Marketers often use images to promote their products. For example, an advertisement for kitchen tools might display the tools alongside various ingredients, or an advertisement for a bookstore might showcase pictures of the store’s interior. One underlying visual characteristic of such images is the degree of “entropy”—or disorder—in their content. Motivated by a fundamental principle from physics—namely, that entropy can only increase over time—the present research examines how entropy influences consumers’ judgments and decisions. Across two pilot studies and five experiments, we find that while high-entropy images shift consumers’ temporal focus to the past, low-entropy images shift their temporal focus to the future. These entropy-induced shifts in temporal focus influence consumers’ decisions. Specifically, consistent with the notion of “fit fluency,” we find that consumers evaluate past-related (e.g., vintage) products more favorably when they are accompanied by high-entropy images and future-related (e.g., futuristic) products more favorably when they are accompanied by low-entropy images. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.

Many consumers suffer from low levels of financial literacy, and attempts to increase this dimension of consumer expertise via educational interventions are typically unsuccessful. We argue that many of these apparent deficits are caused by the distribution of responsibility for knowledge and decision-making between relationship partners. Early in relationships, responsibility for financial matters is often determined not by differences in financial expertise, but by differences in relative contributions to other domains (study 3). Although responsibility may be initially unrelated to ability, responsibility predicts learning of new financial information (study 4). Cross-sectional data from consumers in long-term relationships show that as relationships lengthen, high levels of financial responsibility are associated with increases in financial literacy, whereas low levels of financial responsibility are not (study 1). These diverging trajectories of expertise cannot be explained by role switching or changes in the sample over time (study 2). The resulting gap in financial literacy is linked to corresponding differences in both financial decision-making and financial information search (studies 5, 5a). Consumers develop expertise on a "need to know" basis. Offloading responsibility to a relationship partner may eliminate this need in the present, while simultaneously creating barriers to developing expertise when needed in the future.