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Firms routinely offer warranties, often as attempts to differentiate their offerings from those of competitors. Despite this practice common to virtually every consumer durable category, extant research has been inconclusive regarding the effect of warranties on quality judgments. One potential limitation of these prior investigations is the failure to model a key element of a product warranty�consumer-side transaction costs associated with warranty redemption. In this article, we introduce the role of consumer-side transaction costs associated with warranty redemption and examine the joint impact of warranty length and warranty redemption costs for brand names of varying strength on consumers' judgments of product quality. Two experiments show that warranty length signals security but not quality, and that perceived quality increases as consumers' warranty redemption costs decrease, provided that the warranty length is short. Different dimensions or aspects of warranties have different effects on perceived quality. The implications of the results for understanding conflicting findings in the warranty-quality literature are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has found that search and experience attribute claims are processed differently by consumers, with search attribute claims typically being more believable than experience attribute claims. It is, however, routinely the case that marketers desire to promote a product by making a claim featuring an experience attribute. The marketing literature has largely neglected the issue of how to enhance persuasion of experience attribute claims. The purpose of this research was to fill this void. We reason that source credibility impacts the receipt of experience claims and search claims differently. We then report results of 2 experiments featuring 2 different types of sources in the context of 2 different categories that suggest a source high in credibility can be employed to make experience claims more persuasive. The contributions our study makes to the persuasion literature and avenues for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We employed an attributional framework to test the differences between comparative and noncomparative ads when different attribute types were featured. Our experimental findings suggest that noncomparative ads might be more believable than comparative ads for experience attribute claims; however, for search attribute claims, the 2 might elicit similar levels of believability. We also find some support for the attributional underpinnings of lower believability associated with comparative-experience claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]