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Author: Man Xie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Consumers make decisions under incomplete information. In addition to the generic information availability and accessibility, how firms selectively provide information and how consumers collect information all influence consumer decisions, including product choice, purchase, and reselling. In Essay One, we study the impacts of firms providing information on product list prices on online consumer purchases. Our examination of Amazon data finds that (1) displaying list price in information-rich online markets has no impact on sales when used as a standalone marketing strategy, but can positively or negatively influence sales if implemented concurrently when the price decreases; (2) the direction of that influence depends on user-generated information; and (3) list price interacts with price promotion via both price sensitivity and demand shift. Specifically, when a product with favorable consumer reviews lowers its price, simultaneously displaying list price boosts the effectiveness of price promotion by (i) shifting demand upwards and (ii) increasing price sensitivity. However, when a product with unfavorable reviews lowers its price, simultaneously displaying list price shifts demand downwards, which decreases sales or even destroys the sales gain that price promotion would have generated without list price. In Essay Two, we study the impacts of imperfect information from the initial choice set and post-purchase consumption on consumers' reselling price decisions in C2C (consumer to consumer) markets. We model C2C markets and show they significantly differ from traditional B2C (business to consumer) markets. For example, consumers (as buyers) tend to buy products with overlooked weaknesses rather than overlooked strengths, resulting in over-optimistic choices and post-choice remorse (i.e., "buyer's remorse"). Surprisingly, both increase with a more exhaustive choice search. Moreover, even without buyer's remorse, imperfect information alone causes consumers' valuations (as owners) and asking prices (as resellers) to decrease with the duration of ownership as residual uncertainty decreases. Hence, unlike traditional B2C selling, we find that C2C reselling asking prices depend on reseller expected utility from prolonged consumption, the original consideration set size, the duration of ownership, and residual uncertainty. Our empirical analyses provide evidence from both experimental data and aggregate real estate data.
Author: Man Xie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Consumers make decisions under incomplete information. In addition to the generic information availability and accessibility, how firms selectively provide information and how consumers collect information all influence consumer decisions, including product choice, purchase, and reselling. In Essay One, we study the impacts of firms providing information on product list prices on online consumer purchases. Our examination of Amazon data finds that (1) displaying list price in information-rich online markets has no impact on sales when used as a standalone marketing strategy, but can positively or negatively influence sales if implemented concurrently when the price decreases; (2) the direction of that influence depends on user-generated information; and (3) list price interacts with price promotion via both price sensitivity and demand shift. Specifically, when a product with favorable consumer reviews lowers its price, simultaneously displaying list price boosts the effectiveness of price promotion by (i) shifting demand upwards and (ii) increasing price sensitivity. However, when a product with unfavorable reviews lowers its price, simultaneously displaying list price shifts demand downwards, which decreases sales or even destroys the sales gain that price promotion would have generated without list price. In Essay Two, we study the impacts of imperfect information from the initial choice set and post-purchase consumption on consumers' reselling price decisions in C2C (consumer to consumer) markets. We model C2C markets and show they significantly differ from traditional B2C (business to consumer) markets. For example, consumers (as buyers) tend to buy products with overlooked weaknesses rather than overlooked strengths, resulting in over-optimistic choices and post-choice remorse (i.e., "buyer's remorse"). Surprisingly, both increase with a more exhaustive choice search. Moreover, even without buyer's remorse, imperfect information alone causes consumers' valuations (as owners) and asking prices (as resellers) to decrease with the duration of ownership as residual uncertainty decreases. Hence, unlike traditional B2C selling, we find that C2C reselling asking prices depend on reseller expected utility from prolonged consumption, the original consideration set size, the duration of ownership, and residual uncertainty. Our empirical analyses provide evidence from both experimental data and aggregate real estate data.
