Browsing by Subject "Consumer behavior"
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item Open Access A Multi-Dimensional Approach to Social Relationships in Consumer Behavior(2020) Gullo, KelleyWhile consumer research has long explored social influences in consumer phenomena, the literature rarely considers the implications of different dynamics in relationships. In this dissertation, I take a multi-dimensional perspective on social relationships in consumer behavior. In Chapter 1, I develop a conceptual framework of social relationships that situates different types of relationships along three theoretically orthogonal and consumer-relevant relational dimensions: closeness, competitiveness, and power. I argue that these key relational dimensions jointly shape consumer phenomena in important ways. Then, in Chapter 2, I provide an empirical demonstration of this framework in the context of a novel source of social influence: the effect of making consumption choices for different types of others. I focus on two theoretically relevant relational dimensions, closeness and competitiveness, and show across eight experiments that making goal-related consumption choices for others can influence subsequent goal-related choices for the self, depending on the type of relationship with the other. I conclude by considering the practical and theoretical implications of taking a multi-dimensional approach to consumer behavior.
Item Open Access Antecedents and Consequences of Authenticity in the Marketplace(2019) Du, Katherine MargaretConsumers value and seek authenticity in the marketplace, including in their products, themselves, and others. Due to its appeal to consumers, the study of authenticity in the marketplace has recently accelerated in consumer research. Adding to this research, in this work I explore antecedents and consequences of perceived authenticity related to both consumers and market offerings.
Essay 1 (“Goldilocks Signaling: How the Number of Signaling Items in an Ensemble Affects Perceptions of Consumer Authenticity”) explores how multi-product signals—consumption ensembles—are perceived by observers. Specifically, this research explores how the number of identity-signaling items (e.g., Nike items) a consumer includes in their ensemble affects observer perceptions of the consumer’s identity-specific authenticity (e.g., authenticity as an athlete). If consumers wish to be seen as authentic, essay 1 demonstrates that they have to balance self-presentation with the perception that they are trying too hard to signal. Accordingly, I find that consumers with ensembles featuring a moderate or “just right” number of signaling items are generally (with some boundaries) perceived as most authentic in relation to the identity they are signaling—a “Goldilocks signaling” effect. I demonstrate that consumers make these inferences both spontaneously, without direct prompting regarding authenticity from experimenters, and reflecting the choice patterns of more versus less authentic consumers. Furthermore, such perceptions are important to consumers’ social relationships; I demonstrate that perceived authenticity can affect how much observers like the identity-signaling consumer and how confident they are in the consumer’s identity-relevant skill. This research is one of very few experimental papers in consumer behavior to consider ensemble signaling and provides new insights into the psychological processes underlying judgments of consumers’ authenticity.
Essay 2 (“True to the Original or to the Creator? How Consumers Navigate the Tension Between Iconic and Expressive Authenticity in Evaluations of Creative Adaptations”) explores the role of authenticity in consumers’ evaluations of creative adaptations by leveraging the context of cover songs. I demonstrate that consumers’ evaluations of cover songs are driven by the relative value they place on the cover’s iconic—truth to the original—and expressive—truth to the cover artist—authenticity. Greater difference from the original causes consumers to perceive the cover song as more expressively authentic but less iconically authentic. Consumers often value both these types of authenticity, hence causing them to prefer cover songs that are moderately versus more or less different from their original. Consumers who are highly attached to the original, however, place increased value on iconic authenticity and hence prefer cover songs that are less different from their beloved original. In addition to showing support for this theory, I cast doubt on other, more general theories that could drive this effect. My findings provide a first detailed view of how multiple different types of authenticity affect consumer evaluations.
Together, these essays advance understanding of antecedents and consequences of multiple types of authenticity for both consumers (essay 1) and consumption objects (essay 2) in the marketplace.
