Showing papers in "ACR North American Advances in 2015"

Trust and Reputation in the Sharing Economy: the Role of Personal Photos in Airbnb

Abstract: ‘Sharing economy’ platforms such as Airbnb have recently flourished in the tourism industry. The prominent appearance of sellers' photos on these platforms motivated our study. We suggest that the presence of these photos can have a significant impact on guests' decision making. Specifically, we contend that guests infer the host's trustworthiness from these photos, and that their choice is affected by this inference. In an empirical analysis of Airbnb's data and a controlled experiment, we found that the more trustworthy the host is perceived to be from her photo, the higher the price of the listing and the probability of its being chosen. We also find that a host's reputation, communicated by her online review scores, has no effect on listing price or likelihood of consumer booking. We further demonstrate that if review scores are varied experimentally, they affect guests' decisions, but the role of the host's photo remains significant.

Pleasure As an Ally of Healthy Eating? Contrasting Visceral and Epicurean Eating Pleasure and Their Association With Portion Size Preferences and Wellbeing

Abstract: Research on overeating and self-regulation has associated eating pleasure with short-term visceral impulses triggered by hunger, external cues, or internal emotional urges. Drawing on research on the social and cultural dimensions of eating, we contrast this approach with what we call "Epicurean" eating pleasure, which is the enduring pleasure derived from the aesthetic appreciation of the sensory and symbolic value of the food. To contrast both approaches, we develop and test a scale measuring Epicurean eating pleasure tendencies and show that they are distinct from the tendency to experience visceral pleasure (measured using the external eating and emotional eating scales). We find that Epicurean eating pleasure is more prevalent among women than men but is independent of age, income and education. Unlike visceral eating pleasure tendencies, Epicurean eating tendencies are associated with a preference for smaller food portions and higher wellbeing, and not associated with higher BMI. Overall, we argue that the moralizing approach equating the pleasure of eating with 'low-level' visceral urges should give way to a more holistic approach which recognizes the positive role of Epicurean eating pleasure in healthy eating and wellbeing.

Individual Differences in Marketing Placebo Effects: Evidence From Brain Imaging and Behavioral Experiments

Abstract: A wealth of research has explored whether marketing-based expectancies such as price and brand quality beliefs influence the consumption experience and subsequent behavior, but almost no research has examined individual differences in “marketing placebo effects.” In this article, the authors suggest three moderators of the effect of marketing-based expectancies on the behavioral and neural measures of the consumption experience, based on previous findings from neuroscientific literature investigating traditional clinical pain placebo effects. They use a novel automated structural brain imaging approach to determine individual differences and combine this approach with traditional behavioral experiments. The findings show that consumers high in reward seeking, low in somatosensory awareness, and high in need for cognition are more responsive to marketing placebo effects.

‘Paper Or Plastic’: How We Pay Influences Post-Transaction Connection

Abstract: Does the way that individuals pay for a good or service influence the amount of connection they feel after the purchase has occurred? Employing a multi-method approach across four studies, individuals who pay using a relatively more painful form of payment (e.g., cash or check) increase their post-transaction connection to the product they purchased and/or the organization their purchase supports in comparison to those who pay with less painful forms of payment (e.g., debit or credit card). Specifically, individuals who pay with more painful forms of payment increase their emotional attachment to a product, decrease their commitment to nonchosen alternatives, are more likely to publicly signal their commitment to an organization, and are more likely to make a repeat transaction. Moreover, the form of payment influences post-transaction connection even when the objective monetary cost remains constant and when the psychological cost is indirect (i.e., donating someone else’s money). Increasing the psychological pain of payment appears to have beneficial consequences with respect to increasing downstream product and brand connection.

