The effect of salience on mental accounting: how integration versus segregation of payment influences purchase decisions

Although mental accounting principles are generally robust, the integration‐of‐losses principle often fails. This research argues that when information salience is high, people actively segregate. To demonstrate that effect, this research uses purchase decision making for which the total payment is a key decision factor and compares examples such as the following equivalent total payments: “$120.95 for a stroller plus $19.95 for shipping” (i.e., segregation) versus “$140.90 for a stroller including shipping” (i.e., integration). Two studies demonstrate that integration increases purchase intentions when the salience of the smaller payment is higher. Specifically, integration leads to higher purchase intentions than does segregation when (1) the surcharge is visually more salient, (2) the surcharge is easy to process, and (3) price perceptions are stimulus instead of recall driven. Therefore, this research extends mental accounting by identifying conditions in which the integration‐of‐losses principle is likely to prevail. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The benefits of retail therapy: Making purchase decisions reduces residual sadness

People often shop when feeling sad, but whether and why shopping reduces residual (lingering) sadness remains an open question. Sadness is strongly associated with a sense that situational forces control the outcomes in one's life, and thus we theorized that the choices inherent in shopping may restore personal control over one's environment and reduce residual sadness. Three experiments provided support for our hypothesis. Making shopping choices helped to alleviate sadness whether they were hypothetical (Experiment 1) or real (Experiment 2). In addition, all experiments found support for the underlying mechanism of personal control restoration. Notably, the benefits of restored personal control over one's environment do not generalize to anger (Experiments 2 and 3), because anger is associated with a sense that other people (rather than situational forces) are likely to cause negative outcomes, and these appraisals are not ameliorated by restoring personal control over one's environment.     

口碑追加形式对购买意向的影响:口碑方向的调节作用

网络购物越来越成为大众钟爱的购物方式,而网络口碑在网络购物中发挥着重要的作用,是消费者作出决策需要参考的重要因素。本研究以151名大学生为研究对象,通过实验操纵产品网络口碑,探讨不同追加形式(不追加、追加一致和追加不一致)和口碑方向(正向、负向)对购买意向的影响。结果表明:口碑方向调节追加形式对消费者购买意向的影响。正向口碑组中,不追加和追加一致组购买意向显著高于追加不一致组;负向口碑组中,不追加组,追加一致组和追加不一致组没有显著性差异。研究还发现了有中介的调节作用模型,满意度存在部分中介作用。本文最后对商家如何管理追加口碑进行了讨论。     

Profiling key purchase influencers: Those perceived as consumer savvy

The concept of consumer intelligence or consumer savvy is defined and the way in which this can be measured is examined with a view to determining if and how being perceived to be savvy affects decision‐making influence in a family setting in the UK. A sample of 524 matched pairs (mother and her child) drawn from the TNS postal panel responded to a questionnaire that determined the mother's perception of how savvy her child is with regard to shopping in general and with regard to two product categories (casual clothes for the child and a summer holiday). The child's reported influence on decision making in these categories as well as their money management is also explored. The children perceived to be more savvy were female and older. Mothers in lower socio‐economic groups were also more likely to perceive their children as ‘savvy’. The more savvy children were more involved in the purchase decision process. Implications and future research avenues are presented. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The distribution of influence in purchase decisions by male homosexual couples

The purchase decisions of families are of great interest to marketing researchers, yet families also have become increasingly multi‐faceted, especially in Western societies, where non‐traditional families are far more prevalent and evident in public and business life than they once were. Even as it attempts to adapt to some changes, marketing has not kept up with every development; homosexual couples in particular remain poorly researched. This article therefore examines which factors affect the distribution of influence between partners in male homosexual, long‐term relationships when they make purchase decisions. In line with some extant predictions, male homosexual families tend to use highly egalitarian processes to make purchase decisions. Sex‐role orientation generally does not significantly affect the distribution of influence. In contrast with prior work, this study also shows that a partner's resources affect his relative influence. The investigation demonstrates that some conflict resolution styles employed by partners have significant effects on influence distribution in the context of purchase decisions by male homosexual couples. By providing insights into the purchase decision‐making of male homosexual couples, this research broadens the understanding of homosexual consumers in general. Moreover, the findings about the effect of conflict resolution styles on the influence distribution in male homosexual couples adds significantly to consumer research. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

