Creations can be fundamentally intended or unintended from their outset. Past work has focused on intentional creations, finding that people place a premium on effort. We examine the role of ...unintentionality in the inception of creations in six studies using a variety of stimuli (N = 1,965), finding that people offer a premium to unintentional creations versus otherwise identical intentional creations. We demonstrate that the unintentionality involved in the inception of a creation results in greater downward counterfactual thought about how the unintentional creation may have never been created at all, and this in turn heightens perceptions that the creation was a product of fate, causing people to place a premium on such creations. We provide evidence for this causal pathway using a combination of mediation and moderation approaches. Further, we illuminate that this premium is not offered when a negative outcome is ascribed to an unintentional creation.
LAST-PLACE AVERSION Kuziemko, Ilyana; Buell, Ryan W.; Reich, Taly ...
The Quarterly journal of economics,
02/2014, Letnik:
129, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We present evidence from laboratory experiments showing that individuals are “last-place averse.” Participants choose gambles with the potential to move them out of last place that they reject when ...randomly placed in other parts of the distribution. In modified dictator games, participants randomly placed in second-to-last place are the most likely to give money to the person one rank above them instead of the person one rank below. Last-place aversion suggests that low-income individuals might oppose redistribution because it could differentially help the group just beneath them. Using survey data, we show that individuals making just above the minimum wage are the most likely to oppose its increase. Similarly, in the General Social Survey, those above poverty but below median income support redistribution significantly less than their background characteristics would predict.
Although hedonic principles of emotion regulation suggest that people wish to feel good, the current research demonstrates that sometimes feeling good just seems wrong. Specifically, the authors ...argue that, immediately after viewing moralized content such as human suffering, consumers believe that it is morally appropriate to sustain negative emotions (Study 1). Thus, after exposure to content related to human suffering (vs. other negative content), consumers view subsequent mood-sustaining consumption as morally appropriate and hedonic consumption as morally inappropriate (Study 2). Consequently, they avoid repairing their emotions through hedonic consumption because of their preference to engage in morally appropriate behavior (Studies 3 through 4b); this is particularly true for individuals who view themselves as more moral (Study 4b). These effects are mitigated when the hedonic consumption is morally relevant (Study 4a), rather than prototypically frivolous. This research offers clear prescriptions to marketers about when and when not to offer hedonic consumption as mood repair. By allowing people to pay respect to suffering victims, marketers can give consumers needed space to feel their compassionate emotions.
Individuals experience a greater frequency of interruptions than ever before. Interruptions by e-mails, phone calls, text messages and other sources of disruption are ubiquitous. We examine the ...important unanswered question of whether interruptions can increase the likelihood that individuals will choose closure-associated behaviors. Specifically, we explore the possibility that interruptions that occur during the climactic moments of a task or activity can produce a heightened need for psychological closure. When an interruption prevents individuals from achieving closure in the interrupted domain, we show that the resulting unsatisfied need for psychological closure can cause individuals to seek closure in totally unrelated domains. These findings have important implications for understanding how consumer decisions may be influenced by the dynamic—and often interrupted—course of daily events.
Workers often work in groups of varying sizes, and those workers’ work is often judged by others. To examine how the two might relate, we first asked respondents to report the optimal number of ...collaborators for a variety of different tasks, finding substantial variability across tasks (Supplementary Study) that tracked with perceived task complexity (Study 1). Accordingly, framing a given task as more complex made people want more collaborators collaborating on it (Study 2), and believing that a task had been performed by the right number of collaborators—neither too few nor too many—fostered more favorable evaluations of both simulated (Study 3) and real (Study 4) experience with the collaborative output. The results of this collaboration suggest that perceivers hold an optimal size in mind when thinking about collaborations and that collaborative work benefits from ostensibly hitting this mark.
Abstract This research proposes a new promotional selection method, showing in seven laboratory studies, one field experiment, and five supplemental studies that consumers prefer promoted hedonic ...products when a company selects which products to promote using chance rather than more traditional intentional methods. This preference arises because consumers can perceive chance selection as fun and consequently view a company engaging in such chance selection as more fun. We find converging evidence for this preference, demonstrating the effect on consumer intentions, click‐through rates, and real consumption decisions, while ruling out a variety of alternative explanations. Importantly, because this increased preference is driven by heightened hedonic perceptions, we find that this preference emerges for hedonic products but not for utilitarian products, for which more traditional selection methods are preferred.