Author: Na Wen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Consumers
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This dissertation consists of two central parts. Part one of the dissertation examines the impact of interactive restructuring on decision processes and outcomes. Five experimental studies show that consumers examine less information and engage in more compensatory decision processes when interactive restructuring tools are available. Consumers also increase their use of restructuring tools in cognitively challenging choice environments. The availability of a sorting tool improves objective and subjective decision quality when attributes are positively correlated, or when the number of alternatives in a choice set is large, but not when attributes are negatively correlated or choice sets are small. Greater use of interactive restructuring tools has deleterious effects on decision quality when attributes are negatively correlated. Under time pressure the availability of an interactive restructuring tool improves decision quality, even when attributes are negatively correlated, since time pressure limits tool overuse. Finally, the effects of multiple interactive restructuring tools on decision making vary by the types of tools that marketers make available to consumers.
Author: Morris B. Holbrook
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 0803972970
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
"Once again, Morris B. Holbrook has combined insightful commentary on the field of consumer behavior with a readable and enjoyable writing style. A must read for anyone interested in the latest thinking in the field." Ron Hill, Professor and Chair of Marketing, Villanova University "A delightfully idiosyncratic history of consumer research. What enthralled readers will get from his stylish exposition is a socio-psychocultural description of the consumer through the ages, along with a description of attempts to understand the consumer. Scholarly yet readable, Holbrook's history is a classic study of consumerism too. Editor's Choice." --Business Today In recent years, consumer research has emerged as an academic specialty of growing concern to marketing scholars and of increased importance on today's university campuses. Courses on consumer behavior--taught in virtually every academic program of business or management--draw heavily on work by consumer researchers. Despite this wide and growing recognition as an emergent area of study, no book appears to exist on the history, nature, and types of consumer research or on the variegated and often hotly debated issues that surround this field of inquiry. Consumer Research fills this gap by providing an account of the recent historical developments in consumer research and by showing how the evolution of this discipline has affected the research. The author offers a personal and subjective glance at how various changes in the field have come about and how they have shaped studies of consumption. Marketing scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduates concentrating in marketing will find Consumer Research irresistible reading.
Author: Jianqing Zheng (Ph. D.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Modern consumers are living in a digital environment overloaded with information (Lee and Lee 2004). Due to their limited information processing capacity, consumers are exhibiting very low reading and processing depths of online information (e.g. superficially reading only titles or the first few sentences of news articles and user-generate contents). This new behavioral pattern inspires my dissertation to investigate novel consumer behavior phenomenon and develop organic theories situated in the digital environment with superficial information processing. In essay 1, I explore how sharing via WOM shapes the self-concept with a specific focus on consumer subjective knowledge. We posit that sharing WOM content shapes the self-concept leading sharers to inflate their subjective knowledge related to their shared content, and we test internalized self-presentation as an explanation of this effect. Specifically, we posit that sharing digital content involves public self-presentation which signals expertise, and that as sharers internalize this behavior, they accordingly alter their self-concepts, leading to increased subjective knowledge of the shared content. Six studies provide correlational (study 1) and casual (study 2) evidence for this phenomenon, and examine the internalized self-presentation mechanism by varying the degree of self-presentation in the digital sharing process, including salience of self-presentation (study 3), freedom of sharing (study 4a) and interaction expectancy with audience (study 4b). Finally study 5 examines a downstream consequence of this effect: more risky financial decision making. In essay 2, I explore how a novel type of information during the consumer online decision journey, “mere simultaneous presence”, which refers to information about other consumers who are shopping synchronously, (e.g. “129 people are shopping for hotels in San Francisco on Expedia right now”), affects consumers’ decision-making. We propose that the mere simultaneous presence of others leads to more polarized product evaluations, causing decreased decision difficulty. In contrast to previous scarcity research, we hypothesize that this effect is independent of scarcity perceptions and instead caused by more elaborated processing towards the product options, which is facilitated by a “shared attention” state (Shteynberg 2015) with other consumers. Six studies explore the basic effect and provide evidence for the underlying shared decision process in multiple online decision settings
Author: Katherine N. Barasz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This research investigates the continuum of choice--unseen, unanticipated causes and consequences of consumer decisions. Three essays investigate hidden factors that influence the choices we make, subtle ways to affect choice at the moment of execution, and the overlooked signals that our choices convey (correctly or incorrectly) about us to others. Essay one investigates the perverse tendency to hope for the worst: when faced with a difficult decision (e.g., whether or not to have surgery), people can paradoxically feel subjectively better with--and even actively prefer--objectively worse but certain news (e.g., "95% chance of a disease") over objectively better but more uncertain news (e.g., "50% chance of a disease"). This, in turn, has the potential to meaningfully change people's subsequent choices and preferences in unexpected ways. Essay two examines a subtle intervention to change people's decisions about engagement levels: arbitrarily grouping discrete tasks or items together as part of an apparent "set" motivates people to reach perceived completion points--or finish a pseudo-set--even in the absence of extrinsic incentives. Essay three explores the judgments people make after observing others' choices; specifically, upon learning of someone's choice of one option, people erroneously believe that person must dislike dissimilar options, leading to a pervasive and systematic prediction error.
