Crowdsourcing Consumer Research GOODMAN, JOSEPH K.; PAOLACCI, GABRIELE
The Journal of consumer research,
06/2017, Letnik:
44, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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Data collection in consumer research has progressively moved away from traditional samples (e.g., university undergraduates) and toward Internet samples. In the last complete volume of the Journal of ...Consumer Research (June 2015–April 2016), 43% of behavioral studies were conducted on the crowdsourcing website Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). The option to crowdsource empirical investigations has great efficiency benefits for both individual researchers and the field, but it also poses new challenges and questions for how research should be designed, conducted, analyzed, and evaluated. We assess the evidence on the reliability of crowdsourced populations and the conditions under which crowdsourcing is a valid strategy for data collection. Based on this evidence, we propose specific guidelines for researchers to conduct high-quality research via crowdsourcing. We hope this tutorial will strengthen the community’s scrutiny on data collection practices and move the field toward better and more valid crowdsourcing of consumer research.
Abstract
A wealth of consumer research has proposed an experiential advantage: consumers yield greater happiness from purchasing experiences compared to material possessions. While this research ...stream has undoubtedly influenced consumer research, few have questioned its limitations, explored moderators, or investigated filedrawer effects. This has left marketing managers, consumers, and researchers questioning the relevance of the experiential advantage. To address these questions, the authors develop a model of consumer happiness and well-being based on psychological needs (i.e., autonomy, relatedness, self-esteem, and meaningfulness), and conduct an experiential advantage meta-analysis to test this model. Collecting 360 effect sizes from 141 studies, the meta-analysis supports the experiential advantage (d = 0.383, 95% CI 0.336, 0.430), of which approximately a third of the effect may be attributable to publication bias. The analysis finds differential effects depending on the type of dependent measure, suggesting that the experiential advantage may be more tied to relatedness than to happiness and willingness to pay. The experiential advantage is reduced for negative experiences, for solitary experiences, for lower socioeconomic status consumers, and when experiences provide a similar level of utilitarian benefits relative to material goods. Finally, results suggest future studies in this literature should use larger sample sizes than current practice.
Although previous research suggests that there are hedonic and interpersonal benefits to gifting experiences, consumers often give material gifts rather than experiential gifts. Exploring this ...mismatch, the current research examines when and why consumers prefer to give material versus experiential gifts. The authors propose that gift givers are more likely to give experiential gifts to socially close recipients than socially distant recipients. Since experiences are perceived as more unique than material goods, givers perceive that choosing an experiential gift requires more specific knowledge of a recipient’s preferences to avoid the greater social risk of giving a poorly matched gift. Eight studies provide converging evidence for the proposed effect of social distance on gift preference and demonstrate that this effect is driven by a giver’s knowledge of a recipient’s preferences. Further supporting the mechanism of preference knowledge, the effect of social distance is moderated by the social risk associated with experiential gifts. When experiences contain little social risk—and thus require less knowledge of a recipient—the effect of social distance is significantly mitigated. Together, these results provide answers for why consumers often prefer to give material gifts over experiences, despite the advantage of giving experiences.
Previous theories have suggested that consumers will be happier if they spend their money on experiences such as travel as opposed to material possessions such as automobiles. We test this experience ...recommendation and show that it may be misleading in its general form. Valence of the outcome significantly moderates differences in respondents’ reported retrospective happiness with material versus experiential purchases. For purchases that turned out positively, experiential purchases lead to more happiness than do material purchases, as the experience recommendation suggests. However, for purchases that turned out negatively, experiences have no benefit over (and, for some types of consumers, induce significantly less happiness than) material possessions. We provide evidence that this purchase type by valence interaction is driven by the fact that consumers adapt more slowly to experiential purchases than to material purchases, leading to both greater happiness and greater unhappiness for experiential purchases.
Abstract
Managers often set prices just-below a round number (e.g., $39)—a strategy that lowers price perceptions and increases sales. The authors question this conventional wisdom in a common ...consumer context: upgrade decisions (e.g., whether to upgrade a rental car or hotel room). Seven studies—including one field study—provide empirical evidence for a threshold-crossing effect. When a base product is priced at or just-above a threshold, consumers are more likely to upgrade and spend more money (studies 1–3) because they perceive the upgrade option as less expensive (study 4), and they place less weight on price (study 5). Testing theoretically motivated and managerially relevant boundary conditions, studies find that the threshold-crossing effect is mitigated under sequential choice (study 6) and when an upgrade price crosses an upper threshold (study 7). These studies demonstrate that a small increase in price on a base product can decrease price perceptions of an upgrade option and, thus, increase consumers’ likelihood to upgrade. Results suggest that just-below pricing, while sometimes advantageous at first, may not always be an optimal strategy for managers trying to encourage consumers to ultimately choose an upgrade option.