When consumers avoid taking algorithmic advice, it can prove costly to both marketers (whose algorithmic product offerings go unused) and to themselves (who fail to reap the benefits that algorithmic ...predictions often provide). In a departure from previous research focusing on when algorithm aversion proves more or less likely, we sought to identify and remedy one reason why it occurs in the first place. In seven pre‐registered studies, we find that consumers tend to avoid algorithmic advice on the often faulty assumption that those algorithms, unlike their human counterparts, cannot learn from mistakes, in turn offering an inroad by which to reduce algorithm aversion: highlighting their ability to learn. Process evidence, through both mediation and moderation, examines why consumers fail to trust algorithms that err across a variety of prediction domains and how different theory‐driven interventions can solve the practical problem of enhancing trust and consequential choice in algorithms.
Featuring Mistakes Reich, Taly; Maglio, Sam J.
Journal of marketing,
01/2020, Letnik:
84, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Companies often feature positive consumer reviews on their websites and in their promotional materials in an attempt to increase sales. However, little is known about which particular positive ...reviews companies should leverage to optimize sales. Across four lab studies involving both hypothetical and real choices as well as field data from a retailer’s website (Sephora), the authors find that consumers are more likely to purchase a product if it is recommended by a reviewer who has (vs. has not) made a prior purchase mistake. The authors define a purchase mistake as a self-identified suboptimal decision whereby people purchase a product that subsequently fails to meet a threshold level of expected performance. This persuasive advantage emerges because consumers perceive reviewers who admit a purchase mistake as having more expertise than even reviewers whose purchase experience has not been marred by mistakes. As a result, in marketers’ attempts to increase the persuasive influence of reviews featured in their promotional materials, they may inadvertently decrease it by omitting the very information that would lead consumers to be more likely to purchase recommended products.
•Ambivalence towards a self-threatening outcome increases pursuit of the outcome.•Ambivalence reduces self-threat inspired by a desired uncertain outcome.•People do not intuit this effect and are ...likely not taking advantage of it.
The pursuit of desirable outcomes is often hindered by the threat of failure. While extant research largely characterizes self-threatening outcomes as eliciting an avoidance motivation, the current work demonstrates a novel intervention that can shift people towards an approach motivation: ambivalence towards the outcome. Within professional and personal domains, we show in seven experiments that considering both the pros and cons, rather than just the pros, of a self-threatening outcome encourages people to pursue it. We find that this heightened approach motivation occurs because ambivalence reduces an outcome’s desirability, in turn reducing self-threat, serially mediating the relationship between ambivalence and likelihood of pursuing the outcome. Further, we show that people do not intuit this effect and are likely not taking advantage of it. We conclude by discussing the managerial and theoretical implications of ambivalence in the face of self-threat.
•Preferences change when options in a choice set are presented dynamically.•Dynamic choice sets can either increase or decrease choice share of specific options.•The increase or decrease is ...determined by the relative position of the dynamic option.•A unified theory based on perceived variance explains these opposing effects.•These patterns emerge for both asymmetrically dominated and compromise choice sets.
Most decision-making research examines static choice sets, with fixed options presented all at once. In contrast, people often make decisions from dynamic choice sets, in which new alternatives arise during the decision process. We show that compared to a static choice set, a dynamic choice set can systematically affect preferences, even when the final choice is from an identical set of options. Moreover, dynamic presentation can have opposite effects on preferences. To explain these patterns we propose a unified theory based on perceived variance of the attribute distribution. When dynamic presentation increases the perceived variance of a focal attribute, preferences shift towards the option that is best on that attribute. In contrast, when dynamic presentation reduces perceived variance of a focal attribute, preferences shift towards the option that is best on a non-focal attribute. Five studies examine this proposal using asymmetrically dominated and compromise choice sets.
PDF
