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A core assumption across many disciplines is that producers enter market exchange relationships for economic reasons. This research examines an overlooked factor; namely, the socioemotional benefits of selling the fruits of one's labor. Specifically, the authors find that individuals selling their products interpret sales as a signal from the market that serves as a source of self-validation, thus increasing their happiness above and beyond any monetary rewards from those sales. This effect highlights an information asymmetry that is opposite to what is found in traditional signaling theory. That is, the authors find that customers have information about product quality that they signal to the producer, validating the producer's skill level. Furthermore, the sales-as-signal effect is moderated by characteristics of the purchase transaction that determine the signal strength of sales: The effect is attenuated when product choice does not reflect a deliberate decision and is amplified when buyers incur higher monetary costs. In addition, sales have a stronger effect on happiness than alternative, nonmonetary forms of market signals such as likes. Finally, the sales-as-signal effect is more pronounced when individuals sell their self-made (vs. other-made) products and affects individuals’ happiness beyond the happiness gained from producing.

Consumption can provide a feeling of groundedness or being emotionally rooted. This can occur when products connect consumers to their physical (place), social (people), and historic (past) environment. The authors introduce the concept of groundedness to the literature and show that it increases consumer choice; happiness; and feelings of safety, strength, and stability. Following these consequential outcomes, the authors demonstrate how marketers can provide consumers with a feeling of groundedness through product designs, distribution channels, and marketing communications. They also show how marketers might segment the market using observable proxies for consumers’ need for groundedness, such as high computer use, high socioeconomic status, or life changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Taken together, the findings show that groundedness is a powerful concept providing a comprehensive explanation for a variety of consumer trends, including the popularity of local, artisanal, and nostalgic products. It seems that in times of digitization, urbanization, and global challenges, the need to feel grounded has become particularly acute.

In this article we advance a theory that describes how people evaluate attribute values. We propose that evaluations involve a target and a reference value. Evaluators first seek a reference value on the target attribute (e.g., an average value or another stimulus's value on that same attribute). However, in the absence of same-attribute information, evaluators may instead rely on the target stimulus's own value on another attribute and make an evaluation about the target in one of two ways. First, the individual may compare the target attribute value to the stimulus's value on a reference attribute. The evaluator is more likely to engage in an interattribute comparison when the target attribute value is relatively evaluable and compatible with the reference value. Second, the individual may infer the magnitude of the target value based on his or her judgment about the extremity (e.g., the goodness or badness) of the stimulus's value on a reference attribute and the perceived correlation between the target attribute and the reference attribute. The evaluator is more likely to make an inference about the target value based on the reference when the target is low in evaluability and is less compatible with the reference value. Two attribute values are considered to be more compatible when their scale format is more similar. We provide support for our framework in 14 studies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The idea that consumers use products to feel good about themselves is a basic tenet of marketing. Yet, in addition to the motive to self-enhance, consumers also strive to confirm their self-views (i.e., self-verification). Although self-verification provides self-related benefits, its role in consumer behavior is poorly understood. To redress that gap, we examine a dispositional variable—trait self-esteem—that predicts whether consumers self-verify in the marketplace. We propose that low (vs. high) self-esteem consumers gravitate toward inferior products because those products confirm their pessimistic self-views. Five studies supported our theorizing: low (vs. high) self-esteem participants gravitated toward inferior products (study 1) because of the motivation to self-verify (study 2). Low self-esteem consumers preferred inferior products only when those products signaled pessimistic (vs. positive) self-views and could therefore be self-verifying (study 3). Even more telling, low self-esteem consumers’ propensity to choose inferior products disappeared after they were induced to view themselves as consumers of superior products (study 4), but remained in the wake of negative feedback (study 5). Our investigation thus highlights self-esteem as a boundary condition for compensatory consumption. By pinpointing factors that predict when self-verification guides consumer behavior, this work enriches the field’s understanding of how products serve self-motives.