Item Open Access Do People Value Racial Diversity? Evidence from Nielsen Ratings(2005) Aldrich, EM; Arcidiacono, PS; Vigdor, JLNielsen ratings for ABC's Monday Night Football are significantly higher when the game involves a black quarterback. In this paper, we consider competing explanations for this effect. First, quarterback race might proxy for other player or team attributes. Second, black viewership patterns might be sensitive to quarterback race. Third, viewers of all races might be exhibiting a taste for diversity. We use both ratings data and evidence on racial attitudes from the General Social Survey to test these hypotheses empirically. The evidence strongly supports the taste-for-diversity hypothesis, while suggesting some role for black own-race preferences as well.Item Open Access Feeling Good and Doing Better: How Specific Positive Emotions Influence Consumer Behavior and Well-being(2009) Cavanaugh, Lisa AnnMarketers seek to create and consumers seek to cultivate a variety of positive emotional experiences. Despite their importance to consumer behavior, researchers have lacked a clear understanding of the distinct behavioral consequences of specific positive emotions. My dissertation examines how different positive emotions (e.g., hope, love, and pride) can differentially affect consumers' decisions and behaviors. I find that positive emotions can not only be differentiated but also that specific positive emotions lead to distinctly different patterns of consumption behavior, such as considering more options, donating in different ways, engaging in more effortful actions, or performing more socially conscious consumption behaviors benefiting distant others. I find important differences both with momentary emotional experiences and downstream consequences of chronic emotional experiences.
Positive emotions differ reliably in the degree to which they create a lens of problem-solving, social connection, and perceived control. For example, I find that positive emotions characterized by a social connection lens (e.g., love and gratitude) lead to increases in socially conscious behaviors benefiting distant others. The tendency to perceive one's environment through a problem-solving lens (which characterizes hope and interest but not love and gratitude) leads to larger consideration sets and engagement in more effortful environmental actions. I also examine how positive emotions characterized by different lenses, such as perceived control (e.g., pride) and social connection (e.g., love), produce distinct behaviors within the same consumption context (e.g., giving in different ways in response to a fundraising appeal). Five studies demonstrate that positive emotions can be characterized in ways that allow prediction of distinct forms of broadening and specific consumption behaviors.
Item Open Access Limited Means and What I Can't Buy: Resource Constraints and Resource Use Accessibility Drive Opportunity Cost Consideration(2011) Spiller, Stephen AndrewEvery consumer decision incurs a cost. An hour spent researching products is an hour not spent working. Vacation days used in the winter are vacation days not used in the summer. A dollar spent on a car payment is a dollar not spent dining out. What determines the extent to which consumers consider such opportunity costs when making decisions?
Although every purchase requires an outlay cost (i.e., spending dollars in order to obtain a good), outlay costs only have economic significance because some other good or service must be given up as a result. Consumers have unlimited wants but limited resources, so satisfying one want means not satisfying another (the opportunity cost). An opportunity cost is "the evaluation placed on the most highly valued of the rejected alternatives or opportunities" (Buchanan 2008) or "the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen" (Oxford English Dictionary 2010). Opportunity costs are foundational to the science of economics and, normatively, consumers should account for opportunity costs in every decision they make. I define opportunity cost consideration as "considering alternative uses for one's resources when deciding whether to spend resources on a focal option."
Because consumers face opportunity costs, every purchase decision is effectively a choice among alternative resource uses, not just a decision of whether or not to make a particular purchase. When consumers consider their opportunity costs, alternative resource uses specify the broadest form of competition that products face: each resource use competes for share-of-wallet with all other potential resource uses. Understanding when consumers consider a purchase decision as an allocation across multiple options, and what those considered options are, allows researchers and practitioners to better understand why consumers make the purchases that they do, why they restrain from making the purchases that they do not, and how to influence purchases of focal options by increasing or decreasing consideration of alternative resource uses.
What determines when consumers consider opportunity costs? In Essay 1, I propose that consumers consider opportunity costs when they perceive immediate resource constraints. In Essay 2, I propose that consumers consider opportunity costs when the resource in use increases the accessibility of alternative resource uses in memory.
