Knowledge that Transforms

In this article, the effect of common features on brand choice and the moderating role of attribute importance are examined. It is argued that when brand attributes differ in importance, common features are likely to enhance consumer preferences for the option with the best value on the most important attribute, thus further polarizing brands' choice shares. In contrast, when attributes are similar in their importance, common features are likely to have an opposite effect, equalizing brands' shares. The data provide support for these propositions. Copyright 1997 by the University of Chicago.

Three experiments investigate how the interval between target items of informa-tion in an audio context influences recall under background conditions of music and silence. In experiment 1, when a goal-directed learning task encouraged allocation of resources to the message, recall increased linearly for both back-ground conditions as the interval increased. However, under the incidental learn-ing task used in experiment 2, increasing the interval from two to three seconds had a deleterious impact on recall, but only in the background silence condition. Experiment 3 suggested that this was due to a surplus of cognitive resources in the background silence condition producing interfering extracommunication thought. Results also support the theory presented that background music bor-rows resources from the processing of message information in an incidental learning task. Although music impairs processing of brand information and re-duces recall at shorter intervals, relative to silence, it increases the interval preced-ing the onset of excess resources, delaying interfering thought. One of the goals of most advertising is to achieve a high level of information retention. Although much

How do children become adaptive decision makers in complex environments? Though we know that adult-like abilities are present by age 11 or 12, and that children younger than this often fail to adapt, we know virtually nothing about the mechanisms responsible for this development. In this article, we explore the obstacles that confront young children as they attempt to adapt to complex decision tasks. We focus on the possibility that younger children's failures might be linked to a fairly simple obstacle, such as being insensitive to the cost or effort involved in pursuing alternative strategies for making decisions. This possibility was tested in an experimental setting, with children aged seven to 11 years, in which children's decision-making strategies were monitored as they made choices from increasingly complex information boards in the presence or absence of imposed costs for gathering information from the boards. Our results indicate that age differences in adaptivity can be eliminated with the imposition of search costs, implicating sensitivity to decision-making costs as a major contributor to the development of adaptivity in complex environments.

Effective communication requires that consumers attribute the message content to its intended source. The proposed framework distinguishes four types of source identification processes—cued retrieval, memory-trace refreshment, schematic inferencing, and pure guessing—and delineates their contingencies. Two experiments examine portions of the framework, and experiment 2 introduces a new methodology for decomposing multiple processes. Findings suggest that when cued retrieval fails, consumers try to refresh the original memory trace for the learning episode—a process that is effortful. They invoke schematic inferencing only if the original memory trace cannot be refreshed. Reliance on cued retrieval seems to require little processing capacity. If there is some motivation for accuracy, pure guessing appears to be invoked only as a last resort.

Consumer evaluations of new brands evolve over time as information is acquired. We conceptualize the extent to which evaluations are updated in terms of the weight given to new information during information integration. Based on information processing theory, we derive hypotheses regarding the weights given to new information under different processing ability conditions. We then develop a varying-parameter averaging model that captures the hypothesized moderating effects of processing ability (i.e., time pressure and knowledge) and also takes into account order effects. Scale values and weights for information items are derived by estimating the model using continuous evaluations obtained in a process-tracing experiment that allows subjects to access information that they desire in any order. Results from model estimation support the hypothesis that compared with prior evaluations new information plays a larger role in evaluations of high (vs. low) ability subjects. Estimating order effects on weights when order is endogenous, we find a recency effect such that information seen later is given a greater weight than information seen earlier. However, this recency effect is reduced as category knowledge increases. We discuss the theoretical and methodological contributions of this research.

In this article we examine whether and why preference for a good produced by its mere and arbitrary possession (i.e., a mere-possession effect) occurs even in the absence of actual possession. In two experiments, we demonstrate that merely possessing a coupon for a product, as opposed to the actual product, can increase consumers' preference for that option over its competitors' in real choices from meaningfully comparable choice sets. In addition, a characterization of the cognitive processes underlying this phenomenon, and its variation with individual perceptions of task meaningfulness, provides support for a loss-aversion account of consumers' possession-induced preferences for goods they do not actually possess.

It has recently been suggested that a number of experimental findings of context effects in choice settings can be explained by the ability of subjects to draw choice-relevant inferences from the stimuli. We aim to measure the importance of this explanation. To do so, inferences are assessed in an experiment using the basic context-effect design, supplemented by direct measures of inferred locations of available products on the price-quality Hotelling line. We use these measures to estimate a predicted context effect due to inference alone. For our stimuli, we find that the inference effect accounts for two-thirds of the average magnitude of the context effect and for about one-half of the cross-category context-effect variance.

The effects of imagined versus actual ease of self-generating product-related information were investigated. An ad invited recipients to name either one reason or 10 reasons for (against) choosing a BMW over a Mercedes. Participants who complied with the task experienced the retrieval of one reason as easier than the retrieval of 10 reasons. Participants who did not comply nevertheless imagined the former as easier than the latter. Independent of whether ease was actually experienced or merely imagined, participants evaluated BMW more (less) favorably and Mercedes less (more) favorably when the retrieval was easy rather than difficult.

When consumers learn about a new product, cues in the surrounding context have been found to bias their response to the product in two ways. In some instances, judgments of the product are assimilated toward the affect or descriptive implications associated with the context, whereas in other circumstances, responses are contrasted with or adjusted away from the context. We examine how cognitive resources influence whether assimilation or contrast occurs and when such context effects are reflected in subsequent judgments. Building on a model developed by Martin and his colleagues, we propose that assimilation will occur spontaneously during encoding. Contrast will occur only when this contextual influence is viewed as inappropriate and efforts to partial out the context result in overcorrection. These encoding effects of context should be evident in later judgments when the nature of either the judgment task or consumers' predisposition toward effortful thought encourage retrieval of the context-encoded information. The results of two experiments support our predictions and lead to a modified version of Martin's model. In this model, the cognitive resources available at encoding determine the type of context effect and the cognitive resources at judgment determine whether the encoding effect of context will be reflected in product evaluations.