash compactor that almost crushed the heroes in the movie Star Wars. After 30 minutes, the researchers lifted the hairs out of the water, and as they did so, the film coated the locks.

Compared to the immersion technique, the LB method provided more coverage. In addition, hairs treated with the LB approach sustained less UV damage, were less prone to breakage and could hold more moisture than those that were simply immersed in the nanocomposite. They also dissipated heat better and generated less static electricity when rubbed with a rubber sheet. The researchers say that the method can be scaled up for use by companies that manufacture wigs.