Knowledge that Transforms

Rising costs have led to the emergence of skimpflation—reducing the quality of a product or service without changing its price. Although this practice is becoming increasingly common, little is known about how consumers perceive it relative to other cost-management strategies. Across multiple preregistered experiments, I find that consumers judge decreases in product quality as significantly more unfair than decreases in product size or increases in price. This “skimpflation penalty” is associated with perceptions that quality reductions are less transparent and affect more central aspects of the product and consumption experience. Consistent with this account, differences in consumer reactions are substantially reduced when firms communicate changes transparently, and the additional penalty for quality reductions disappears—or even reverses relative to size reductions—when quality reductions affect peripheral rather than central attributes. Additional studies examine behavioral consequences, showing that consumers are especially averse to purchasing products with reduced quality compared with downsized products or those with higher prices. Further, consumers react less negatively to quality reductions when the original consumption experience can be recovered. These findings offer important implications for firms managing rising costs and for policymakers concerned with transparency and market fairness.

Scientists, NGOs, companies, and the press typically communicate temporal predictions about environmental threats in terms of the calendar date by which the threat is expected to occur (e.g., “Water shortage in the UK by 2040”). However, across eight online studies and a field experiment, we find that referring instead to the amount of time left until the threat (e.g., “Water shortage in the UK within 20 years”) makes the threat feel temporally closer. Consequently, using time-left frames increases consumer engagement with environmental issues and support for pro-environmental causes. This effect arises because time-left framing makes individuals feel as though time is counting down toward the threat.

Hedonic experiences often involve multiple components that are experienced simultaneously. When watching a video clip, for instance, consumers simultaneously experience acoustic and visual elements. The authors study how framing the same experience as either a single whole (single-experience framing) or as a combination of multiple simultaneous experiences (multi-experience framing) shapes hedonic enjoyment. Across 12 studies that span a variety of consumption contexts (e.g., food, videos, music, paintings, games), this work shows that multi-experience framing increases consumers’ enjoyment of the experience and also affects consequential choices such as the willingness to continue the experience. This enjoyment boost occurs because multi-experience framing leads consumers to invest more attention into the experience. The authors also establish two boundary conditions for this effect: multi-experience framing does not boost enjoyment if consumers already pay high attention to the experience for other reasons (e.g., extrinsic rewards) or when the experience is negatively valenced. By investigating how the framing of experiences as multiple simultaneous components shapes hedonic enjoyment, these findings extend existing research on gestalt psychology, partitioning, and bundling further into the hedonic domain. This simple, yet effective, framing manipulation can help marketers, policymakers, and everyday people to maximize the hedonic enjoyment for various commonplace experiences.

Social media shapes how people connect, communicate, and consume information. As generative artificial intelligence (AI) becomes an increasingly common tool for content creation, many platforms have introduced disclosure requirements to inform consumers when content has been created or significantly edited by AI. Yet, little is known about how such AI-generated content (AIGC) disclosures influence consumer engagement, a key metric for creators, platforms, and brands. This research examines whether and why AIGC disclosures affect engagement on social media. Analysis of engagement behavior on TikTok following the introduction of their AIGC disclosure policy and eight preregistered experiments (including two in the web appendix) finds that disclosures reduce consumer engagement. This reduction does not stem from concerns about content quality, wariness of artificial content, or general AI aversion. Instead, the findings identify a novel process: AIGC disclosures reduce parasocial connection—one-sided emotional bonds between consumers and creators. Reduced parasocial connection is driven in part by the perceived effort of the content creator. As such, disclosures that signal greater effort can mitigate reductions in engagement. The implications of these findings for platform policy, content creator strategy, and the future design of AI disclosure practices are discussed.

Much of the uncertainty people face is eventually resolved (e.g., a person entered in a raffle eventually learns what prize they have received). How do people evaluate goods (e.g., a prize of a $50 gift card) resulting from uncertain promotions (e.g., raffles)? Seven experiments (total N = 12,128) provide evidence for an uncertainty spillover effect: People prefer goods originating from uncertain prospects compared to those that were always known. This effect appeared both with naturalistic scenarios (study 1) and with incentive-compatible decisions (study 2). The authors propose that this effect arises because uncertainty induces a perception that the outcome is superior relative to salient downward counterfactuals (study 3). Supporting this idea, this effect: (a) weakened when downward counterfactuals were salient for certain goods (study 4), (b) weakened when the worst outcome from uncertainty was realized (study 5), and (c) reversed when uncertainty involved losses (study 6). Lastly, this effect carried over to products associated with previously uncertain goods (study 7). These findings demonstrate that the influence of uncertainty persists beyond its resolution, shaping the evaluation of goods derived from uncertain prospects.

