The Role of Repugnance in Markets: How the Jared Fogle Scandal Affected Patronage of Subway
John Cawley,
Julia Eddelbuettel,
Scott Cunningham,
Matthew D. Eisenberg,
Alan Mathios and
Rosemary J. Avery
No 31782, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Abstract:
Economics has long studied how consumers respond to the disclosure of information about firms. We study a case in which the disclosed information is unrelated to the product or firm leadership, but which could still potentially affect consumer patronage through the mechanism of repugnance, as described in Roth (2007). The information in this case concerns the arrest of Jared Fogle, the advertising pitchman for the Subway sandwich franchise, who was arrested in 2015 on charges of sex with a minor and child pornography. We study how the disclosure of this information, which was widely covered in the media, affected patronage of Subway. We estimate synthetic control models using data from a large nationwide survey of consumers regarding the restaurants they patronize. Despite the close and long-standing association of Jared Fogle with Subway, and heavy publicity of his crimes, we consistently fail to detect any effect of the Jared Fogle scandal on the probability of visiting a Subway restaurant. These results contrast with past studies of negative information disclosure, which tend to find negative impacts on sales, revenue, or stock price of the relevant companies. The absence of an effect in this case suggests that repugnance did not drive demand, and that consumers largely separated the offenses of a symbol of the firm from the products of the firm.
JEL-codes: D1 D22 D80 D83 I1 J1 K42 L2 L83 M2 M3 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-10
Note: CH EH IO
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31782.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
Related works:
Journal Article: The role of repugnance in markets: How the Jared Fogle scandal affected patronage of subway (2025) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:31782
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31782
The price is Paper copy available by mail.
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().