Consumer Behavior

Media economics provides a basis for Eli Noam in setting out the logic behind a series of expectations he shares about how the transition from regular linear TV to online video will lead to major changes in culture, politics, and society. His perspective on the dramatic implications of this shift suggests comparisons with the fundamental changes brought about by the introduction of first-generation TV over seventy years ago, with both exciting advances and also disturbing problems.

Human enhancement products allow consumers to radically enhance their mental abilities. Focusing on cognitive enhancements, we introduce and study a novel factor dehumanization (i.e., denying a person emotional ability and likening them to a robot) which plays a key role in consumers' reluctance to use enhancement products. In study 1, consumers who enhance their mental abilities beyond normal levels were dehumanized, whereas consumers who use the same products to restore lost abilities were not.

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) have been widely used in marketing to study dynamics in customer behavior. HMMs have been successfully applied to model how customers transition among a set latent states such as attention levels, web search behavior, customer's relationships, and purchase intent. While most HMMs in marketing allow for heterogeneity in the model's parameters, these models assume that the number of latent states is common across customers.

User-generated content has become ubiquitous and very influential in the marketplace. Increasingly, this content is generated on smartphones rather than personal computers (PCs). This article argues that because of its physically constrained nature, smartphone (vs. PC) use leads consumers to generate briefer content, which encourages them to focus on the overall gist of their experiences. This focus on gist, in turn, tends to manifest as reviews that emphasize the emotional aspects of an experience in lieu of more specific details.

The tendency to see life as zero-sum exacerbates political conflicts. Six studies (N = 3223) examine the relationship between political ideology and zero-sum thinking: the belief that one party's gains can only be obtained at the expense of another party's losses. We find that both liberals and conservatives view life as zero-sum when it benefits them to do so. Whereas conservatives exhibit zero-sum thinking when the status quo is challenged, liberals do so when the status quo is being upheld.

Failing to refinance a mortgage can cost a borrower thousands of dollars. Based on administrative data from a large financial institution, we show that around 50% of borrowers leave thousands of dollars on the table by not refinancing. Survey data indicate that, among all the behavioral factors examined, only suspicion of banks motives is consistently related to the probability of accepting a refinancing offer. Finally, we report the results of three field experiments showing that enticing offers made by banks fail to increase participation and may even deepen suspicion.

This article provides a critical review of what is known about affect regulation in relation to consumption behavior. Based on numerous findings from psychology, communication research, and consumer research, we identify a core set of general principles of affect regulation in consumer behavior. First, we define affect regulation, clarify its relations to the concepts of coping and compensatory consumption, and refine the emerging concept of “displaced coping.” We then review the generic strategies used in the regulation of general negative affective states.

The second Global Business Anthropology Summit was held May 28-29, 2019 at Fordham University in New York City. The 2019 Summit brought together 160 industry practitioners and academic scholars to build upon the work of the 2018 Summit. The 2019 Summit was explicitly and emphatically forward thinking and action oriented to advance anthropological ideas in business.

Consumers often have multiple goals that are active simultaneously and make choices to satisfy those goals. However, no work to date has studied how people choose when all available options serve a goal (e.g., a choice-set goal) that conflicts with another goal they hold (e.g., an incidental goal). We demonstrate that in such contexts, consumers are more likely to choose the option that is most instrumental for attaining the choice-set goal, even when that option poses the greatest violation of the incidental goal.