Author: Patrick E. Murphy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134091079
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Marketing is among the most powerful cultural forces at work in the contemporary world, affecting not merely consumer behaviour, but almost every aspect of human behaviour. While the potential for marketing both to promote and threaten societal well-being has been a perennial focus of inquiry, the current global intellectual and political climate has lent this topic extra gravitas. Through original research and scholarship from the influential Mendoza School of Business, this book looks at marketing’s ramifications far beyond simple economic exchange. It addresses four major topic areas: societal aspects of marketing and consumption; the social and ethical thought; sustainability; and public policy issues, in order to explore the wider relationship of marketing within the ethical and moral economy and its implications for the common good. By bringing together the wide-ranging and interdisciplinary contributions, it provides a uniquely comprehensive and challenging exploration of some of the most pressing themes for business and society today.
Author: Daria Dzyabura
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 112
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Book Description
This thesis consists of three related essays which explore new approaches to modeling and measurement of consumer decision strategies. The focus is on decision strategies that deviate from von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theory. Essays 1 and 2 explore decision rules that consumers use to form their consideration sets. Essay 1 proposes disjunctions-of-conjunctions (DOC) decision rules that generalize several well-studied decision models. Two methods are proposed for estimating the model. Consumers' consideration sets for global positioning systems are observed for both calibration and validation data. For the validation data, the cognitively simple DOC-based methods predict better than the ten benchmark methods on an information theoretic measure and on hit rates. The results are robust with respect to format by which consideration is measured, sample, and presentation of profiles. Essay 2 develops and tests an active-machine-learning method to select questions adaptively when consumers use heuristic decision rules. The method tailors priors to each consumer based on a "configurator." Subsequent questions maximize information about the decision heuristics (minimize expected posterior entropy). To update posteriors after each question the posterior is approximated with a variational distribution and uses belief-propagation. The method runs sufficiently fast to select new queries in under a second and provides significantly and substantially more information per question than existing methods based on random, market-based, or orthogonal questions. The algorithm is tested empirically in a web-based survey conducted by an American automotive manufacturer to study vehicle consideration. Adaptive questions outperform market-based questions when estimating heuristic decision rules. Heuristics decision rules predict validation decisions better than compensatory rules. Essay 3 proposes a model of product search when preferences are constructed during the process of search: consumers learn what they like and dislike as they examine products. Product recommendations, whether made by sales people or online recommendation systems, bring products to the consumer's attention and impact his/her preferences. Changing preferences changes the products the consumer will choose to search; at the same time, the products the consumer chooses to search will determine the future shifts in preferences. Accounting for this two-way relationship between products and preferences is critical in optimizing recommendations.
