Decision-making researchers have largely focused on showing errors and biases in consumers' decision-making processes without paying much attention to the social welfare and policy implications of ...these systematic behaviors. In this paper, we explore how findings and methods in behavioral decision research can be used to help consumers improve their decision making and enhance their well-being. We first review select findings in behavioral decision research to explain why consumers need help in decisions, and based on these findings, suggest various interventions that could be effective within the scope of libertarian paternalism. Ethics and effectiveness of the interventions are also discussed.
This abstract provides an overview of four papers presented at the Advances in Consumer Research conference. The first paper, titled "Mistaking the Journey for the Destination: Overestimating the ...Fruits of More Labor," explores how consumers often overestimate the benefits of putting in more effort. The second paper, "Inferring Personality from Solo vs. Accompanied Consumption: When Solo Consumers are Perceived to Be More Open," investigates how consumers' personality traits are perceived differently based on whether they are consuming alone or with others. The third paper, "Handshaking Promotes Dealmaking by Signaling Cooperative Intent," examines how handshakes can signal cooperative intentions and influence dealmaking. The fourth paper, "Mispredicting Reactions to Gambling Losses and Their Impact on Consumer Choice," explores how consumers mispredict their reactions to gambling losses and how this affects their subsequent choices. These papers contribute to the understanding of consumers' mistaken beliefs and their impact on decision-making processes.
Leisure is time that people spend with freedom of choice, intrinsic motivation and enjoyment. We spend leisure time attending baseball game with friends, celebrating accomplishments with family, or ...volunteering in the neighborhood. As these examples suggest, many of the ways people spend leisure time involve social contexts and the presence of other people. Here, several papers examining how the presence of others affects leisure choices and experiences are presented.
The incretin hormone glucagon-like peptide-1 agonists and dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors fill an unaddressed therapeutic gap in the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) by potentiating ...insulin secretion in pancreatic β cells, suppressing glucagon secretion, delaying gastric emptying, and reducing appetite. The incretin therapies, alone or in combination with metformin and/or thiazolidinediones, yield improved glycemic control without risk of hypoglycemia and the potential for weight neutrality or even weight loss. New incretin-based approaches offer promising new strategies for treating T2DM by recruiting new, physiologically based mechanisms of action for glucoregulation in the context of a favorable safety profile.
Previous research suggests that scarcity polarizes preference (Zhu and Ratner 2015), consequently increasing consumers' liking of the already more-preferred alternative and decreasing the liking of ...the less-preferred alternative. But, what if a priori the customer does not have a strong preference for one option over the other? Will scarcity polarize, or alternatively converge, the consumer's preference towards the two similarly preferred options? The goal of the present research is to examine when and why scarcity might converge versus polarize consumer preferences. Scarcity has become a widespread marketing strategy. Extant literature on scarcity has focused on scarce supply of a single item and how object-specific scarcity increases desirability of the particular item (Amoldoss and Jain 2005). Yet, our understanding of how consumers make choices among a set of items which are all scarce or abundant remains limited. In a notable exception, Zhu and Ratner (2015) show that overall scarcity of items increases the attractiveness of the a priori most-preferred item but decreases the attractiveness of the less-preferred items, leading consumers to choose more of the favorite item. However, Zhu and Ratner employed choice sets in which consumers have rather strong preferences for one option over the others. In the current work, we extend our investigation to situations where individual do not have a priori more-preferred choice alternative. Consumers are faced with numerous choices. Sometimes they have a strong preference for one option over the other, but other times their prior preference gap among the choice alternatives is small. The primary objective of this research is to examine whether the impact of scarcity on preference within a choice set is affected by the extent to which consumers prefer one choice alternative over another. Building on several streams of research suggesting a possible connection between scarcity and attention narrowing (Cialdini 2009; Mullainathan and Shafir 2013), we predict that while scarcity polarizes preferences when consumers' prior preference gap is large, scarcity converges preferences when consumers' prior preference gap is small. Further, we explore whether the preference convergence arising from scarcity leads to negative downstream consequences, such as increased decision difficulty and decreased decision satisfaction. We also explore the underlying process from scarcity to preference polarization and preference convergence. Prior research has theorized a connection between scarcity and attention narrowing (Cialdini 2009; Mullainathan and Shafir 2013). Building on findings that consumers have the propensity to reduce the processing strain by basing their choice on the most important attributes (Tversky, Sattath, and Slovic 1988), we suggest that consumers faced with narrowed attentional focus induced by scarcity are even more likely to selectively attend to cues that have high information value at the expense of cues that have limited information value when making decisions (Mandler 1975; Mano 1992, 1994; Paulhus andLim 1994). The disproportionate attention given to primary (vs. secondary) attributes subsequently leads to either preference polarization or preference convergence, depending on the size of prior preference gap. Study 1 supports our hypothesis that scarcity converges preference when the initial preference gap for options is small. Participants were asked to choose between two similarly liked candies that were customized for each participant based on their initial likings towards six types of candies. Participants were told that we had either limited quantities (scarcity condition) or large quantities (abundance condition) of each type of candy. As expected, when consumers have close prior preferences towards the options, scarce versus abundant supply of each alternative reduces the discrepancy between the likings of the choice alternatives, subsequently increasing perceived decision difficulty. In study 2, we employed an incentive-compatible test to investigate whether scarcity leads to preference convergence and preference polarization respectively, when the prior preference gap is small versus large. Participants were presented with four pairs of gift cards with four different levels of initial preference gaps. Each pair of gift cards was customized for each participant based on their initial likings towards gift cards from eight different apparel retailers. Participants were told only a few (scarcity) or many (abundance) gift