Prosocial organizations have different moral objectives. Some seek to promote welfare (e.g., Red Cross), but others seek to promote justice and equality (e.g., ACLU). Additionally, these organizations can induce different positive emotions to motivate donations. If organizations are seeking to promote different moral objectives using positive emotions, which positive emotion will be the most effective for their respective campaigns? We demonstrate how the congruency between the moral domain of an emotion and the moral objective of an organization plays a role in influencing prosocial behaviors. Charities that seek to increase care in society (e.g., disaster-relief charities) should utilize compassion in their promotion campaigns, but charities that seek to promote fairness and equality in society (e.g., human rights charities) should utilize gratitude in their promotion campaigns. One field study (N = 2,112) and four experiments (N = 2,100) demonstrate that utilizing a positive emotion congruent with the charity’s moral objective increases monetary donations and preferences. The preferences are driven by the moral concerns made salient by the respective emotions. Further, the preferences attenuate when exchange norms are made salient. Altogether, these results underscore the importance of considering moral congruence in consumption contexts.

This manuscript documents the research productivity over a 10-year period (2007–2016) of marketing faculty at 30 leading marketing departments. We find that median productivity in the top four marketing journals was 0.40 publications per year. We find no meaningful difference in productivity between “quant” and “behavioral” faculty. Furthermore, we find a slow decrease in productivity as faculty’s “academic age” increases, but we also find that the most productive members of our community are among the colleagues who received their PhDs 20 to 30 years ago and that academic age is not a good predictor when recent productivity is taken into account. In addition, we find that the departments differ strongly in terms of the concentration of publications among faculty, as measured by the Gini coefficient. Finally, and to our surprise, we find that the number of publications in top journals by the faculty at these 30 schools dropped quite precipitously from the 2007–2011 to the 2012–2016 period.

Research on the effect of consumption on self-esteem is relatively scarce and related evidence is fragmented. We review articles from the literature on consumption, advertising, materialism, mass media, and social media as they relate - directly or indirectly - to consumer self-esteem. We introduce a taxonomy of eight types of processes through which consumption affects self-esteem: self-discrepancy, self-congruency, self-enhancement, self-determination, compensatory consumption, self-verification, self-object association, and market-mediated relationships. Based on this taxonomy, we highlight consumption domains and recent consumer trends that impact self-esteem. Moreover, we suggest priorities for further research.

People hold strong moral objections to commercial bodily markets—the buying and selling of the human body and its components (e.g., prostitution; commercial surrogacy; trade of kidneys, blood plasma, sperm, ovum, and hair). This research takes a descriptive approach to understand why people object to the marketing of the human body and how their moral objections differ across the political spectrum. The authors propose that liberals and conservatives find bodily markets to be morally wrong; however, the two groups object to bodily markets for different reasons. Liberals are more sensitive to exploitation concerns, but conservatives are more sensitive to violation of sanctity concerns in these markets. Real-world observational data and controlled experiments test these predictions. The findings show how sociopolitical leaders utilize the different moral objections to persuade their respective audiences, such as how conservative versus more liberal pastors sermonize differently on prostitution. Second, results show how targeted marketing campaigns encourage liberals and conservatives to participate in consumer advocacy and donate to political causes. Third, findings outline how liberals and conservatives support different regulatory laws that penalize buyers versus sellers. Finally, results show how the different moral objections manifest for live bodily products but not for dead bodily products.

In the past decade, consumer research using experiments has experienced a crisis of confidence. Research in our field has rightfully been criticized for p-hacking, Hypothesizing After the Results are Known, and other practices that lead to overestimation of the reliability and replicability of published results. Remediation has centered on more closely approximating the ideal hypothetico-deductive method. There has been a push towards forming, and registering, one or few hypotheses before running experiments, testing only those hypotheses, and testing each hypothesis with a single, preplanned analysis. We argue that doing better hypothetico-deductive experiments is not the (whole) solution and that p-hacking and HARKing are not the problem per se. The problem is that we misrepresent exploratory research as hypothetico-deductive. Forcing exploratory research into a hypothetico-deductive straightjacket leads to bad hypothesis testing. The straightjacket also leads to bad exploration, crowding out essential, good exploration that deserves space in our journals. We propose a recipe for more honest consumer research, in which authors report exploratory studies meant to generate hypotheses followed by truly hypothetico-deductive studies that test those hypotheses.

