Ahead of Print Highlights 
September 16, 2014

The Categorization of Time and Its Impact on Task Initiation
Yanping Tu
Dilip Soman 

It could be argued that success in life is a function of consumer ability to get things done. The key step in getting things done is to get started. This research explores the effect of the categorization of time on task initiation. Consumers use a variety of cues to categorize future points in time (events) into either events that are like the present event or those that are unlike the present event. When the deadline of a task is categorized in a like-the-present category, it triggers the default implemental mind-set and hence results in a greater likelihood of task initiation. A series of studies among farmers in India and undergraduate and MBA students in North America provided support to this theorizing. The findings have implications for goal-striving strategy and choice architecture. 

 

DOI: 10.1086/677840
Published Online August 13, 2014

Outsourcing Parenthood? How Families Manage Care Assemblages Using Paid Commercial Services
Amber M. Epp
Sunaina R. Velagaleti 

An expanding array of available services allow parents to outsource almost any caregiving activity (nannies, potty training, birthday party planning). Sociologists document a care deficit -- resulting from dual-earner households and distance from extended family -- coupled with rising consumerism to account for outsourcing. These studies, as well as those in consumer research, clarify outsourcing motivations, but stop short of explaining the differential impacts of outsourcing tensions parents regularly face when assembling care. As such, consumer researchers know little about how parents navigate such tensions when deciding what is acceptable to outsource. Based on depth interviews with 23 families, this analysis uncovers complex care assemblages that are shaped by parenting discourses and tensions of control, intimacy, and substitutability. The resulting framework explains parents' strategies for minimizing outsourcing tensions, reveals processes for (re)assembling different types of care resources, and challenges what is known about the relationship between the market and family life.

  

DOI: 10.1086/677892
Published Online August 11, 2014 

Marketplace Sentiments
Ahir Gopaldas 


From outrage at corporations to excitement about innovations, marketplace sentiments are powerful forces in consumer culture that transform markets. This article develops a preliminary theory of marketplace sentiments. Defined as collectively shared emotional dispositions, sentiments can be grouped into three function-based categories: contempt for villains, concern for victims, and celebration of heroes. Marketplace actors such as activists, brands, and consumers have a variety of motives and methods for producing and reproducing sentiments. Activists plant, amplify, and hyper-perform sentiments to recruit consumers and discipline institutions. Brands carefully select, calibrate, and broadcast sentiments to entertain consumers and promote products. Consumers learn, experience, and communicate sentiments to commune and individuate in society. The emergent theory of marketplace sentiments advances a sociocultural perspective on consumer emotion, elevates the theoretical significance of emotional observations in cultural studies, offers a sentiment-based understanding of the power of ideology, indicates how activist sentiments can paradoxically benefit from brand co-optation, and calls for human input in big data sentiment analysis. More broadly, the author proposes that cultures are systems of discourses, sentiments, and practices wherein discourses legitimize sentiments and practices, sentiments energize discourses and practices, and practices materialize discourses and sentiments.

 
DOI: 10.1086/678034
Published Online August 6, 2014 

When Going Green Backfires: How Firm Intentions Shape the Evaluation of Socially Beneficial Product Enhancements
George E. Newman
Margarita Gorlin
Ravi Dhar 

  

Many companies offer products with social benefits that are orthogonal to performance (green products). Information about a company's intentions in designing the product plays an important role in consumer evaluations. In particular, consumers are less likely to purchase a green product when they perceive that the company intentionally made the product better for the environment compared to when the same environmental benefit occurred as an unintended side effect. This result is explained by consumer lay theories about resource allocation: intended (vs. unintended) green enhancements lead consumers to assume that the company diverted resources away from product quality, which in turn drives a reduction in purchase interest. The present studies also identify an important boundary condition based on the type of enhancement and show that the basic intended (vs. unintended) effect generalizes to other types of perceived tradeoffs, such as healthfulness and taste.   


DOI: 10.1086/677841
Published Online August 15, 2014 

Consuming Experiential Categories
Anuj K. Shah
Adam L. Alter

  

How do we maximize enjoyment and minimize displeasure over a variety of events? Previous research has discussed how consumers might focus on savoring individual events or distribute appealing and unappealing events across time to maximize happiness. Building on this work, the current research shows that consumers track not just individual events but also "categories" of events. Consequently, a consumer who visits a modern art gallery, a classic art gallery, the opera, and a symphony concert could either construe these as four distinct experiences or as two categories of experiences (art galleries and musical performances). Consumers seem to naturally consider experiential categories. For positive experiences, consumers are reluctant to choose in a way that eliminates categories, but the opposite is true for negative experiences. Consumers may do this because eliminating categories leads to a greater subjective feeling of making progress in a hedonic experience. 

 
DOI: 10.1086/677893
Published Online August 7, 2014

Fooled by Heteroscedastic Randomness: Local Consistency Breeds Extremity in Price-Based Quality Inferences
Bart de Langhe
Stijn M. J. van Osselaer
Stefano Puntoni
Ann L. McGill 

In some product categories, low-priced brands are consistently of low quality, but high-priced brands can be anything from terrible to excellent. In other product categories, high-priced brands are consistently of high quality, but quality of low-priced brands varies widely. Such heteroscedasticity leads to more extreme price-based quality predictions. Quality inferences do not only stem from what consumers have learned about the average level of quality at different price points through exemplar memory or rule abstraction. Instead, quality predictions are also based on learning about the covariation between price and quality. That is, consumers inappropriately conflate the conditional mean of quality with the predictability of quality. The authors discuss implications for theories of quantitative cue learning and selective information processing, for pricing strategies and luxury branding, and for our understanding of the emergence and persistence of erroneous beliefs and stereotypes beyond the consumer realm.

 

DOI: 10.1086/678035
Published Online August 13, 2014 


Meaningful Choice

(Autumn 2014)

Curator: Jennifer Aaker

Morality and the Marketplace

(Summer 2014)

Curator: Kent Grayson

Decisions at a Distance

(Spring 2014)

Curator: Rebecca Hamilton

      
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