Hema Yoganarasimhan

Who they are

Yoganarasimhan works on marketing and data. The 2023 paper gives her affiliation, and Barzegary's, as the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington in Seattle.

This page records only what the paper and its published record state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Design and evaluation of optimal free trials (2023), with Barzegary and Pani. A software company that sells a suite of related products randomly assigned 337,724 new users to a 7, 14 or 30 day free trial, with 30 days as the firm's standard offer. Giving every user the 7 day trial produced significantly more subscriptions than the 30 day baseline; the 14 day trial did not significantly increase them. The authors rejected the idea that longer trials simply cannibalise demand and found support for a learning account: long stretches of inactivity near the end of a trial were linked to lower conversion. More experienced users benefited more from longer trials, and beginners from shorter ones. A personalised policy improved subscriptions further, but some more complex targeting methods did worse than simply giving everyone a short trial.

Key ideas

Free trials are often explained by loss aversion or the endowment effect: once people have used a product, giving it up should feel like a loss, so a longer trial should make cancelling harder. This experiment did not test that account directly, but its result runs against the prediction, since the shortest trial converted best. The authors' explanation centres on how people learn a product and lose interest when they stop using it.

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