Knowledge that Transforms

Leisure is desirable and beneficial, yet consumers frequently forgo leisure in favor of other activities—namely, work. Why? We propose that goal conflict plays an important role. Seven experiments demonstrate that perceiving greater goal conflict shapes how consumers allocate time to work and leisure—even when those activities are unrelated to the conflicting goals. This occurs because goal conflict increases reliance on salient justifications, influencing how much time people spend on subsequent, unrelated activities. Because work tends to be easier to justify and leisure harder to justify, goal conflict increases time spent on work and decreases time spent on leisure. Thus, despite the conflicting goals being independent of the specific work and leisure activities considered (i.e., despite goal conflict being “incidental”), perceiving greater goal conflict encourages work and discourages leisure. The findings further understanding of how consumers allocate time to work and leisure, incidental effects of goal conflict on decision-making, and the role of justification in consumer choice. They also have implications for the use of “time-saving” technologies and the marketing of leisure activities.

How does coping with a resource loss of time, space, or money change a consumer? In the current work, we argue that resource losses that give rise to budget contractions require a coping strategy that not only influences choice in the moment but also changes underlying consumer preferences. We show that the preference restructuring that occurs when coping with a budget loss also leads to stabilization of preferences. Specifically, a consumer who allocates a budget to a set of items prior to a budget contraction and allocates that same budget post-contraction when the budget is fully restored will allocate the restored budget to fewer options in the set. Coping with the contraction helps consumers prioritize what matters to them, leading to refinement of preference. This within-consumer preference refinement effect exists for budgets of time, space, and money. We identify boundary conditions (i.e., significant budget contractions and self-determined contraction allocations are necessary for prioritization to occur) and rule out non-prioritization explanations (e.g., anchoring and under-adjusting). These findings suggest that marketers should focus on capturing consumers who are dealing with budget contractions as this is one of the moments where individuals revisit and rediscover what matters most to them.

Journal Article A Word of Thanks Get access Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 47, Issue 6, April 2021, Pages 829–830, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucab013 Published: 10 April 2020

Using a sample of individuals who hold target retirement funds (TRFs), we examine how people use arithmetic to estimate their retirement age. We find a robust “zero” bias where investors have a strong preference for TRFs that end with zero compared to TRFs that end with five. The evidence is consistent that the bias is an outcome of people using imprecise arithmetic, specifically rounding up and down in the computational estimation required to estimate their retirement year. The zero bias manifests itself in people born in years ending between eight and two. Those born in zero- through two-ending years select TRFs that imply they intend to retire at 70, whereas those born in eight- and nine-ending years choose TRFs that imply retiring at 60. The choices can significantly lower or increase wealth by altering the contribution amounts and exposing investors to risk incompatible with their age profile. The bias is particularly costly for those who are risk averse and select later TRFs but is also most beneficial to risk-averse consumers who choose early TRFs. We experimentally confirm that the contribution rates are related to the TRF choices and that the use of imprecise mathematical rounding is implicated in the bias.

Consumers often try to visually identify a previously encountered product among a sequence of similar items, guided only by their memory and a few general search terms. What determines their success at correctly identifying the target product in such “product lineups”? The current research finds that the longer consumers search sequentially, the more conservative and—ironically—inaccurate judges they become. Consequently, the more consumers search, the more likely they are to erroneously reject the correct target when it finally appears in the lineup. This happens because each time consumers evaluate a similar item in the lineup, and determine that it is not the option for which they have been looking, they draw an implicit inference that the correct target should feel more familiar than the similar items rejected up to that point. This causes the subjective feeling of familiarity consumers expect to experience with the true target to progressively escalate, making them more conservative but also less accurate judges. The findings have practical implications for consumers and marketers, and make theoretical contributions to research on inference-making, online search, and product recognition.

Four studies, across a range of domains, find a dragging-down effect in which consumers purchase fewer units of a product when a discount applies to more units. For example, consumers buy fewer peaches when each customer can buy up to three peaches at a discount than when each customer can buy only one peach at a discount or when there is no discount at all. In contrast to basic economic principles, this dragging-down effect implies that consumers purchase less (more) when the per-unit price is lower (higher). We propose and our results support an acceptability account: consumers will adopt the price-increase point (i.e., maximum discounted quantity) as their purchase quantity if that point falls within an acceptable range, and will ignore that point and purchase their initially preferred quantity instead if the price-increase point falls below the acceptable range. The current work enriches existing research on anchoring and pricing and carries implications for consumers, marketers, and policy-makers.

The Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) is not only the premier outlet for the best scholarship in consumer research. It is also the intellectual home of the global consumer research community. In sustaining that home, the ideals of the journal include publishing insights gained from a variety of perspectives on critical consumer-relevant issues, from diverse theories and methodologies to substantive domains. As a team of editors, we see our role as nurturing, building, protecting, and further strengthening our intellectual home. And we want to build up JCR as a platform of insights to the world by better translating our research and showing how it is important to others; we want to invite the broader world into our home, to share the insights created within our walls. To become the stewards of JCR during a pandemic unlike any we’ve known in our lifetime demands that we think about how community is fostered, even in a socially distanced world. Does JCR—as our intellectual home—connect us? Is our digital space compelling enough? Do community members find it easy and exciting to stay connected to the new ideas we work hard to develop? Does our intellectual home feel equally welcoming and transparent to all members of our community? COVID-19 has shown us the power and importance of home. In 2020, home renovation has been popular, and we, too, have been thinking it might be the ideal time for a little updating.

We propose that individual differences in the value placed on the principle of moderation exist and influence many aspects of consumer decision-making. The idea that moderation is an important guiding norm of human behavior is prevalent throughout history and an explicit theme in many philosophies, religions, and cultures. Yet, moderation has not been studied as an individual-level determinant of consumer behavior. We develop a scale that measures the degree to which individuals have a Preference for Moderation (PFM). The PFM scale predicts consequential behavior in many decision contexts. We first report on scale development, including the generation and selection of items. We then report analyses showing that PFM is distinct from several popular individual-difference variables. Related to cultural background, PFM reliably predicts the use of compromise (study 1) and balancing (vs. highlighting) strategies (study 2), as well as various decision-making behaviors, including reliance on the representativeness heuristic (study 3), self-reported financial habits and outcomes (studies 4–5), real-world online-reviewing behavior (study 6), and split-ticket voting behavior in the 2018 US midterm elections (study 7).