We investigate a psychological factor regulating consumers’ switching in response to poor service quality: chronic global self-esteem. Whereas high-self-esteem consumers tend to switch to other providers in response to poor service quality, low-self-esteem consumers often do not. This happens because low-self-esteem consumers who experience poor service become risk-averse, and therefore reluctant to engage in new committed service relationships. Indeed, low-self-esteem consumers’ likelihood to switch to an alternative provider in response to poor service quality increases when this provider offers a less risky, low commitment (vs. more risky, high commitment) contract. Moreover, experimentally reducing low-self-esteem consumers’ risk aversion increases their likelihood to switch to alternative providers in response to poor service quality. Finally, low-self-esteem consumers’ risk aversion mediates their reluctance to switch in response to poor service. We rule out failure severity perceptions, power, autonomy, affect, and action orientation as alternative explanations. The implication of this research for public policy makers is that promoting competition (by offering consumers options and by reducing switching costs) may not be enough to protect the welfare of low-self-esteem consumers. We also suggest ways in which firms can untie vulnerable consumers from negative service relationships.

Whereas many theories of decision making predict that presenting or not presenting common features of choice alternatives should not affect choice, in this research, the authors show that common features can be a powerful driver of choice behavior. They conjecture that consumers often hold expectations about the features that choice alternatives have in common, and they demonstrate that presenting (vs. omitting information about) a common feature increases the choice probability of the alternative that would have been expected to perform worse on the common feature, given its performance on differentiating features. This effect occurs because performance on the common feature is judged not at face value but relative to an expectation about which product should perform best on that feature. The effect holds even though performance on the common feature is clearly the same when alternatives are presented side by side. Finally, the authors demonstrate four boundary conditions of this effect.

As in other social sciences, published findings in consumer research tend to overestimate the size of the effect being investigated, due to both file drawer effects and abuse of researcher degrees of freedom, including opportunistic analysis decisions. Given that most effect sizes are substantially smaller than would be apparent from published research, there has been a widespread call to increase power by increasing sample size. We propose that, aside from increasing sample size, researchers can also increase power by boosting the effect size. If done correctly, removing participants, using covariates, and optimizing experimental designs, stimuli, and measures can boost effect size without inflating researcher degrees of freedom. In fact, careful planning of studies and analyses to maximize effect size is essential to be able to study many psychologically interesting phenomena when massive sample sizes are not feasible.

Technological advances, originating in the time of the industrial revolution and accelerating today, have alienated workers from consumers, and vice versa. We argue that this alienation and accompanying feelings of being objectified as a mere interchangeable source of profit are aversive to workers and consumers. These feelings reduce the meaningfulness and satisfaction workers find in their work and make products less attractive and consumption less meaningful to consumers. We propose simple and inexpensive interventions that can be used to make business more personal, with powerful effects on workers’ job satisfaction, product quality, and product attractiveness to consumers. Paradoxically, these interventions often rely on the same technological advances that otherwise facilitate the alienation. We specifically highlight how disclosing personal information (e.g., name, personal background) about workers and consumers can impact the motivation and performance of workers. We also highlight how disclosing personal information about workers and consumers can impact consumers’ satisfaction, preferences, and willingness-to-pay. We argue that providing personal information about workers to consumers and vice versa will often yield a win-win-win effect. As more satisfied customers buy more at higher prices, more satisfied workers do a better job, and personal information can be disclosed cheaply using information technology, companies benefit from increased sales at higher prices and at very little extra cost.

The conviction one holds about free will serves as a foundation for the views one holds about the consumption activities of other consumers, the nature of social support systems, and the constraints that should or should not be placed on industry. Across multiple paradigms and contexts, the authors assess people's beliefs about the control consumers have over consumption activities in the face of various constraints on agency. They find that beliefs regarding personal discretion are robust and resilient, consistent with their finding that free will is viewed as noncorporeal. Nonetheless, they also find that these beliefs are not monolithic but vary as a function of identifiable differences across individuals and the perceived cause of behavior, particularly with regard to physical causation. Taken together, the results support the general wisdom of libertarian paternalism as a framework for public policy and highlight current and emerging situations in which policy makers might be granted greater latitude.

