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This research documents a phenomenon we call the endowed progress effect, whereby people provided with artificial advancement toward a goal exhibit greater persistence toward reaching the goal. By converting a task requiring eight steps into a task requiring 10 steps but with two steps already complete, the task is reframed as one that has been undertaken and incomplete rather than not yet begun. This increases the likelihood of task completion and decreases completion time. The effect appears to depend on perceptions of task completion rather than a desire to avoid wasting the endowed progress. Moderators include the reason, if any, offered for the endowment and the currency in which progress is recorded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Auction sellers usually must set a reserve, which is the lowest auction price that they will accept. I propose that anticipated regret and rejoicing affect reserves. Regret occurs when the highest bid exceeds the seller's value for the property but is still below the reserve. Rejoicing occurs when the reserve forces the winning bidder to pay a higher price. The impact of regret and rejoicing can be observed by examining sellers' learning over sequential auctions, particularly when they use a frequency heuristic. Results from an auction experiment with simulated bidders support the impact of anticipated regret and rejoicing on reserves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional explorations of inference making have examined consumers' reactions to product descriptions that lack information about salient attributes. Such studies frequently report systematically lower evaluations of incompletely described alternatives along with a generally low incidence of unprompted attribute-to-attribute inference. We argue that the nature and likelihood of an inference are dependent on the cues available at the time of decision making, and that some cues may exert a disproportionate influence on inference behavior. In several experiments in which subjects were presented with competing cues that implied different values of a missing attribute, we show that intuitive beliefs about the relationships between attributes are perceived as a particularly reliable basis for interattribute inference. Strong beliefs appear capable of superseding other compelling cues and may induce consumers to generate inferences spontaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study a market model in which competing firms use costly marketing devices to influence the set of alternatives which consumers perceive as relevant. Consumers in our model are boundedly rational in the sense that they have an imperfect perception of what is relevant to their decision problem. They apply well-defined preferences to a “consideration set”, which is a function of the marketing devices employed by the firms. We examine the implications of this behavioural model in the context of a competitive market model, particularly on industry profits, vertical product differentiation, the use of marketing devices, and consumers' conversion rates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents a sequential decision model in which entrepreneurs decide on whether to enter a new market. Private expectation of individual entrepreneurs; Viability of the decision models of entrepreneurs; Distribution of the private expectations; Implications of the heterogeneity of private expectations.

Explores the relevance of Bayesian statistics to market decision-making and research. Fundamentals of Bayesian statistics within the framework of marketing research; Information on how the Bayesian approach has been applied to prescriptive decision-making in marketing; Relevance of the Bayesian model for a behavioral theory of buyer and/or managerial behavior.