From October 17 to October 20 three members of CDS, Kellen Mrkva, Atonia Krefeld-Schwalb, and Byung Cheol Lee, traveled to Atlanta to attend the 2019 Association for Consumer Research Conference (ACR).
All three organized special sessions around their research. Kellen traced the decision-making processes of people when deciding between credit cards. He discussed how he found present-biased individuals to be less willing than their patient counterparts to spend time engaging in boring or unpleasant search patterns that would result in a future monetary benefit.
Antonia discussed the need to analyze and document efforts to improve the replicability of consumer research. She analyzed articles published in three consumer research journals between 2011 and 2018 and found an increase in sample size and a decrease in effect size of published results. She further found a decrease in selective reporting of research results. Lastly, Byung discussed his findings that different search patterns predict and influence participants' patience when choosing between options.
Congratulations to the three researchers on their work! You can view their abstracts below.
Kellen Mrkva:
Across several studies (total n=18,405), we show that present-biased individuals are unwilling to engage in unpleasant search when looking for credit cards. Consequently, they terminate search quickly, and search less overall relative to their patient counterparts. Further, process evidence shows that impatient individuals search less for all information associated with available credit cards--they do not search less because they focus only on a subset of attributes. As a result, impatient people are more likely to choose credit cards that accrue higher fees and have higher total costs. Antonia
Krefeld-Schwalb:
Replicability is a fundamental basis for gaining new knowledge and insights from empirical research. Increased efforts to improve research practices in the social sciences have motivated consumer researchers to implement new measures to increase the replicability of published work within the field. Nonetheless, the replicability of consumer research has not yet been subjected to systematic empirical analysis on a large sample.
To address this need, we surveyed the replicability of published consumer research and its development over time. We used text mining to quantify sample sizes, effect sizes, statistical power, and the distribution of published p-values from a sample of N= 971 articles published between 2011 and 2018 in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, the Journal of Consumer Research, and the Journal of Marketing Research. Results show a trend toward increased sample sizes and decreased effect sizes across all three journals and subsequently unchanged statistical power over time.
Results further suggest that selective reporting of significant results has decreased over time, which in turn has increased the replicability and precision of effect size estimates. Nonetheless, existing discrepancies leave room for improvement to further reduce error rates in published consumer research.
Byung Cheol Lee:
Purchase decisions often feature a trade-off between price and the timing in which consumption benefits unfold. Using MouseLabWeb, we find that search strategies – how and in what order people acquire information – robustly predict and shape consumer patience. Particularly, comparative (vs. integrative) search strategy predicts and causally increases the choice of the less expensive option of getting an item at a later date over the more expensive option of getting the item at an earlier date.
This work provides insights into the origin of consumer impatience and suggests that subtle manipulations of search environments might be useful in fostering patient choices.