Virtually all current theories of choice under risk or uncertainty are cognitive and consequentialist. They assume that people assess the desirability and likelihood of possible outcomes of choice alternatives and integrate this information through some type of expectation-based calculus to arrive at decision. The authors propose an alternative theoretical perspective, the risk-as-feelings hypothesis, that highlights the role of affect experienced at the moment of decision making. Drawing on research from clinical, physiological, and other subfield of psychology, they show that emotional reactions to risky situations often drive behavior. The risk-as-feelings hypothesis is shown to explain a wide range of phenomena that have resisted interpretation in cognitive-consequentialist terms.

Risk as Feelings

Virtually all current theories of choice under risk or uncertainty are cognitive and consequentialist. They assume that people assess the desirability and likelihood of possible outcomes of choice alternatives and integrate this information through some type of expectation-based calculus to arrive at a decision. The authors propose an alternative theoretical perspective, the risk-as-feelings hypothesis, that highlights the role of affect experienced at the moment of decision making. Drawing on research from clinical, physiological, and other subfields of psychology, they show that emotional reactions to risky situations often diverge from cognitive assessments of those risks. When such divergence occurs, emotional reactions often drive behavior. The risk-as-feelings hypothesis is shown to explain a wide range of phenomena that have resisted interpretation in cognitive-consequentialist terms.

Risk as feelings.

Fast and frugal heuristics - simple rules for making decisions with realistic mental resources - are presented here. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices, classifications, and predictions by employing bounded rationality. But when and how can such fast and frugal heuristics work? What heuristics are in the mind's adaptive toolbox, and what building blocks compose them? Can judgments based simply on a single reason be as accurate as those based on many reasons? Could less knowledge even lead to systematically better predictions than more knowledge? This book explores these questions by developing computational models of heuristics and testing them through experiments and analysis. It shows how fast and frugal heuristics can yield adaptive decisions in situations as varied as choosing a mate, dividing resources among offspring, predicting high school drop-out rates, and playing the stock market.

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart

Consumer decision making has been a focal interest in consumer research, and consideration of current marketplace trends (e.g., technological change, an information explosion) indicates that this topic will continue to be critically important. We argue that consumer choice is inherently constructive. Due to limited processing capacity, consumers often do not have well-defined existing preferences, but construct them using a variety of strategies contingent on task demands. After describing constructive choice, consumer decision tasks, and decision strategies, we provide an integrative framework for understanding constructive choice, review evidence for constructive consumer choice in light of that framework, and identify knowledge gaps that suggest opportunities for additional research.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1086/209535.pdf

Constructive Consumer Choice Processes

Branding has emerged as a top management priority in the last decade due to the growing realization that brands are one of the most valuable intangible assets that firms have. Driven in part by this intense industry interest, academic researchers have explored a number of different brand-related topics in recent years, generating scores of papers, articles, research reports, and books. This paper identifies some of the influential work in the branding area, highlighting what has been learned from an academic perspective on important topics such as brand positioning, brand integration, brand-equity measurement, brand growth, and brand management. The paper also outlines some gaps that exist in the research of branding and brand equity and formulates a series of related research questions. Choice modeling implications of the branding concept and the challenges of incorporating main and interaction effects of branding as well as the impact of competition are discussed.

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Brands and Branding: Research Findings and Future Priorities

This article addresses how consumers resolve decisions involving conflict between attributes linked to highly valued goals, such as an automobile purchase decision requiring determination of how much safety one is willing to sacrifice in order to obtain other benefits. One salient goal for these decisions may be coping with or minimizing the negative emotion generated during decision making. The conceptual framework developed in this article predicts that choosing avoidant options (e.g., the option to maintain the status quo) can satisfy coping goals by minimizing explicit confrontation of negative potential decision consequences and difficult trade-offs. Two experiments demonstrate that reported emotion can be altered by manipulating decision attributes, that the opportunity to choose an avoidant option mitigates levels of reported emotion, and that increasingly emotion-laden decision environments are associated with more choice of avoidant options. Mediation analyses indicate that actual choice of an avoidant option results in less retrospective negative emotion (in experiment 1) and that increased initial negative emotion results in increased choice of avoidant options (in experiment 2). Mediation analyses for experiment 2 also indicate that increased response times mediate avoidant choice, in contrast to explanations of the status quo bias and similar choice phenomena that appeal to decision makers' desires to minimize cognitive effort.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/209518.pdf

Choosing to Avoid: Coping with Negatively Emotion-Laden Consumer Decisions

In this article, the authors explore whether choice patterns are sensitive to the potential of relevant trade-offs to elicit negative emotion. Across three experiments, decision makers increasingly...

Emotional Trade-Off Difficulty and Choice:

Choice conflicts between one's important values may cause negative emotion. This article extends the standard effort-accuracy approach to explaining task influences on decision processing by arguing that coping goals will interact with effort minimization and accuracy maximization goals for negatively emotion-laden decision tasks. These coping goals may involve both a desire to process in a thorough, accurate manner and a desire to avoid particularly distressing aspects of processing. On the basis of this extended framework, the authors hypothesized and found in 3 experiments that decision processing under increasing negative emotion both becomes more extensive and proceeds more by focusing on one attribute at a time. In particular, increased negative emotion leads to more attribute-based processing at the beginning of the decision process. The results are inconsistent with views that negative emotion acts only as an incentive or only as a source of decision complexity.

/pdf/choice-processing-in-emotionally-difficult-decisions-2bshxj2lbf.pdf

Choice Processing in Emotionally Difficult Decisions

https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~jrb12/bio/Jim/46.pdf

Mary Frances Luce

Papers

Constructive Consumer Choice Processes

Choosing to Avoid: Coping with Negatively Emotion-Laden Consumer Decisions

Emotional Trade-Off Difficulty and Choice:

Choice Processing in Emotionally Difficult Decisions

When time is money : Decision behavior under opportunity-cost time pressure