Beyond addressing when consumers consider opportunity costs, I address three additional questions. First, who is more likely to consider opportunity costs? Individuals with a high propensity to plan are likely to consider opportunity costs even when they are not immediately constrained. Second, which opportunity costs are consumers more likely to consider? Consumers are more likely to consider opportunity costs that are more typical of the category of possible resource uses than opportunity costs that are less typical of the category of possible resource uses. Third, what are the consequences of opportunity cost consideration? Individuals who consider their opportunity costs are more sensitive to their value than those who do not consider them. In addition to aiding our understanding of the consumer decision process, understanding opportunity cost consideration has important implications for consumers' sensitivities to the structure of the decision environment, understanding the nature of competition and cross-price elasticities, memory for foregone options, and construction of preferences.
Item Open Access Operations of Innovative Business Models(2020) Chakraborty, SoudiptaThe last decade has witnessed the rapid growth of many innovative and disruptive business models. This dissertation identifies a few of the unique inefficiencies and challenges that these new business models bring for small entrepreneurs and recommends ways to solve them.
The second and third chapters of this dissertation focus on rewards-based crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, where entrepreneurs designing new and innovative products solicit monetary pledges from a population of potential contributors. If total pledges exceed a pre-specified funding target, the entrepreneur distributes non-monetary rewards—typically, units of the new product—to these contributors. Otherwise, the contributors are refunded their pledges.
The second chapter explores how an entrepreneur might overcome one of the most significant challenges in crowdfunding: credibly signaling information about the quality of the new product to a pool of small, uninformed contributors. We find that the entrepreneur should signal high quality by setting a high target that is distorted above the full information optimal level. While a separating equilibrium always exists, a pooling equilibrium can only occur under very specific circumstances. We show that the high target affects the quality choice of entrepreneurs and may deter unique, high quality projects. In addition, we discuss how the entrepreneur should modify the signaling strategy when a high target potentially deters backers from pledging due to the cost of participating in a failed campaign.
The third chapter explores how to design such crowdfunding campaigns when contributors choose not just whether to contribute, but also when to contribute. We show that strategic contribution behavior—when contributors intentionally delay their pledges until campaign success is likely—can arise from the combination of non-refundable (potentially very small) hassle costs and the risk of campaign failure, and can explain pledging patterns commonly observed in crowdfunding. Furthermore, such delays hurt the entrepreneur if contributors are distracted, i.e., if they may fail to return to the campaign after an intentional delay. To mitigate this, an entrepreneur can use a simple menu of two rewards with a fixed number of units sold at a low price, and an unlimited number sold at a higher price; this segments contributors over time based on the information they observe upon arrival. Despite its simplicity, such a menu performs well compared to a theoretically optimal menu consisting of an infinite number of different rewards and price levels under many conditions.
The fourth chapter focuses on another business model: subscription box services that deliver shipments of products to consumers at regular intervals for a fixed, per-box fee. Two challenges for providers of such services are acquiring new subscribers and retaining existing ones. We show that providers can respond to these challenges by managing the content of their subscription boxes over time when selling to customers that are heterogeneous along two dimensions: their utility for the contents of each box, and their utility for the service of content curation and delivery. The provider faces a budget for the total value (i.e., the quality) of box contents over a finite time horizon, and must allocate that budget over time to maximize total demand. Allocating more budget to a particular period increases consumer utility for the box—and hence the subscription rate—in that period, but at the expense of reducing the remaining budget for other periods. We show that it is generally not optimal for the service provider to allocate her budget equally and maintain consistent quality over time. If consumer heterogeneity is low, the optimal content strategy is to increase quality over time, which prioritizes retention over initial acquisition (i.e., quality starts low, acquiring few consumers, but increases to induce consumers to continue subscribing). On the other hand, if heterogeneity is high, the optimal strategy is to decrease quality over time, prioritizing acquisition over retention (i.e., quality starts high, acquiring many consumers, but decreases over time, retaining only consumers who highly value the service).