In response to Sunstein’s “Fifty Shades of Manipulation (2015), I reinforce and expand on two of Sunstein’s points. First, I argue that almost any action by a marketeer, such as the order or context in which information is given, affects the salience of choice options or consumption benefits. These effects on salience in turn impact choice in subtle and often subconscious ways. Thus, if manipulation is defined in terms of lack of reflection and deliberation (Sunstein 2015), one might argue that “you can’t not manipulate.” Second, I argue that some non-deliberative manipulative processes may increase consumer welfare by increasing the pleasure of consuming the product. Thus, I agree with Sunstein that some effects of manipulation that rely on more automatic, lessdeliberative processes are not all that harmful. In addition to these two points, my main argument is that defining manipulation mostly in terms of less-deliberative processes misses out on several ways to influence consumers that are particularly harmful and that most consumers would consider manipulative. I argue that, for example in financial decision making, consumers often try to think hard and carefully, but are overwhelmed by the amount and complexity of information. This leads, for example, to confusopolies, and should undermine our confidence in the principle of caveat emptor. Consumers try to perform due diligence but still cannot avoid making suboptimal decisions.

We examine consumers' forgetting to buy items they intended to buy. We show that the propensity to forget depends on the types of items consumers intend to purchase and the way consumers shop. Consumers may shop using a memory-based search by recalling their planned purchases from memory and directly searching for the products. For example, consumers may use the search function at an online store. Alternatively, consumers may use a stimulus-based search by systematically moving through a store, visually scanning the inventory and selecting the required items as they are encountered. Using an online shopping paradigm, we show that consumers are more likely to forget the items they infrequently buy when using the memory-based search, but not when using the stimulus-based search. In fact, when using the stimulus-based search, consumers are sometimes even better able to remember the items they infrequently (vs. frequently) buy. Moreover, consumers fail to take these factors into account when predicting their memory. As a result, they do not take appropriate actions to prevent forgetting (e.g., using a shopping list).

This manuscript documents the research productivity over a ten-year period (2007-2016) of marketing faculty at 30 leading marketing departments. We find that median productivity in the top four marketing journals was .40 publications per year. We find no meaningful difference in productivity between “quant” and “behavioral” faculty. Furthermore, we find a slow decrease in productivity as faculty’s “academic age” increases, but we also find that the most productive members of our community are among the colleagues who received their PhDs 20 to 30 years ago and that academic age is not a good predictor when recent productivity is taken into account. In addition, we find that the departments differ strongly in terms of the concentration of publications among faculty, as measured by the Gini coefficient. Finally, and to our surprise, we find that the number of publications in top journals by the faculty at these 30 schools dropped quite precipitously from the 2007-2011 to the 2012-2016 period.

How do you respond when receiving advice from somebody with the argumentation “my gut tells me so” or “this is what my intuition says”? Most likely, you would find this justification insufficient and disregard the advice. Are there also situations where people do appreciate such intuitive advice and change their opinion accordingly? A growing number of authors write about the power of intuition in solving problems, showing that intuitively made decisions can be of higher quality than decisions based on analytical reasoning. We want to know if decision makers, when receiving advice based on an intuitive cognitive process, also recognize the value of such advice. Is advice justified by intuition necessarily followed to a lesser extent than an advice justified by analysis? Furthermore, what are the important factors influencing the effect of intuitive justification on advice taking? Participants across three studies show that utilization of intuitive advice varies depending on advisor seniority and type of task for which the advice is given. Summarizing, the results suggest that decision makers a priori doubt the value of intuitive advice and only assess it as accurate if other cues in the advice setting corroborate this. Intuitively justified advice is utilized more if it comes from a senior advisor. In decision tasks with experiential products, intuitively justified advice can even have more impact than analytically justified advice. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The authors propose a goal-based model of product evaluation and choice. The model is intended to account for the role of momentary goal activations in relatively straightforward product evaluation and choice processes. It contributes by ( a ) providing a coherent and consistent account for goal-based product evaluations/choices, ( b ) providing a theory of the way goal activation influences product evaluation and choice, and ( c ) generating predictions about novel phenomena, moderators, and boundary conditions in the area of goal-based product evaluations and choices.

In an increasingly globalized marketplace, it is common for marketing researchers to collect data from respondents who are not native speakers of the language in which the questions are formulated. Examples include online customer ratings and internal marketing initiatives in multinational corporations. This raises the issue of whether providing responses on rating scales in a person's native versus second language exerts a systematic influence on the responses obtained. This article documents the anchor contraction effect (ACE), the systematic tendency to report more intense emotions when answering questions using rating scales in a nonnative language than in the native language. Nine studies (1) establish ACE, test the underlying process, and rule out alternative explanations; (2) examine the generalizability of ACE across a range of situations, measures, and response scale formats; and (3) explore managerially relevant and easily implementable corrective techniques.

