JCR Cover
December 18, 2012

   

 

   

 

  

 

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Journal of Consumer Research
Ahead of Print Highlights

Price Inferences for Sacred versus Secular Goods: Changing the Price of Medicine Influences Perceived Health Risk

Adriana Samper
Janet A. Schwartz

The current research examines how the price of a medication influences consumers' beliefs about their own disease risk -- a critical question with new laws mandating greater price transparency for health care goods and services. Consumers believe that lifesaving health goods are priced according to perceived need (communal-sharing principles) and that price consequently influences risk perceptions and intentions to consume care. Specifically, consumers believe that lower medication prices signal greater accessibility to anyone in need, and such accessibility thus makes them feel that their own self-risk is elevated, increasing consumption. The reverse is true for higher prices. Importantly, these effects are limited to self-relevant health threats and reveal that consumers make inconsistent assumptions about risk, prevalence, and need with price exposure. These findings suggest that while greater price transparency may indeed reduce consumption of higher-priced goods, it may do so for both necessary and unnecessary care.

 

DOI: 10.1086/668639
Electronically published November 14, 2012 

Who Are You Calling Old? Negotiating Old Age Identity in the Elderly Consumption Ensemble

Michelle Barnhart
Lisa Pe�aloza


As the elderly population increases, more family, friends, and paid service providers assist them with consumption activities in a group that the authors conceptualize as the elderly consumption ensemble (ECE). Interviews with members of eight ECEs demonstrate consumption in advanced age as a group phenomenon rather than an individual one, provide an account of how the practices and discourses of the ECE's division of consumption serve as a means of knowing someone is old and positioning him/her as an old subject, and detail strategies through which older consumers negotiate their age identity when it conflicts with this positioning. This research illuminates ways in which consumer agency in identity construction is constrained in interpersonal interactions, demonstrates old identity as implicated in consumption in relation to and distinction from physiological ability and old subject position, and updates the final stages of the Family Life Cycle model.

 

DOI: 10.1086/668536
Electronically published November 5, 2012 

The Status Costs of Subordinate Cultural Capital: At-Home Fathers' Collective Pursuit of Cultural Legitimacy through Capitalizing Consumption Practices

Gokcen Coskuner-Balli
Craig J. Thompson

Consumer researchers have primarily conceptualized cultural capital either as an endowed stock of resources that tend to reproduce socioeconomic hierarchies among consumer collectivities or as constellations of knowledge and skill that consumers acquire by making identity investments in a given consumption field. These studies, however, have given scant attention to the theoretical distinction between dominant and subordinate forms of cultural capital, with the latter affording comparatively lower conversion rates for economic, social, and symbolic capital. To redress this oversight, this article presents a multimethod investigation of middle-class men who are performing the emergent gender role of at-home fatherhood. The analysis profiles and theoretically elaborates upon a set of capitalizing consumption practices through which at-home fathers seek to enhance the conversion rates of their acquisitions of domesticated (and subordinate) cultural capital and to build greater cultural legitimacy for their marginalized gender identity.

 

DOI: 10.1086/668640
Electronically published November 7, 2012 

Affect as a Decision-Making System of the Present

Hannah H. Chang
Michel Tuan Pham

The affective system of judgment and decision making is inherently anchored in the present. Affective feelings are relied on more (weighted more heavily) in judgments whose outcomes and targets are closer to the present than in those whose outcomes and targets are temporally more distant. Temporal proximity amplifies the relative preference for options that are affectively superior and increases the effects of incidental affect on evaluations. These effects are observed when compared to a more distant future as well as to a more distant past, and they appear to be linked to a greater perceived information value of affective feelings in judgments whose outcomes and targets are closer to the present. Theoretical implications are discussed.

 

DOI: 10.1086/668644
Electronically published November 20, 2012 



Curator: Jennifer Escalas 

 

Numerosity and Consumer Behavior (Autumn 2012)

Curator: Rashmi Adaval

 

Curator: Eileen Fischer

 

Curator: Lauren Block  



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