Item Open Access Putting ‘Time’ Back in “Me-Time”: Exploring the Relationships between Time Perceptions, Self-Gifting, and Well-Being(2020) Rifkin, JacquelineConsumers are increasingly being encouraged to engage in consumption with the specific intention of improving their own emotional well-being (called “self-gifting consumption”). As a result, the market around self-care and self-gifting has been growing over the last several years. At the same time, however, consumers are also experiencing what has been called a “time famine,” or the sense of not having enough time to accomplish what they need or want to do. Leveraging the academic literatures on self-gifting consumption and time perceptions, this dissertation explores this tension, its psychological underpinnings, and possible solutions. Specifically, two essays explore antecedents of consumer interest in self-gifting, consequences of engaging in self-gifting, and the role of time perceptions in shaping these relationships.
Essay 1 examines the role of perceived time availability in driving consumers’ attitudes toward “self-gifting appeals,” or marketing appeals that communicate the intention to improve one’s emotional well-being through the purchase or consumption of a given offering. Six studies reveal that perceiving time as more (vs. less) abundant leads consumers to resonate more with self-gifting appeals, compared to when the same offerings are positioned in other ways. This occurs because perceived time abundance triggers a heightened sense of contentment—a positive, emotion-like state of feeling complete, and characterized by a desire to focus on one’s emotions—which, in turn, increases attitudes towards appeals that involve a personal, emotional focus (as with self-gifting appeals).
Turning from antecedents to consequences, Essay 2 tests whether engaging in a brief self-gifting experience provides emotional well-being benefits, whether consumers can correctly intuit this outcome, and the potential moderating role of time perceptions. Four studies demonstrate that, despite consumers’ expectations that time scarcity will hamper their ability to derive emotional benefit from self-gifting experiences, time- scarce consumers in fact derive amplified emotional well-being boosts, relative to time- abundant consumers. In addition to improving emotional well-being, self-gifting experiences can also expand one’s sense of available time, particularly for the time-scarce.
Overall, this dissertation contributes to the literatures on time perceptions, self- gifting, affective forecasting, and consumer well-being and has implications for the role that consumption and marketing can play in improving consumers’ lives.
Item Open Access The Benefits of Budgeting Time First for Multiple Goal Setting and Pursuit(2020) Memmi, SarahConsumers often have multiple goals and limited time to pursue them. Running out of time means that people may fail to achieve, or to even attempt, one or more valued goals. When time constrains multiple goal pursuit, what might encourage consumers to protect time for downstream goals (i.e., goals that occur later in a sequence)? I propose that a subtle shift in the way people think about setting multiple goals in relation to limited time can help. Nine experiments demonstrate that, compared to only setting goals, budgeting time first (i.e., allocating total time across tasks before specifying goal levels) encourages people to set more realistic (i.e., more accurate) multiple goals that better fit within the total available time. This occurs because, by disaggregating the total time available for multiple goals into distinct accounts, budgeting time reduces implicit “double dipping” into a shared time pool when setting goals. By encouraging people to set more realistic upstream goals, budgeting time first increases time spent on downstream goals, boosting how much people accomplish toward, and whether they ultimately achieve, those goals. Further, by protecting time for downstream goals, budgeting time first discourages consumers from exceeding the total time budget and spending against future periods. This research contributes to understanding of the relationship between goals and time, multiple goal setting and pursuit, and mental accounting and budgeting. The findings also have substantive implications for consumer goal pursuit and well-being.