Author: Ratapol Teratanavat
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Consumer behavior
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Abstract: Functional foods have received increasing attention from consumers and food producers and manufacturers over the past years, yet few studies have examined economic and marketing issues that are related to foods with additional health benefits beyond basic nutrients. This dissertation consists of three papers that employ different techniques to understand consumer behavior in this domain. The first essay applies a choice experiment to examine consumer valuation of various attributes of functional foods, using a statewide mail survey. Results indicate that consumers place positive value on health benefits and ingredient naturalness. Moreover, they are willing to pay higher prices for products having these attributes. The data also reveal that taste preferences tend to vary across consumers. Individual characteristics that tend to affect preferences include age, education, and income level. Past purchase behavior for functional foods, organic foods, and natural foods also has significant influence on preferences. The second essay uses the Elaboration Likelihood Model as a theoretical framework to understand the role of health claims in consumer assessment of products. Previous research and theory related to the role of health claims in persuasive messages has portrayed health claims as having little effect on consumers' attitudes. The present research, however, suggests this conclusion may be premature. A new conceptualization of the role of health claims in persuasion is proposed. Practical significance of the laboratory studies is discussed in light of recent changes in product design as well as changes in FDA rules regarding label claims. The third essay focuses on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)'s recently amended policy on food labeling. This policy allows different qualified levels of health claims on product labels, based on the strength of scientific evidence supporting the claims. This essay examines whether consumers understand and can differentiate between these qualified health claims. Results show that people do not perceive significant differences between the different levels of qualified claims. An additional experiment suggests that a visual aid may be an important device to help consumers understand the scientific basis supporting a claim.
Author: Aaron A. Schroeder
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781267865373
Category : Consumers
Languages : en
Pages : 106
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Book Description
Individuals' consumption decisions constitute a key foundational block of economics. Although some intrinsic factors behind consumer decisions can be evaluated in a controlled setting, learning about the role of preferences and availability of information in other decisions requires changes by outside actors. The first chapter of my dissertation uses wagering choices made by individuals for an uncertain gamble to measure their attitudes toward risk. The second chapter looks at how characteristics of loans taken out by consumers change when a large supplier, with an atypical set of incentives, leaves the market. The final chapter looks at how increased demand for volunteers during elections, along with increased awareness by all consumers of election-related issues, impact individuals' takeup and intensity of volunteering, a consumption good.
Author: Koichi Yonezawa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Consumer behavior
Languages : en
Pages : 191
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Book Description
It is well understood that decisions made under uncertainty differ from those made without risk in important and significant ways. Yet, there is very little research into how uncertainty manifests itself in the most ubiquitous of decision-making environments: Consumers' day-to-day decisions over where to shop, and what to buy for their daily grocery needs. Facing a choice between stores that either offer relatively stable "everyday low prices" (EDLP) or variable prices that reflect aggressive promotion strategies (HILO), consumers have to choose stores under price-uncertainty. I find that consumers' attitudes toward risk are critically important in determining store-choice, and that heterogeneity in risk attitudes explains the co-existence of EDLP and HILO stores - an equilibrium that was previously explained in somewhat unsatisfying ways. After choosing a store, consumers face another source of risk. While knowing the quality or taste of established brands, consumers have very little information about new products. Consequently, consumers tend to choose smaller package sizes for new products, which limits their exposure to the risk that the product does not meet their prior expectations. While the observation that consumers purchase small amounts of new products is not new, I show how this practice is fully consistent with optimal purchase decision-making by utility-maximizing consumers. I then use this insight to explain how manufacturers of consumer packaged goods (CPGs) respond to higher production costs. Because consumers base their purchase decisions in part on package size, manufacturers can use package size as a competitive tool in order to raise margins in the face of higher production costs. While others have argued that manufacturers reduce package sizes as a means of raising unit-prices (prices per unit of volume) in a hidden way, I show that the more important effect is a competitive one: Changes in package size can soften price competition, so manufacturers need not rely on fooling consumers in order to pass-through cost increases through changes in package size. The broader implications of consumer behavior under risk are dramatic. First, risk perceptions affect consumers' store choice and product choice patterns in ways that can be exploited by both retailers and manufacturers. Second, strategic considerations prevent manufacturers from manipulating package size in ways that seem designed to trick consumers. Third, many services are also offered as packages, and also involve uncertainty, so the effects identified here are likely to be pervasive throughout the consumer economy.
