Vinit Tipnis

Vinit S. Tipnis is a PhD student in Operations Management in the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University Bloomington. His research focuses on corporate social responsibility practices and how they affect the operations of firms and non-governmental organizations.

In his first-year project, Vinit studies the practice of cause marketing – a concept where a firm donates a portion of its profits to a partnering non-governmental organization (NGO). NGOs receive two different types of donations from donors.  The two types of donations are earmarked and flexible. Earmarked donations refer to restricted donations targeted for a particular purpose and can only be used for that purpose. Flexible donations refer to unrestricted donations that can be freely used by the NGO in any of their programs. In a traditional donation setting, a donor is directly donating to an NGO; in a cause marketing setting, the firm donates to the NGO conditional on the customer purchase. Research provides a clear understanding on how earmarking and flexibility influence donations. However, there is not a clear understanding on how these two types of donations influence the willingness to pay for a product. In his project, Vinit intends on using choice-based conjoint analysis to disentangle the impact of earmarked and flexible donations in a cause marketing campaign. In the conjoint analysis, the primary attributes will be brand, price, quality of product, and quality of reviews.

Prior to starting his PhD, Vinit received his bachelor’s degree from the Kelley School of Business where he majored in Supply Chain Management and Business Analytics.