Cross-Domain Effects of Guilt on Desire For Self-Improvement Products

Abstract: This research examines the notion that guilt, the negative emotion stemming from a failure to meet a self-held standard of behavior, leads to preferences for products enabling self-improvement, even in domains unrelated to the original source of the guilt. Examining consumer responses to real products, this research shows that such effects arise because guilt—by its focus on previous wrongdoings—activates a general desire to improve the self. This increase in desire for self-improvement products is only observed for choices involving the self (not others), is not observed in response to other negative emotions (e.g., shame, embarrassment, sadness, or envy), and is mitigated when people hold the belief that the self is nonmalleable. Building on past work that focuses on how guilt often leads to the motivation to alleviate feelings of guilt either directly or indirectly, the current research demonstrates an additional, novel downstream consequence of guilt, showing that only guilt has the unique motivational consequence of activating a general desire to improve the self, which subsequently spills into other domains and spurs self-improving product choices. These findings are discussed in light of their implications for research on the distinct motivational consequences of specific emotions and on consumer well-being.

Excusing Selfishness in Charitable Giving: the Role of Risk

Abstract: Decisions involving charitable giving often occur under the shadow of risk. A common finding is that potential donors give less when there is greater risk that their donation will have less impact. While this behavior could be fully rationalized by standard economic models, this paper shows that an additional mechanism is relevant: the use of risk as an excuse not to give. In a laboratory study, participants evaluate risky payoffs for themselves and risky payoffs for a charity. When their decisions do not involve tradeoffs between money for themselves and the charity, they respond very similarly to self risk and charity risk. By contrast, when their decisions force tradeoffs between money for themselves and the charity, participants act more averse to charity risk and less averse to self risk. These altered responses to risk bias participants towards choosing payoffs for themselves more often, consistent with excuse-driven responses to risk. Additional results support the existence of excuse-driven types.

The Role of Other Customers During Self-Service Technology Failure

Abstract: Service recovery through inter-customer helping is especially meaningful in the self-service technology (SST) failure context because SSTs are associated with a high risk of failure due to the lack of face-to-face contacts with employees. In understanding the phenomenon of inter-customer helping, two fundamental questions are investigated in the current research: (1) does social influence play a role in customers’ helping decisions? and (2) what are the motives for helping? Through two experimental studies, we provide evidence that two different forms of social influence play a role in helping others during SST failures, and customers have self-centered (vs. other-centered) motives. Results from Study 1 showed that individuals in the private environment indicated more willingness to help than individuals in the public environment did due to heightened perceived responsibility. Study 2 revealed that tie strength influenced willingness to help via a dual pathway: perceived responsibility and social approach motives. Finally, we discuss and highlight the positive influence that self-centered motives can exert in the SST failure scene.

Connecting on Movie Night? Neural Measures of Engagement Differ By Gender

Abstract: We propose a novel method, Cross Brain Correlation (CBC), to study between-group differences in responses to complex stimuli, such as movies or advertisements, based on agreement across multiple brains while experiencing content. Clustering this neural data (i.e. segmentation by gender) can distill preferences that are not captured by traditional means.

Cultural Diversity in Advertising and Representing Different Visions of America

Abstract: Four studies examined young healthy individuals’ willingness to take drugs intended to enhance various social, emotional, and cognitive abilities. We found that people were much more reluctant to enhance traits believed to be highly fundamental to the self (e.g., mood, social comfort) than traits considered less fundamental (e.g., concentration ability). Moral acceptability of a trait enhancement strongly predicted people’s desire to legalize those enhancements, but not their willingness to take those enhancements. Ad taglines that framed enhancements as enabling rather than enhancing the fundamental self increased people’s interest in a fundamental enhancement, and eliminated the preference for non-fundamental over fundamental enhancements.

The Heart and the Head: on Choosing Experiences Intuitively and Possessions Deliberatively

Abstract: An enduring question in the field of judgment and decision making is when people are likely to choose on the basis of intuition and when they are likely to pursue a more deliberative decision strategy. Here, we attempt to shed light on that question by examining whether people tend to weight intuition more heavily when making experiential purchases, and to weight deliberation more heavily when making material purchases. Results from seven studies indicate that they do. In Study 1 (and a replication), participants expressed an explicit preference for choosing experiential purchases intuitively and material purchases analytically. In Study 2 (and a replication), participants anticipated experiencing more regret after going against reason for material purchases and going against intuition for experiential purchases. Participants in Study 3 who were asked to think about an experiential purchase wanted to see the relevant information presented by alternative, which facilitates intuitive/holistic processing, more than did those who were asked to consider a material purchase. In two additional studies, participants who were induced to think intuitively chose experiential purchases more often (Study 4) and reported a higher willingness to pay for them (Study 5) compared with participants induced to think analytically. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Malleability of Taste Perception: Biasing Effects of Rating Scale Format on Taste Recognition, Product Evaluation, and Willingness to Pay