Item Open Access The Influence of Amusement and Love on Consumers’ Choice between National Brands and Private Labels(2019-11-26) Chen, CocoLove and amusement are positive emotions that are commonly used in marketing. Although a plethora of research has shown that emotions have influence on consumer choice, few prior studies have examined the influence of discrete position emotions (i.e. love and amusement) on consumers’ preference between national brands and store-owned brands. The present study primed amusement, love, and neutral emotions in 195 participants via memory recall, then participants were presented with a $75 budget to choose between nine pairs of national brand and private label products. Although no significant difference was found between emotions and brand choice, people who felt more love were more likely to purchase private label household products. With participant exclusion, people who felt more amusement were emerged as more likely to purchase private label food products. These findings have implications for both advertisers and consumers, suggesting that discrete positive emotions have influence on purchase decisions in various product categories.Item Open Access The Pursuit of Health, Wealth, and Well-being Through Minimalist Consumption(2020) Chabot, AimeeMaterial consumption has increased exponentially in recent decades, establishing most American consumers today as the most materially wealthy humans in history. But what is all of our stuff really buying us? Despite our material wealth, Americans suffer from many poverties and illnesses that seem to be exacerbated rather than alleviated by our culture of consumerism. Even more clear is the threat that our consumption behavior poses to the environment. In seeking solutions to overconsumption, interest in minimalism as a lifestyle has rapidly expanded over the past decade. Given a lack of academic research on this topic, the current work relies on four datasets using quantitative surveys (total N = 1,117) and in-depth qualitative interviews (N = 30 minimalists) to explore the following questions: what does it mean to practice minimalism, what motivates people to adopt minimalism, and what impacts do people report experiencing as a result of practicing minimalism? I find that minimalism is a practice of centering one's values and intentionally allocating and cultivating one's resources across a variety of domains. By investing one’s time, money, attention, energy, and space into that which is most valued and divesting from that which is not, minimalists seek to maximize value and minimize costs. As a result, I suggest that minimalism is a consumption orientation and practice that is value-driven and resource-building. I find that minimalist consumers often adopt minimalism during periods of significant change and transition and are primarily motivated by a desire to reduce stress and increase their psychological well-being. Minimalists report a high number of benefits from practicing minimalism, including increased financial security, improved psychological well-being, less stress, more free time, fewer distractions, and a greater sense of control. In conceptualizing minimalism more broadly, I adapt and extend Antonovsky’s theory of salutogenesis (1979, 1987) to argue that minimalism can be viewed as a case of a salutogenic (vs. pathogenic) consumption orientation – that is, consumption that is focused on building well-being through the active cultivation of valued resources (as compared to consumption that threatens well-being and depletes valued resources). I conclude that minimalism is a promising pathway to greater individual well-being with positive second-order environmental effects.
Item Open Access “What’s Pain Got To Do With It?”: How the Pain of Payment Influences Our Choices and Our Relationships(2015) Shah, Avni MaheshOne of the most frequent things we do as consumers is make purchase. We pay for a coffee or for food, we pay for necessities around the house, we even pay for one another, buying drinks or dinner for a friend every now and then. In today’s marketplace, the decision of whether to purchase is also coupled with the decision of how to make a purchase. Consumers have so many different methods to pay for their transactions. Can the way a consumer chooses to pay change the likelihood that s/he make a purchase? And then post-purchase, can the payment method used to pay for a purchase influence how connected individuals feel to that product, brand, or organization? Given that we sometimes pay for others (and vice versa), can the way we pay influence our interpersonal relationships?
In what follows, I argue that the way individuals pay, and specifically the pain associated with making a payment, can have a pervasive effect on their decision to make a purchase and how they feel post-transaction. Across three essays, I focus on how the pain of paying can influence the likelihood to purchase an item from a consideration set (Essay 1) and subsequently, how the pain of paying can influence post-transaction connection to a product, organization, or even to other people (Essay 2 and 3). Across field, laboratory, online, and archival methods, I find robust evidence that increasing the pain of paying may initially deter individuals from choosing. However, post-transaction, increasing the pain of payment may have an upside: individuals feel closer and more committed to a product that they purchased, organization that they donated to, and feel greater connection and rapport to who they spent their money on. However, I also demonstrate the boundary conditions of these findings. When individuals are spending money on something that is undesirable, such as paying for a competitor, increasing the pain of payment decreases interpersonal connection and rapport.