This article challenges the view that it is always better to hold decision makers accountable for their decision process rather than their decision outcomes. In three multiple-cue judgment studies, the authors show that process accountability, relative to outcome accountability, consistently improves judgment quality in relatively simple elemental tasks. However, this performance advantage of process accountability does not generalize to more complex configural tasks. This is because process accountability improves an analytical process based on cue abstraction, while it does not change a holistic process based on exemplar memory. Cue abstraction is only effective in elemental tasks (in which outcomes are a linear additive combination of cues) but not in configural tasks (in which outcomes depend on interactions between the cues). In addition, Studies 2 and 3 show that the extent to which process and outcome accountability affect judgment quality depends on individual differences in analytical intelligence and rational thinking style.

Changing brand attitudes by pairing a brand with affectively laden stimuli such as celebrity endorsers or pleasant pictures is called evaluative conditioning. We show that this attitude change can occur in two ways, depending on how brands and affective stimuli are presented. Attitude change can result from establishing a memory link between brand and affective stimulus (indirect attitude change) or from direct ¿affect transfer¿ from affective stimulus to brand (direct attitude change). Direct attitude change is significantly more robust than indirect attitude change, for example, to changes in the valence of affective stimuli (unconditioned stimulus revaluation: e.g., endorsers falling from grace), to interference by subsequent information (e.g., advertising clutter), and to persuasion knowledge activation (e.g., consumer suspicion about being influenced). Indirect evaluative conditioning requires repeated presentations of a brand with the same affective stimulus. Direct evaluative conditioning requires simultaneous presentation of a brand with different affective stimuli.

Extrinsic cues such as price and irrelevant attributes have been shown to bias consumers' product judgments. Results in this article replicate those findings in pretrial judgments but show that such biasing cues can improve quality judgments at a later point in time. Initially biasing cues can even yield more accurate judgments than cues that do not bias pretrial judgments and can help consumers after a delay (e.g., at the time of repeat purchase) to determine how much they had liked a product when they tried it before. These results suggest that trying to deceive consumers with the use of biasing cues may induce trial in the short term but may come back to haunt the deceiver at the time of repeat purchase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research contributes to the current understanding of language effects in advertising by uncovering a previously ignored mechanism shaping consumer response to an increasingly globalized marketplace. We propose a language-specific episodic trace theory of language emotionality to explain how language influences the perceived emotionality of marketing communications. Five experiments with bilingual consumers show (1) that textual information (e.g., marketing slogans) expressed in consumers' native language tends to be perceived as more emotional than messages expressed in their second language, (2) that this effect is not uniquely due to the activation of stereotypes associated to specific languages or to a lack of comprehension, and (3) that the effect depends on the frequency with which words have been experienced in native- versus second-language contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends the familiar multi-stage framework for choice by explicitly describing the role that goals play at each stage. We first present a typology of goals, ranging from content to process and from immediate to long-term illustrating it in the context of two examples—purchasing a new car and earthquake retrofitting. We then delineate each stage of the choice process based on recent advances from the descriptive literature on the influence of the various goals. Finally, we draw the prescriptive implications as to how goals can inform what we know, or need to know, about the choice process.

We investigate one of the factors that might explain behavioral loyalty in face of service failures. Research suggests that individuals with low self-esteem who experience relational transgressions develop an avoidant attachment style, which impairs their interpersonal functioning and their willingness to take further interpersonal risks (Park and Maner 2009), and in particular to engage in other long-term relationships (Walker 2009). Drawing on this research, we propose that low self-esteem (LSE) consumers who experience service failures become unwilling to commit themselves to alternative brands, even when they have the opportunity to do so, thus—paradoxically—they remain trapped in their current brand relationship. High self-esteem (HSE) consumers, instead, are more likely to switch to other available service providers when they experience service failures, as compared to when they do not experience failures. We also predict that LSE consumers who experience service failures tend to avoid new commitments in general, thus favoring transactions relative to long-term contracts, even in consumption domains that are unrelated to the service failure.

