Highlights from Two Years Ago
August 12, 2014

Warm It Up with Love: The Effect of Physical Coldness on Liking of Romance Movies
Jiewen Hong
Yacheng Sun

Are romance movies more desirable when people are cold? Building on research on (bodily) feeling-as-information and embodied cognition, the authors hypothesize that physical coldness activates a need for psychological warmth, which in turn leads to an increased liking for romance movies. Four experiments and an analysis of online movie rental data provide support for this hypothesis. Physical coldness increases the liking of and willingness to pay for romance movies. The effect of physical coldness on liking of romance movies only occurs for consumers who associate romance movies with psychological warmth, and consumers correct for the influence of physical coldness on their liking of romance movies when physical coldness is made salient. Using data on online movie rentals and historical temperature, the authors found a negative relationship between weather temperature and preference for romance movies.

 

Volume 39, Number 2, August 2012
DOI: 10.1086/662613

Plate Size and Color Suggestibility: The Delboeuf Illusion's Bias on Serving and Eating Behavior

Koert Van Ittersum
Brian Wansink

Despite the challenged contention that consumers serve more onto larger dinnerware, it remains unclear what would cause this and who might be most at risk. The neglected Delboeuf illusion may explain how the size of dinnerware creates two opposing biases that lead consumers to overserve on larger plates and bowls and underserve on smaller ones. A countercyclical sinus-shaped relationship is shown to exist between these serving biases and the relative gap between the edge of the food and the edge of the dinnerware. Although these serving biases are difficult to eliminate with attention and education, changing the color of one's dinnerware or tablecloth may help attenuate them. By showing that the Delboeuf illusion offers a mechanistic explanation for how dinnerware size can bias serving and intake, the authors open new theoretical opportunities for linking illusions to eating behavior and suggest how simple changes in design can improve consumer welfare.

 

Volume 39, Number 2, August 2012
DOI: 10.1086/662615


How Economic Contractions and Expansions Affect Expenditure Patterns
Wagner A. Kamakura
Rex Yuxing Du

The authors attempt to understand how household budget allocations across various expenditure categories change when the economy is in recession or expansion. The common assumption is that a household's tastes would not change as a function of economic conditions and therefore any adjustments in expenditure patterns during economic contractions/expansions would simply be due to changes in the consumption budget. Standard economic models translate these budgetary effects into lateral movements along a set of fixed Engel curves, which relate category expenditure shares to total expenditures. The authors propose and test a conceptual framework based on the notion of relative consumption, which prescribes that, for any given total consumption budget, expenditure shares for positional goods/services will decrease during a recession, while shares for nonpositional goods/services will increase (shifting the entire Engel curve upward or downward, depending on the nature of the expenditure category and the economic conditions).

 

Volume 39, Number 2, August 2012
DOI:
10.1086/662611 
   
How and Why 1 Year Differs from 365 Days: A Conversational Logic Analysis of Inferences from the Granularity of Quantitative Expressions
Y. Charles Zhang
Norbert Schwarz

The same quantity can be expressed at different levels of granularity (1 year, 12 months, or 365 days). Consumers attend to the granularity chosen by a communicator and draw pragmatic inferences that influence judgment and choice. They consider estimates expressed in finer granularity more precise and have more confidence in their accuracy. This effect is eliminated when consumers doubt that the communicator complies with Gricean norms of cooperative conversational conduct. Based on their pragmatic inferences, consumers perceive products as more likely to deliver on their promises when the promise is described in fine-grained rather than coarse terms and choose accordingly. These findings highlight the role of pragmatic inferences in consumer judgment and have important implications for the design of marketing communications.

Volume 39, Number 2, August 2012
DOI: 10.1086/662612 
 

A Goal-Based Model of Product Evaluation and Choice

Stijn M. J. van Osselaer
Chris Janiszewski

The authors propose a goal-based model of product evaluation and choice. The model is intended to account for the role of momentary goal activations in relatively straightforward product evaluation and choice processes. It contributes by providing a coherent and consistent account for goal-based product evaluations/choices, providing a theory of the way goal activation influences product evaluation and choice, and generating predictions about novel phenomena, moderators, and boundary conditions in the area of goal-based product evaluations and choices.

Volume 39, Number 2, August 2012
DOI: 10.1086/662643


Morality and the Marketplace

(Summer 2014)

Curator: Kent Grayson

Decisions at a Distance

(Spring 2014)

Curator: Rebecca Hamilton

      
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