外观新颖性对消费者购买意愿的影响：自我建构与产品类型的调节效应

外观创新在市场竞争中的地位越来越突出,然而因此而导致的成败案例都很普遍。如何进行外观创新更受消费者欢迎,其内在机制是什么,我们却知之甚少。基于独特性需求理论、风险感知理论及自我建构理论,本文探讨了自我建构与外观新颖性对消费者购买意愿的交互作用、影响机制以及边界条件。通过3个实验,发现对于独立型自我建构的消费者而言,高外观新颖性能引发独特性需求从而提高购买意愿,而对于相依型自我建构而言,低外观新颖性则通过降低社会风险感知从而提高购买意愿;同时,本文也确定了产品类型对该机制的调节作用,具体来讲,对于实用品,所有消费者都对低外观新颖性产品具有更强的购买意愿,而对于享乐品,所有消费者都对高外观新颖性产品具有更强的购买意愿。     

Social Influence on consumer decisions: Motives,modes, and consequences

Research on consumer decision making has long recognized the influence of others. In this comment on Simpson, Griskevicius, and Rothman (this issue), we agree with them that consumer decisions are best understood in the social contexts in which these decisions are made. We explain how research on consumer social influence incorporates social motives, and we trace the effects of these motives on consumers’ information processing and their purchase and consumption decisions.     

The effects of option framing on consumer choices: Making decisions in rational versus experiential processing modes

• In the marketplace, consumers often encounter framed scenarios for optional product features, whereby they can add desired product options to a base model or delete undesired product options from a fully loaded model. The results of two experiments show that such option framing can influence consumers' decision making regarding the total number of finally chosen product options. Also, consumers' processing modes – rational versus experiential, can influence their choice behavior under option framing. Specifically, consumers choose a higher number of options in the delete (versus add) frame, and the effect is magnified when making decisions in an experiential mode, and it is diminished when making decisions in a rational mode. Moreover, cognitive constraints further moderate these effects.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Less is more: Online consumer ratings' format affects purchase intentions and processing

Online customer ratings of products and services are commonplace in e‐commerce; however, the format in which these ratings are presented to consumers can vary. Although not anticipated by classical models of decision making, latter models such as prospect theory and feelings‐as‐information theory suggest that the presentation format of online customer ratings could affect subsequent consumer decision making. In the present research, 3 empirical studies test whether online customer ratings' formats differentially affect consumer purchase intentions. The results offer support for feeling‐as‐information theory and suggest that online ratings presented in a mean (vs. distribution) format result in higher purchase intentions as a result of increased processing fluency. Implications for the presentation of online consumer ratings in e‐commerce, based on these findings, are addressed.     

The role of explanation in categorization decisions

Research into the role of explanation on the categorization process has yielded conflicting conclusions. Some theorists stress the importance of explanation, arguing that explanations provide a causal structure necessary to the categorization process. Others discount its significance, arguing that explanation is neither necessary nor sufficient for categorization. Experimentally, explanation has shown modest success in accounting for some categories but not others. Across three experiments, we test whether the central features of a category are the ones that capture the most explanatory structure. The objectives of the current study are threefold: to determine the importance of explanation in natural kind and artifact categorization; to understand the implications of feature correlations as they relate to explanation; and to further delineate the benefit of explanation outside of a functional role. Experiment 1 demonstrates that explanation plays a more dominant role in artifact versus natural kind categorization. Experiment 2 provides evidence that correlated features are neither necessary nor sufficient for categorization. Moreover, it demonstrates that, in the absence of correlation, people still rely on explanation for artifacts but not for natural kinds. Experiment 3 tests to what extent functional information underlies explanation in artifact categorization. We demonstrate that functional relations are not necessary for explanatory‐based categorization. Our results, coupled with previous evidence, suggest a dichotomous role for explanation‐based categorization. On the one hand, explanation is virtually ignored when categorizing biological kinds; on the other, explanation fosters artifact categorization. Implications for categorization and category‐specific disorder are considered.     

