Consumer Behavior

Several individual, social-setting, and choice-set factors have been shown to be related to satisfaction. This article argues that these factors operate through a set of choice goals. Using panel data on purchasers of consumer electronics, the authors examine how five goals (justifiability, confidence, anticipated regret, evaluation costs, and final negative affect) drive decision and consumption satisfaction, which in turn determine loyalty, product recommendations, and the amount and valence of word of mouth.

Our goal in this chapter is to review for social psychologists some of the interesting research done in consumer behavior and marketing.

Three experiments investigate the emotions that arise from buying or not buying at an unintended purchase opportunity and how they color evaluations of affective advertising appeals that are viewed subsequently. We demonstrate that buying can cause happiness tempered with guilt, while not buying causes pride. Consistent with the felt affect, respondents who had bought at time 1 subsequently prefer happiness appeals to pride appeals, while those who had refrained prefer pride appeals.

Our two-stage framework predicts that, during impression formation, individuals who hold ambivalent attitudes toward an issue are influenced by other sources regardless of their perceived reliability on the target issue. Less ambivalent individuals are presumed likely to check the reliability of the message's source before accepting it. Experiment 1 finds that highly ambivalent participants do not differentiate between a more versus less reliable source when forming impressions of a political candidate, whereas less ambivalent participants do.

This research addresses refutation of false beliefs formed on the basis of repeated exposure to advertisements. Experiment 1 explores belief in the refutation as a function of the perceptual details shared (alignment) between the claim and the refutation as manipulated by whether the original claim was direct (assertion) or indirect (implication). Experiment 2 then examines whether this effect will carry through to belief in the original claim after exposure to the refutation. Findings indicate that direct refutations of indirect claims are believed more than refutations of direct claims.

Profession- and job-related social events such as mixers are viewed by organizations and individuals as incubators of interpersonal ties, as arenas in which individuals can initiate new and different contacts. Theory and evidence on network dynamics, however, suggests that such outcomes may be unlikely, because past ties constrain future contacts, and because homophily inhibits contact between different types of people. We investigate whether guests at a social mixer "mix" despite these influences.

In a decentralized supply chain, with long-term competition between independent retailers facing random demands and buying from a common supplier, how should wholesale and retail prices be specified in an attempt to maximize supply-chain-wide profits? We show what types of coordination mechanisms allow the decentralized supply chain to generate aggregate expected profits equal to the optimal profits in a centralized system, and how the parameters of these (perfect) coordination schemes can be determined.

We consider a family of N items that are produced in, or obtained from, the same production facility. Demands are deterministic for each item and each period within a given horizon of T periods. If in a given period an order is placed, setup costs are incurred. The aggregate order size is constrained by a capacity limit. The objective is to find a lot-sizing strategy that satisfies the demands for all items over the entire horizon without backlogging, and that minimizes the sum of inventory-carrying costs, fixed-order costs, and variable-order costs.

In the present investigation, we build on prior research by examining perceptions of choices and their outcomes as a factor of independent and interdependent self–construals, the identity of the chooser, and the recipient of the choice. Results from two experiments suggest that independent selves prefer to be both chooser and choice recipient, whereas interdependent selves are more amenable to choosing for others and having others choose on their behalf.