This article introduces a goal-based view of consumer choice in which (1) choice is influenced by three classes of goals (consumption goals, criterion goals, and process goals), (2) goals are cognitively represented, and (3) the impact of a goal on choice depends on its activation. For each class of goals, we discuss how goal activation is influenced by direct (subconscious) goal priming, by spreading activation from choice options, from other goals, and from the context, and by goal (non-)achievement. Opportunities for modeling goal-based choice, the integration of emotions in a theory of goal-based choice, and relationships with dual-process theories of decision making are discussed.

We believe there is insufficient support for the direct perception-to-behavior and the direct goal-to-behavior explanations of nonconsciously mediated behavior. We propose a nonconscious behavioral choice model. We argue that behavioral choice depends on means activation, goal activation, and the relative value of a behavior for achieving a goal.

Results from 4 experiments suggest that currencies such as loyalty-program points are overvalued. Different allocations of the same quantity of points across the same number of purchases (e.g., 100 points for each first, 200 for each second, 300 for each third purchase vs. 200 for each first, second, and third purchase) yielded irrelevant trends and should have led participants to ignore loyalty points as a basis for choice. However, choices were influenced by points even when consumers were provided with other truly discriminating information (e.g., price) and the irrelevance of the loyalty points was readily discernable. This implies that irrelevant information can influence choice when other, easily justifiable bases for decisions are available and, therefore, that irrelevant information can function as more than a tie-breaker. Other implications for research on irrelevant attributes, medium effects, intertemporal choice, and loyalty programs are discussed.

Prevailing wisdom assumes that brand equity increases when a brand touts its desirable attributes. We report conditions under which the use of attribute information to promote a product can shift the locus of equity from brand to attribute, thereby reducing the attractiveness of extension products. This effect is moderated by the degree of ambiguity in the learning environment, such that prevailing wisdom is refuted when ambiguity is low but is supported when ambiguity is high. Copyright 2003 by the University of Chicago.

Despite the popularity and high quality of machine-made products, handmade products have not disappeared, even in product categories in which machinal production is common. The authors present the first systematic set of studies exploring whether and how stated production mode (handmade vs. machine-made) affects product attractiveness. Four studies provide evidence for the existence of a positive handmade effect on product attractiveness. This effect is, to an important extent, driven by perceptions that handmade products symbolically “contain love.” The authors validate this love account by controlling for alternative value drivers of handmade production (effort, product quality, uniqueness, authenticity, and pride). The handmade effect is moderated by two factors that affect the value of love. Specifically, consumers indicate stronger purchase intentions for handmade than machine-made products when buying gifts for their loved ones but not for more distant gift recipients, and they pay more for handmade gifts when purchased to convey love than simply to acquire the best-performing product.

Four studies show that consumers have not one but two distinct learning processes that allow them to use brand names and other product features to predict consumption benefits. The first learning process is a relatively unfocused process in which all stimulus elements get cross-referenced for later retrieval. This process is backward looking and consistent with human associative memory (HAM) models. The second learning process requires that a benefit be the focus of prediction during learning. It assumes feature-benefit associations change only to the extent that the expected performance of the product does not match the experienced performance of the product. This process is forward looking and consistent with adaptive network models. The importance of this two-process theory is most apparent when a product has multiple features. During HAM learning, each feature-benefit association will develop independently. During adaptive learning, features will compete to predict benefits and, thus, feature-benefit associations will develop interdependently. We find adaptive learning of feature-benefit associations when consumers are motivated to learn to predict a benefit (e.g., because it is perceived to have hedonic relevance) but find HAM learning when consumers attend to an associate of lesser motivational significance. Copyright 2001 by the University of Chicago.

Consumers use brand names and product features to predict the performance of products. Various learning models offer hypotheses about the source of these predictive associations. Spreading-activation models hypothesize that cues acquire predictive value as a consequence of being present during the acquisition of product performance information. Least mean squares connectionist models hypothesize that any one cue acquires predictive value only to the extent that it can predict differences in performance that are not already predicted by other available cues. Five studies in the context of portfolio-branding strategies provide evidence supporting a least mean squares connectionist model. As predicted by this model, results show that subbranding and ingredient-branding strategies can protect brands from dilution in some situations but can promote dilution in other situations.

