Framing Goals to Increase Or Decrease Personal Savings: the Effect of Specific Goals and Construal Level

We show that anticipated success, commitment to saving, and the actual amount saved, can be increased or decreased simply by changing the way consumers think about saving goals. Consumers can (a) specify or not specify an exact amount to save (goal specificity), and (b) focus on either how to save, or why to save (construal level). Specific (vs. non-specific) goals help consumers save more under high-level construal but this effect reverses under low-level construal. Mediation analyses reveal that specific (vs. non-specific) goals are perceived to be more important under high-level construal, and more difficult under low-level construal

Malleable conjoint partworths: how the breadth of response scales alters price sensitivity

Survey instruments such as conjoint tasks and pricing surveys are intended to reveal respondents’ price sensitivity. This research finds, however, that seemingly trivial aspects of these instruments can alter measured price sensitivity. This research examines the impact of innocuous questions that often precede a main conjoint task, such as demographic and usage-related screening questions. The findings demonstrate that whether these prior questions use broad (i.e., few scale points) or narrow (i.e., many scale points) response categories, systematically influences consumers’ price sensitivity in a CBC (Choice Based Conjoint) study. The research provides preliminary evidence that this occurs because the narrow (vs. broad) response categories in the prior questions leads to consideration of a greater (vs. fewer) number of attributes during the key conjoint task, consequently altering the importance weight associated with price

Influencing feature price tradeoff decisions in CBC experiments

In a typical CBC exercise, respondents are shown combinations of product features at different prices and are asked for their choices. Often, the prices respondents imply that they are willing to pay to obtain these features are unrealistically high. The purpose of this research is to test, in a field experiment, whether questions and tasks performed before a CBC exercise affect respondents‘ price sensitivity. Morwitz et al. (2008, and Ülkümen et al. 2009) demonstrated that the use of survey questions early in the survey, using narrow (i.e., many scale points for responding) vs. broad (i.e., few scale points for responding) response scales had an influence on how respondents reacted to subsequent questions. In particular, they showed that when respondents were asked questions about products, they used more dimensions when they were later asked to evaluate the product if they previously answered a long series of unrelated questions using narrow instead of broad scales. We attempted to replicate their effect and test if it would occur in a different setting. We also tested whether this effect would still occur if a shorter list of questions was used for the manipulation. We incorporated a short series of questions that used narrow or broad response scales prior to the CBC exercise. We then examined the impact of this manipulation on respondents‘ tradeoff decisions in the CBC task. Our results showed that the shortened manipulation did impact respondent price elasticity, but that the direction of the effect was different from what we had first predicted. We also studied the impact of several other manipulations on respondents‘ tradeoff decisions. These included a Build-Your-Own (BYO) exercise, alone and in combination with a budgeting session, a Van Westendorp pricing exercise, and a simulation of point of sale price comparisons. The BYO exercise was effective in increasing respondent price elasticity. In addition, we compared the traditional CBC experiment to an Adaptive CBC (ACBC) experiment. Our results showed that ACBC was surprisingly effective in reducing the price premiums respondents placed on product features

The sources and consequences of the fluent processing of numbers

10.1509/jmkr.48.2.327Journal of Marketing Research482327-34

Categories create mind-sets: the effect of exposure to broad versus narrow categorizations on subsequent, unrelated decisions

The authors find that exposure to different types of categories or assortments in a task creates a mind-set that changes how consumers process information in subsequent tasks. That is, these mind-sets have a spillover effect that alters consumers' decision making in a variety of subsequent and unrelated tasks, from basic cognitive behaviors (e.g., grouping) and consumer decisions (e.g., new product adoptions) to more general decision-making strategies (e.g., susceptibility to heuristics). Consumers previously exposed to broad assortments or categorizations base their decisions on fewer pieces of information, typically those made salient by the environment. In contrast, consumers previously exposed to narrow assortments or categorizations employ multiple pieces of information, both salient and nonsalient, without exerting any extra effort. Consequently, prior exposure to broad versus narrow categorizations leads to greater susceptibility to some common context effects and to heuristic decision making