Abstract
Consumers routinely make decisions about the timing of their consumption, making tradeoffs between consuming now or later. Most of the literature examining impatience considers monetary ...outcomes (i.e., delaying dollars), implicitly assuming that how the money is spent does not systematically alter impatience levels and patterns. The authors propose an impatience asymmetry for material and experiential purchases based on utility duration. Five studies provide evidence that consumers are more impatient toward experiential purchases compared to material purchases and that this increased impatience is driven by whether the value is extracted over a shorter utility duration (often associated with experiential purchases) or a longer utility duration (often associated with material purchases). Thus, when an experience is consumed over a longer period of time, the results show that impatience can be diminished. Additional results show that the effect holds in both delay and expedite frames and suggest that the results cannot be explained by differences in scheduling, time sensitivity, affect, ownership, future time perspective, or future connectedness.
Total joint replacement is a highly successful surgical procedure for treatment of patients with disabling arthritis and joint dysfunction. However, over time, with high levels of activity and usage ...of the joint, implant wear particles are generated from the articulating surfaces. These wear particles can lead to activation of an inflammatory reaction, and subsequent bone resorption around the implant （periprosthetic osteolysis）. Cells of the monocyte/macrophage lineage orchestrate this chronic inflammatory response, which is dominated by a pro-inflammatory （M 1） macrophage phenotype rather than an anti-inflammatory pro-tissue healing （M2） macrophage phenotype. While it has been shown that interleukin-4 （IL-4） selectively polarizes macrophages towards an M2 anti-inflammatory phenotype which promotes bone healing, rather than inflammation, little is known about the time course in which this occurs or conditions in which repolarization through I L-4 is most effective. The goal of this work was to study the time course of murine macrophage polarization and cytokine release in response to challenge with combinations of polymethyl methacrylate （PMMA） particles, lipopolysaccharide （LPS） and IL-4 in vitro. Treatment of particle-challenged monocyte/macrophages with IL-4 led to an initial suppression of pro-inflammatory cytokines and inducible nitric oxide synthase （iNOS） production and subsequent polarization into an M2 anti-inflammatory phenotype. This result was optimized when IL-4 was delivered before PMMA particle challenge, to an M 1 phenotype rather than to uncommitted （MO） macrophages. The effects of this polarization were sustained over a 5-day time course. Polarization of M1 macrophages into an M2 phenotype may be a strategy to mitigate wear particle associated periprosthetic osteolysis.
Consumers prefer larger assortments, despite the negative consequences associated with choosing from these sets. This article examines the role of psychological distance (temporal and geographical) ...in consumers’ assortment size decisions and rectifies contradicting hypotheses produced by construal level theory. Six studies demonstrate that while consumers prefer larger assortments when the choice takes place in the here and now, they are more likely to prefer small assortments when choices pertain to distant locations and times. This decrease in preference for large assortments is due to psychological distance increasing the similarity of the options in a category, making them appear more substitutable. This effect of psychological distance reverses when consumers consider desirability/feasibility trade-off information inherent in the assortment size decision. These findings point to important outcomes of psychological distance, resolving opposing predictions of construal level theory, and identify boundary conditions for the well-established notion that consumers are attracted to large assortments.
The authors investigate whether consumers systematically consider feature usage before making multifunctional product purchase decisions. Across five studies and four product domains, the article ...shows that consumers fail to estimate their feature usage rate before purchasing multifunctional products, negatively affecting product satisfaction. The findings demonstrate that when consumers do estimate their feature usage before choice, preferences shift from many-feature products toward few-feature products. The authors show that this shift in preferences is due to a change in elaboration from having features to using features, and they identify three key moderators to the effect: need for cognition, feature trivialness, and materialism. Finally, the authors investigate the downstream consequences of usage estimation on product satisfaction, demonstrating that consumers who estimate usage before choice experience greater product satisfaction and are more likely to recommend their chosen product. These results point to the relative importance consumers place on having versus using product features.
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