An increasing number of companies offer take-back programs, collecting used products or materials from consumers to sustainably process them through recycling or reusing. Prior research examines how to bolster company sustainability perceptions and initially engage customers in take-back programs, but are there additional actions companies can take to enhance their sustainability image and encourage repeat customer participation? This research theorizes that when a company simply acknowledges customers’ participation in its take-back program, it increases customers’ emotional attachment and partnership with the company. Subsequently, customers perceive the company as more sustainable and are also more likely to participate in the company’s take-back program again. These effects are demonstrated in seven studies, including a field study with actual repeat participation. Results indicate that the acknowledgment effect is stronger for take-back programs than for company-beneficial programs and operates through distinct mechanisms within the take-back context. The consumer characteristic of self-brand connection dilutes the acknowledgment effect, and the industry characteristic of greenwashing attenuates the benefits of acknowledgment, consistent with the emotional attachment and partnership mechanisms. This research provides theoretical insights into partnerships and offers substantive implications for managers as more companies launch take-back programs.

People with disabilities constitute 15% of the world’s population with a total disposable income of more than $2.6 trillion. However, few companies offer products tailored to the needs of this segment, making it important to understand how mass-market consumers react to innovations that target people with disabilities. Nine studies and six supplementary studies (twelve preregistered) reveal that innovations targeting consumers with disabilities are subject to comparatively greater scrutiny by mass-market consumers. Specifically, consumers find charging price premiums for innovative products less acceptable when they are targeted at people with disabilities. The aversion to targeting this segment occurs only when firms charge a price premium and persists even when firms provide cost justifications for the relatively higher prices. Drawing on research on disability stereotypes, we identify pity for people with disabilities as a critical driver of these reactions. Variations in pity across disabilities are related to the acceptability of a price premium for adaptive innovations. These findings are suggestive of a novel form of paternalism against consumers with disabilities. Paradoxically, this view may render the marketplace less inclusive for consumers with disabilities, as it could penalize companies that provide more options for this underserved segment.

In the era of big data, an increasing amount of information is becoming available to business analysts and scientists. Statistical correlations between consumption patterns and individual conditions (e.g., health conditions) are frequently uncovered and reported in the media. However, many correlations are spurious, prompting the question of when consumers perceive them as reflecting causal relationships. Across eight preregistered studies, a correlation (e.g., between drinking tea and bone health) is perceived as more likely to reflect a causal relationship (i.e., drinking tea makes bones healthier) when the plausible cause reportedly correlates with additional outcomes (e.g., heart conditions). The correlational scope effect is attenuated when the additional outcomes are perceived as weakly related to the focal outcome, mitigated under a cause-last framing (in which the plausible cause in a correlation is presented after the target outcome), and can influence product choices. Category-based induction may contribute to the correlational scope effect: perceived susceptibility to a cause is projected from additional outcomes onto the focal outcome. These findings have implications for understanding causal judgment and for consumers’ well-being.

This study explores how consumers respond to the ambivalence sparked by conflicting institutional norms in contexts such as the United States market for donor conception (i.e., egg, sperm, embryo). While prior research has framed responses to ambivalence as “coping,” we theorize these responses as consumer-led institutional work—that is, active efforts to adapt to or challenge institutional norms. Drawing on interviews, archival narratives, and case profiles, we develop a typology distinguishing between adaptation work (efforts to reconcile contradictions in existing institutional arrangements) and disruption work (efforts to transform institutional arrangements), with individual and collaborative variants of each. Theoretically, we argue that structured ambivalence is both the experience through which institutional contradictions become salient and the catalyst that motivates institutional work. Our contributions are twofold. First, we demonstrate that adaptive work, which facilitates individual participation, paradoxically reinforces the very market system that produces ambivalence. Second, we identify structured ambivalence as a micro-level emotional catalyst driving the full spectrum of consumer-led action, ranging from quiet adaptation to the creation of new, market-changing organizations. This provides a more nuanced understanding of why consumers engage in institutional work, contributing to the microfoundations of institutions perspective by specifying the emotional and reflexive underpinnings of institutional continuity and change within markets.

This research examines the effectiveness of two common types of restricted price promotions: threshold promotions (conditional on spending more than a threshold amount; e.g., “Get $5 off on orders of $10 or more”) and capped promotions (limited to a maximum dollar value; e.g., “Get 50% off, up to $5 per order”). Results from seven preregistered studies, including one field study, show that threshold promotions lead to higher purchase intentions and conversion rates (but potentially lower purchase amounts) than comparable capped promotions—even though capped promotions are equivalent in maximal economic savings for the consumer—when the trigger value (the spending amount at which the promotion activates or caps) is low. This effect occurs because consumers have higher expected promotion levels for capped promotions and lower expected spending levels for threshold promotions, leading them to perceive the threshold promotion as a fairer deal. However, this effect reverses when the trigger value is high, wherein consumers perceive capped promotions as a fairer deal and prefer them to threshold promotions. The implications of our results for the optimal management of price promotion architectures were discussed.