Abstract: Product-related cues, such as brand or price, can influence consumers’ taste perception. Going beyond this observation, we examine the extent to which a stimulus-extrinsic factor, such as the format of the measurement tool on which consumers describe attributes of a taste sample, influences concurrent taste perception, and in turn, later taste recognition, overall product evaluation, and willingness to pay (WTP). The results of two experiments show that rating scale format (i) influences consumers’ concurrent impression of a taste sample, (ii) systematically biases later identification of the sample in a taste recognition test, and (iii) affects overall product evaluation and WTP. However, scale format (iv) does not influence ratings and downstream judgments when consumers are highly knowledgeable in the product domain. These findings demonstrate that the experience of taste is fleeting and not well represented in memory, and that like other subjective experiences, taste needs to be reconstructed based on accessible cues.

In Good Company: Managing Interpersonal Resources That Support Self-Regulation

Abstract: Effective self-regulation could involve not only managing internal resources for goal pursuit but also the often-fleeting interpersonal resources that can support goal attainment. In five studies, we test whether people who are effective self-regulators tend to position themselves in social environments that best afford self-regulatory success. Results indicated individual differences in self-regulatory effectiveness predict stronger preferences to spend time with, collaborate with, and be informed by others who were (a) high in self-control or self-regulation themselves or (b) instrumental to one’s goal pursuit. These preferences for supportive social environments appeared to be both targeted and strategic. Together, the findings suggest that effective self-regulation may involve positioning oneself in social environments that support goal pursuit and increase one’s chances of success.

Solving the Annuity Puzzle: the Role of Mortality Salience in Retirement Savings Decumulation Decisions

Abstract: We propose mortality salience – increased accessibility of death-related thoughts – as one previously unexplored explanation for the annuity puzzle, the low rate at which retirees buy annuities even though economists recommend annuities as an optimal decision. Across four studies we show that mortality salience decreases how likely individuals are to put savings into an annuity. By forcing consumers to consider their own death, the annuity decision makes mortality salient, motivating them to avoid the annuity option as a proximal defense against the death-related thoughts triggered by considering an annuity. Moreover, we demonstrate the robustness of the mortality salience effect through measurement and manipulation of the underlying process, and we estimate an overall mean effect size using meta-analysis. With this research, psychological theory can inform economic theory by helping to explain the annuity puzzle phenomenon that has challenged economists for decades. This research also has important implications for consumer welfare by offering insights into annuity choice and helping to inform the increasingly complex financial decisions facing individuals as they navigate the retirement savings decumulation process.

To Do Or to Have, Now Or Later? the Preferred Consumption Profiles of Material and Experiential Purchases

Abstract: Extending previous research on the hedonic benefits of spending money on doing rather than having, this paper investigates when people prefer to consume experiential and material purchases. We contend that the preferred timing of consumption tends to be more immediate for things (like clothing and gadgets) than for experiences (like vacations and meals out). First, we examine whether consumers exhibit a stronger preference to delay consumption of experiential purchases compared to material goods. When asked to make choices about their optimal consumption times, people exhibit a relative preference to have now and do later. In the next set of studies, we found that this difference in preferred consumption led participants to opt for a lesser material item now over a superior item later, but to wait for a superior experiential purchase rather than settle for a lesser experience now. This tendency is due to the fact that consumers derive more utility from waiting for experiences than from waiting for possessions. Finally, we provide evidence that these preferences affect people's real-world decisions about when to consume. © 2015 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Sex and Status Sell to Monkeys: Social Advertising Creates Brand Preferences in Rhesus Macaques

Abstract: Innate evolutionary mechanisms may influence consumer response to advertising. We demonstrate that exposure to sexand statusbased advertising campaigns elicit brand preferences in rhesus monkeys. Advertising induced preferences depend on subject sex and advertisement content. Our findings emphasize the role of hard-wired, evolutionarily primitive cognitive biases in shaping consumer preferences.