Purpose
A growing stream of consumer research has examined the intersection of family dynamics, consumption practices and the marketplace. The purpose of this paper is to make sense of the complex ...nature of family for senior families (adult children and their elderly parents) who employ the use of elder care services and facilities.
Design/methodology/approach
This research analyses data gathered from in-depth interviews with adult siblings and their elderly parents through the lens of assemblage theory.
Findings
This paper advances a conceptulisation of the family as an evolving assemblage of components, including individual members; material possessions and home(s); shared values, goals, memories and practices; prominent familial attributes of love and care; and marketplace resources. Three features of the assemblage come to the fore in senior families: the fluid meaning of independence for the elderly parent, the evolution of shared family practices and the trajectory of the assemblage that is a function of its history and future.
Originality/value
This research focuses on a stage of family life that has been under-theorised; applies assemblage theory to the family collective, demonstrating that a family can be conceptualised as an ever-evolving assemblage of human and non-human components, and this is a useful lens for understanding how senior families “do” family; and argues for a broader notion of family – one that is not household-centric or focused on families with young children, that encompasses members and materiality and that foregrounds the dynamic, evolving nature of family life.
With online, lab, and field experiments, Cotte and Moorhouse explore what leads to a positive bias in sharing economy ratings. They further test three ways to reduce the bias by making it easier for ...consumers to determine when and why their expectations were missed, including whether providers are trustworthy. Ratings and reviews are a critical source of trust in the peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing economy because exchanges take place between strangers and without strict screening. But despite a high variance in quality on P2P platforms like Airbnb or Uber, nearly all ratings are positive. For example, Zervas et al find that 94% of Airbnb properties are rated 4.5 stars or higher, compared to 26% for Tri-pAdvisor. and Airbnb ratings are higher for properties that are cross-listed on both sites. Evidence from ratings of cross-listed properties, and comparisons of public and private feedback, suggests that P2P ratings are biased. This is important because if ratings don't reflect performance, it erodes trust, and users may leave the platform.
The Journal of Consumer Research at 40 WANG, XIN (SHANE); BENDLE, NEIL T.; MAI, FENG ...
The Journal of consumer research,
06/2015, Letnik:
42, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article reviews 40 years of the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR). Using text mining, we uncover the key phrases associated with consumer research. We use a topic modeling procedure to uncover ...16 topics that have been featured in the journal since its inception and to show the trends in topics over time. For example, we highlight the decline in family decision-making research and the flourishing of social identity and influence research since the journal’s inception. A citation analysis shows which JCR articles have had the most impact and compares the topics in top-cited articles with all JCR journal articles. We show that methodological and consumer culture articles tend to be heavily cited. We conclude by investigating the scholars who have been the top contributors to the journal across the four decades of its existence. And to better understand which schools have contributed most to the knowledge of consumer research over this history, we provide an analysis of where these top-performing scholars were trained. Our approach shows that the JCR archives can be an excellent source of data for scholars trying to understand the complicated, challenging, and dynamic field of consumer research.
Abstract
This research investigates reviewing experts on online review platforms. The main hypothesis is that greater expertise in generating reviews leads to greater restraint from extreme summary ...evaluations. The authors argue that greater experience generating reviews facilitates processing and elaboration and enhances the number of attributes implicitly considered in evaluations, which reduces the likelihood of assigning extreme summary ratings. This restraint-of-expertise hypothesis is tested across different review platforms (TripAdvisor, Qunar, and Yelp), shown for both assigned ratings and review text sentiment, and demonstrated both between (experts vs. novices) and within reviewers (expert vs. pre-expert). Two experiments replicate the main effect and provide support for the attribute-based explanation. Field studies demonstrate two major consequences of the restraint-of-expertise effect. (i) Reviewing experts (vs. novices), as a whole, have less impact on the aggregate valence metric, which is known to affect page-rank and consumer consideration. (ii) Experts systematically benefit and harm service providers with their ratings. For service providers that generally provide mediocre (excellent) experiences, reviewing experts assign significantly higher (lower) ratings than novices. This research provides important caveats to the existing marketing practice of service providers incentivizing reviewing experts and provides strategic implications for how platforms should adopt rating scales and aggregate ratings.
People frequently observe others’ consumption, making inferences about both the consumer and the consumed brands. Although these observations are often beneficial for brands, this research ...demonstrates that observing luxury brand consumers whose consumption arose from unearned (vs. earned) financial resources reduces observers’ brand attitudes when observers place a high value on fairness. When fairness values are high, observers do not perceive luxury brand consumers who use unearned (vs. earned) consumption resources as prestigious, and in turn, lower prestige perceptions adversely affect observers’ brand evaluations for luxury brands. Consistent with our theorizing regarding the signaling of prestige, the joint effect of consumers’ consumption resources and observers’ fairness values on observers’ brand attitudes does not hold for nonluxury brands, which are not associated with prestige and thereby are not denigrated when the consumer is not perceived as prestigious. This research sheds light on the role of moral values in marketplace judgments of luxury consumption and brand attitude by considering the influence of consumption resources on observers’ judgments.
The interactive nature of the Internet has boosted online communication for both social and business purposes. However, individual consumers differ in their predisposition to interact online with ...others. Whereas an impressive stream of research has investigated media interactivity, the existence of individual differences in the use of different online media, that is, differences in general online social interaction propensity, has so far received less research attention. An individual's predisposition to interact online affects many important consumer behaviors, such as online engagement and participation. Thus, in this paper, we propose and conceptualize general online social interaction propensity as a trait-based individual difference that captures the differences between consumers in their predisposition to interact with others in an online environment. Based on eight studies, we develop and validate a scale for measuring general online social interaction propensity and demonstrate its usefulness in understanding diversity in levels of engagement and in predicting online interaction behaviors.
•Consumers differ in their predisposition to enter in online communication.•We conceptualize an individual difference trait termed GOSIP.•We empirically develop and validate a scale to measure GOSIP.•We show GOSIP’s importance as antecedent of engagement and online behavior.•Interactive marketers can use GOSIP to assess consumer differences in online behavior.
Viewing the consumer as an active, skeptical reader of the persuasion attempt is an emerging perspective in advertising research. This perspective suggests that a consumer's recognition of an ...emotional “tactic” in an ad can have a significant impact on an ad's intended effect. Adopting this approach, we examine whether consumers' evaluations of an ad's credibility can enhance, and perceptions of manipulative intent can disrupt, the emotional response intended by the advertiser. We also investigate the effects of these two variables on attitude toward the ad and corporate attributions, including attitude toward the sponsor of the ad. We examine a commonly employed emotional tactic—the guilt appeal—and report the results of an experimental study. Our results suggest that credible guilt advertisements that are not overtly manipulative induce guilt feelings and positive attitudes. However, when consumers infer manipulative intent by the marketer, consumers do not feel guilty, but do have negative attitudes toward the sponsor of the advertisement and the advertisement.
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