cards from each store are remaining. After choosing a gift card from each of the four pairs, participants were asked to rate their likings towards the gift cards again. The results show that compared to abundance, scarcity leads to preference polarization when the initial preference gap is large; more importantly, we find that with the initial preference gap declining, preference polarization attenuates and ultimately reversed. As preference convergence emerges, consumers experience lower satisfaction when making the decision. Study 3 directly tests the premise that scarcity leads to a narrowed attentional focus on primary versus secondary attributes. Participants were asked to imagine that they were looking for a new apartment and had narrowed down to two options. After the scarcity manipulation, participants were informed that they had access to information of the two apartments on two attributes and they could check on the information only when they hover their mouse on the attribute of interest. As predicted, we find consumers under the constraint of scarcity devoted a larger share of their time checking on information of the primary (vs. secondary) attribute. Study 4 further examines the attention-narrowing process, demonstrating that preference convergence triggered by scarcity can be attenuated by experimentally expanding participants' attention on other attributes. Attention expansion was manipulated by presenting the participants with unrelated examples of how people compare multiple attributes to make a decision. Adopting similar protocol of study 2, participants were presented with two customized pairs of gift cards with large and small initial preference gaps. Results show that when participants are primed to allocate their attention more evenly on primary vs. secondary attributes when making choices, preference convergence effect attenuates, which in turn leads to lower decision difficulty. To summarize, we find scarcity polarizes or converges preferences, depending on the size of prior preference gap towards options. Preference convergence arising from scarcity consequently increases decision difficulty and decreases decision satisfaction. Process evidence show that scarcity narrows consumers' attention on primary (vs. secondary) attribute, leading to these effects. Hypothesis 1A: When consumers have small prior preference gap towards the options in the choice set, scarcity converges preferences, decreasing the discrepancy between the liking of the choice alternatives. Hypothesis IB: When consumers have large prior preference gap towards the options in the choice set, scarcity polarizes preferences, broadening the discrepancy between the liking of the choice alternatives. Hypothesis 2: Overall scarcity versus overall abundance of options contained in a choice set narrows consumers ' attention on primary versus secondary attributes of the choice alternatives. Hypothesis 3: The impact of scarcity on preference within a choice set will be attenuated when consumers broaden their attention to secondary attributes of the choice alternatives.
Effects of Resource Scarcity on Perceptions of Control and Impulsivity Chiraag Mittal, University of Minnesota, USA Vladas Griskevičius, University of Minnesota, USA SESSION OVERVIEW As a pervasive ...aspect of human life (Booth 1984), a fundamental concept in economics (Brock 1968), and one of the most powerful instruments of influence in our society (Cialdini 2009), scarcity has attracted attention from various disciplines. ...Mittal and Griskevičius demonstrate that resource scarcity produces divergent control beliefs and impulsive behaviors in people as a function of their childhood environments. ...arousal has been shown to alter attention allocation (Broadbent 1971; Easterbrook 1959; Kahneman 1973) giving rise to judgment polarization (Mano 1992; Paulhus and Lim 1994). ...Study 5 generalizes the proposed polarization effect to situations where a general sense of scarcity is activated.
Presents six brief studies to examine the hypothesis that individuals contemplating initiating a romantic relationship experience pluralistic ignorance (ie, when people misrepresent their true ...feelings because of a fear of embarrassment or social disapproval). In sum, questionnaire & scale data from 544 undergraduates at the U of Manitoba (Winnipeg) & Princeton (NJ) U indicate that students consistently fail to make the first move out of fear of rejection, while perceiving the other party's inaction as arising from lack of interest. Further, subjects considered themselves more likely than others to be inhibited by fear of rejection & imagined the involved party's thoughts of them would be more negative than their own. 4 Tables, 32 References. Adapted from the source document.
Whereas some research finds that partitioning a set of items increases consumption, other research finds that partitions decrease consumption. What explains these conflicting findings? We propose ...that partitions serve both as signals of variety and as decision points in influencing consumption and identify factors that determine the direction of influence.
Two experiments investigated whether individuals choose to listen to songs that maximize their enjoyment on each trial (local maximization) or across the sequence of trials (global maximization). In ...Study 1, participants made repeated choices between one liked song and one disliked song. In Study 2, participants made repeated choices between a liked song and two less-preferred songs. Participants' choices and ratings indicate that they did not maximize locally. In both studies, participants switched to the less-preferred songs before their ratings of the favored songs had declined to the level of the less-preferred songs. Additionally, in Study 2, more participants chose their favorite song on a given trial when it was the last trial of the block than when the block was expected to continue. This indicates that participants who did not choose the favored song in the latter case were not maximizing locally. That individuals continued to choose variety even at the very end of the experiments also suggests that they were not maximizing globally. Thus, the present studies suggest the intriguing possibility that participants' variety seeking did not reflect local or global maximization. Implications for variety seeking are discussed.
Four studies investigated whether people feel inhibited from engaging in social action incongruent with their apparent self-interest. Participants in Study I predicted that they would be evaluated ...negatively were they to take action on behalf of a cause in which they had no stake or in which they had a stake but held stake-incongruent attitudes. Participants in Study 2 reported both surprise & anger when a target person took action on behalf of a cause in which he or she had no stake or in which he or she held stake-incongruent attitudes. In Study 3, individuals felt more comfortable engaging in social action & expected others to respond more favorably toward their actions if the issue was described as more relevant to their own sex than to the opposite sex. In Study 4, the authors found that providing nonvested individuals with psychological standing rendered them as likely as vested individuals to undertake social action. The authors discuss the implications of these results for the relationship between vested interest, social action, & attitude-behavior consistency. 4 Tables, 27 References. Copyright 2001 The American Psychological Association.