A series of experiments illustrates a learning process that enhances brand equity at the expense of quality-determining attributes. When the relationship between brand name and product quality is learned prior to the relationship between product attributes and quality, inhibition of the latter may occur. The phenomenon is shown to be robust, but its influence appears sensitive to contextual variations in the learning environment. Tests of process are inconsistent with attentional explanations and popular models of causal reasoning, but they are supportive of associative learning models that portray learners as inherently forward looking. P urchase decisions are based on predictions of product performance. Consumers base their predictions in part on product cues and are accurate to the extent that they have properly learned the relationship between the cues and performance. Consumer research has devoted little attention to this learning process despite its fundamental importance (Hutchinson and Alba 1991; Meyer 1987). In the present research we examine consumer learning of product cues as predictors of product quality with particular emphasis on the distinction between brand and attribute cues. To illustrate, consider the cases in which consumers rely strictly on either brand or attribute cues to predict quality. If consumers learn the relationship between product attributes and quality, they will differentiate among brands that possess different attributes and treat as commodities those brands that share the same attributes. Once the predictive rule is learned, it may be applied to any new brand that possesses the attributes. In contrast, consumers who rely strictly on brand cues will ignore the underlying attributes and may incorrectly differentiate physically identical brands. The latter case is important because it can be costly and is not uncommon (such as when consumers pay high premiums for branded drugs that are chemically identical to their generic counterparts). An appealing explanation of this phenomenon is that consumers are unaware of the attributes of these brands. Indeed, firms attempt to foster such ignorance by making attribute information difficult to find or process (Bergen, Dutta, and Shugan 1996; Hoch and Deighton 1989). The present research investigates whether consumers will routinely learn the determinants of product quality when attribute cues are *Stijn M. J. van Osselaer is assistant professor of marketing, University of Chicago. Joseph W. Alba is distinguished professor of marketing, University of Florida. This work was supported by the Beatrice Foods Co. Faculty Research Fund at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. The authors thank Alan Cooke, Joffre Swait, Chris Janiszewski, and Bart Weitz for their helpful comments. freely available and processing is unconstrained. We suggest that learning can be suppressed even under these relatively favorable conditions due to the learning phenomenon known as blocking.

Current literature on loyalty programs emphasizes the importance of psychological rewards and special treatment. However, it is not clear if male and female customers respond to these incentives in a similar way. We explore the differential effect for female versus male consumers of two psychological rewards that are provided through a loyalty program (a) high status (e.g., Gold membership), and (b) personalization, at different levels of visibility to other consumers. Across three experiments and a field study, we find a coherent pattern of gender differences in the way customers respond to different types of psychological rewards in the context of loyalty programs. The results show that men respond more positively than women to loyalty programs that emphasize status, but only when their higher status is highly visible to others. In contrast, women respond more positively than men to loyalty programs that emphasize personalization, but only for personalization in private settings. We discuss managerial implications for the design of loyalty programs.

Recent studies involving nonlinear discrimination problems suggest that stimuli in human associative learning are represented configurally with narrow generalization, such that presentation of stimuli that are even slightly dissimilar to stored configurations weakly activate these configurations. The authors note that another well-known set of findings in human associative learning, cue-interaction phenomena, suggest relatively broad generalization. Three experiments show that current models of human associative learning, which try to model both nonlinear discrimination and cue interaction as the result of 1 process, fail because they cannot simultaneously account for narrow and broad generalization. Results suggest that human associative learning involves (a) an exemplar-based process with configural stimulus representation and narrow generalization and (b) an adaptive learning process characterized by broad generalization and cue interaction.

In some product categories, low-priced brands are consistently of low quality, but high-priced brands can be anything from terrible to excellent. In other product categories, high-priced brands are consistently of high quality, but quality of low-priced brands varies widely. Three experiments demonstrate that such heteroscedasticity leads to more extreme price-based quality predictions. This finding suggests that quality inferences do not only stem from what consumers have learned about the average level of quality at different price points through exemplar memory or rule abstraction. Instead, quality predictions are also based on learning about the covariation between price and quality. That is, consumers inappropriately conflate the conditional mean of quality with the predictability of quality. We discuss implications for theories of quantitative cue learning and selective information processing, for pricing strategies and luxury branding, and for our understanding of the emergence and persistence of erroneous beliefs and stereotypes beyond the consumer realm.