The role of impulses in shaping decisions

This paper explores the extent to which decision behavior is shaped by short‐lived reactions to the outcome of the most recent decision. We inspected repeated decision‐making behavior in two versions of each of two decision‐making tasks, an individual task and a strategic one. By regressing behavior onto the outcomes of recent decisions, we found that the upcoming decision was well predicted by the most recent outcome alone, with the tendency to repeat a previous action being affected both by its actual outcome and by the outcomes of actions not taken. Because the goodness of predictions based on the most recent outcome did not diminish as participants gained experience with the task, we conclude that repeated decisions are continuously affected by impulsive reactions. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The pseudohomophone effect: The role of visual similarity in non-word decisions

The pseudohomophone effect, that is, the finding that non-words that are pronounced like words (e.g. MEEN) take longer to reject in a lexical decision task than other pronounceable non-words (e.g. NEEN), has been used to support the hypothesis of phonological receding in lexical access. The lexical decision experiments reported here matched pseudohomophones to control non-words that were as visually similar to words as were the pseudohomophones. For both normal and aphasic subjects, reaction times to reject the pseudohomophones were no longer than those for the visual controls. However, the pseudohomophones did take longer to reject than other pronounceable non-words which were not as visually similar to words. The results suggest that most previous findings of the pseudohomophone effect result from the greater visual rather than phonological similarity of the pseudohomophones to words. The absence of a phonological effect on the non-words in the present study implies that phonological coding is an optional rather than a slow, but obligatory process.     

Understanding the influence of literacy on consumer memory: The role of pictorial elements

This research examines the relationship between literacy and consumer memory. The effects of a variety of stimuli at exposure (i.e., brand names, brand signatures, and products in usage) on memory (i.e., recognition, stem-completion tasks) were examined for a range of literacy. In a series of experiments, we find that the use of pictorial representations of brands (i.e., brand signatures) results in superior brand memory for individuals with lower literacy levels when compared to those at higher literacy levels. This effect is shown to occur not due to pictorial elements per se, but due to pictorial elements with a 1-to-1 correspondence with reality, i.e., which match the form in which they were originally encoded in memory. Moreover, this effect does not persist with stimulus-rich pictures of brands in usage, pointing to boundary conditions with the use of pictorial information.     

The role of physical appearance in managerial decisions

This study was designed to examine stereotypical beliefs about the physical appearance of employees and the effects of these beliefs on decision-making. Current stereotypes about obese and very thin people were assessed, and the effect of beliefs about obese and very thin people on subjects' evaluations of employee performance was measured. The findings indicated that subjects used information about employees' weight and body build differently, depending on whether they were responding to questions about discipline, the likelihood of recurrence of behavior, or their desire to work with certain employees. Overall, the results suggest that subjects exclude nondiagnostic aspects of employees (e.g., weight and body build) in some types of work decisions.     

Prospective payment: its impact on psychology's role in health care

This article describes the new Medicare payment system based on diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) and its impact on professional psychology. DRGs represent medically oriented notions about how many inpatient days a prudent physician needs to effectively treat a patient who suffers from a specified disease. However, for the most part, DRGs ignore the behavioral variables that moderate entry into the tertiary care system and the subsequent use of hospital resources. Under DRGs, the development and use of behavioral treatments for somatic disorders could be discouraged. For example, many newer behavioral medicine techniques may be more time-consuming and/or expensive than traditional treatment options (e.g., bed rest vs. biofeedback for low back pain) and thus not fall within the time period or "trim points" alloted for such disorder, regardless of comparative effectiveness. Also, under the new system, psychologists can no longer bill separately for their inpatient services. It is argued that the framers of health care policies should recognize and support health psychologists in light of the fact that many of their techniques can reduce the cost and consumption of health care through programs that: reduce behavioral risk factors, increase compliance with medical regimens, and prepare patients psychologically for stressful medical procedures.     

Cutthroat cooperation: The effects of team role decisions on adaptation to alternative reward structures

Structural Adaptation Theory proposes that it is more difficult for teams to change from competitive to cooperative reward conditions than it is for them to change in the opposite direction, and this has been labeled the cutthroat cooperation effect [Johnson, M. D., Hollenbeck, J. R., Ilgen, D. R., Humphrey, S. E., Meyer, C. J., & Jundt, D. K. (2006). Cutthroat cooperation: Asymmetrical adaptation of team reward structures. Academy of Management Journal, 49, 103–120]. The current study investigated whether team role discussion can neutralize this effect and promote successful adaptation from competitive to cooperative reward structures. Consistent with our predictions, in a study that involved 75 four-person teams performing a complex task under cooperative reward conditions, we found that teams with a history of competitive rewards performed worse than teams with a history of cooperative rewards in a control condition. However, this effect was neutralized when teams allocated their roles in a team role discussion. This neutralization effect was driven by behavioral coordination and unmet expectations regarding conflict.