Aspects of Experiences: The Role of Novelty in Retrospective Summary Assessments

Many consumption episodes involve experiences that extend over time or comprise sequences of outcomes. Whether leisure activities, shopping visits, or service encounters, extended experiences vary in their novelty for consumers. While past work has studied the role of novelty in how episodes are experienced, in this dissertation I ask: How does the novelty of an experience impact its retrospective, overall evaluation? Previous research on the snapshot model observed that overall evaluations are based on only the most accessible snapshots of experiences. This past work largely focused on accessibility differences arising from serial positioning and intensity, whereas novelty stems from differences on stimulus or conceptual characteristics. In this dissertation, while demonstrating that novelty influences accessibility in overall evaluations, I also show that novelty’s effect depends on the timing and type of evaluation. As a basic effect, I find that novelty enhances the accessibility of affective experience: Aspects that are normally under-weighted in overall evaluations have a larger influence if these aspects are novel. Further, studying overall evaluations of affect at different points in time, I find that aspects that regularly influence immediate evaluations are more likely to impact delayed evaluations if these aspects are novel. Examining different evaluation types, I show that novelty has opposite effects for informational evaluations: Retrospective judgments of attribute quality levels are more accurate when an experience is common versus when it is unique—an effect driven by learning advantages that accrue through accumulated experience. Finally, I distinguish novelty from unfamiliarity by showing that novelty varies based on the number of past direct experiences but not indirect experiences (e.g., verbal descriptions of episodes) in a domain. Taken together, these findings augment our understanding of overall evaluations and explicate novelty. This dissertation also unites the snapshot model literature with other work on memory, learning, and affect

Collective satiation: how co-experience accelerates a decline in hedonic judgments

ndividuals often mutually experience a stimulus with a relationship partner or social group (e.g., snacking with friends). Yet, little is currently understood about how a sense of coexperiencing affects hedonic judgments of experiences that unfold over time. Research on the shared attention state has suggested that hedonic judgments are intensified when individuals coexperience a stimulus (vs. experiencing it alone), and other related work has found that the social environment influences hedonic judgments in shared (vs. solo) experiences. Although this past work has focused on judgments of single instances of a stimulus, the present work examines how coexperience affects hedonic judgments of stimuli over time. This work documents the ‘collective satiation effect’ wherein satiation—a diminished enjoyment of pleasant stimuli with repeated experience—is accelerated by a sense of coexperiencing the stimulus with others. We propose that this happens because shared attention makes the repetitive nature of the experience more salient, by promoting and incorporating thoughts of others also repeatedly having the same shared experience. Five studies document the collective satiation effect, support the proposed mechanism, and show moderators of the effect. Taken together, this research contributes to an understanding of how the social environment influences the experience of hedonic stimuli, which has broad implications for the value individuals place on the time that they spend with others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved

Two-stage decisions increase preference for hedonic options

When choosing from multiple options, decision-makers may directly choose an option (single-stage decision), or initially shortlist a subset of options, and then choose an option from this shortlist (two-stage decision). Past work suggests that these two decision formats should lead to the same final choice when information about the choice alternatives is held constant. In contrast, this research demonstrates a novel effect: two-stage decisions increase preference for hedonic (vs. utilitarian) options. A regulatory focus account explains this effect. In a two-stage process, after shortlisting, decision-makers feel that they have sufficiently advanced their prevention goals, and this reduces their prevention focus during the final choice stage. Reduced prevention focus, in turn, enhances hedonic preference. Four studies across different decision contexts illustrate this effect and support the underlying process mechanism. The findings suggest that the formal structure of a decision (single-stage vs. two-stage) leads to systematic differences in decision-makers’ choices

How Does Tobin’s Q Respond to Merger and Acquisition Announcements: Evidence of Listed Indian Firms

Purpose: The aim of this study is to examine the linkage between mergers and acquisition announcements and firm’s valuation taking into consideration Tobin’s q.   Theoretical framework: The Q theory of investment propounded by James Tobin (1969) is suitable for the present study. According to this theory, there is a significant correlation between a company's market value and its rate of investment. Following this, indicators of the relative potential profitability of investments are the valuations that are placed in financial markets on the securities of companies as ratios to the costs of replacing their assets, which is denoted by q.    Design/methodology/approach: The current investigation examines Tobin's q distribution for 140 listed firms on the Bombay Stock Exchange from 2011 to 2022. Tobin’s q is calculated for the financial service sector of the Indian economy.   Findings: The results study suggests that Stock markets react significantly to the valuation of Indian firms due to M&A announcements in the category of non-banking financial companies. More specifically, 40 companies have a high Tobin’s q ratio in the full sample of firms. According to the findings, the majority of M&A announcements had no effect on the Tobin's q of the sampling companies. This indicates that the stocks of companies operating in the financial services sector are not affected by news of mergers and acquisitions. It demonstrates that the Indian capital market responded normally to information on mergers and acquisitions.   Research, Practical & Social implications: The study helps financial analysts, top-level management, and stakeholders of a company to correctly evaluate the impact of mergers and acquisitions announcements on Tobin’s q of firms as a performance measurement metric.   Originality/value: The value of the study can be evaluated from the fact that it investigates the relationship between mergers and acquisitions announcements and Tobin's q as a crucial parameter for corporate valuation, which is the first of its kind for emerging economies

Milestone Age Affects the Role of Health and Emotions in Life Satisfaction: A Preliminary Inquiry

Jill turns 40. Should this change how she evaluates her life, and would a similar change occur when she turns 41? Milestone age (e.g., 30, 40, 50)—a naturally occurring feature in personal timelines—has received much attention is popular culture, but little attention in academic inquiry. This study examines whether milestone birthdays change the way people evaluate their life. We show that life outlook is impacted by this temporal landmark, which appears to punctuate people’s mental maps of their life cycle. At these milestone junctures, people take stock of where they stand and have a more evaluative perspective towards their lives when making life satisfaction judgments. Correspondingly, they place less emphasis on daily emotional experiences. We find that milestone agers (vs. other individuals) place greater weight on health satisfaction and BMI and lesser weight on daily positive emotions in their overall life satisfaction judgments, whereas negative emotions remain influential

Cellular Network Speech Enhancement: Removing Background and Transmission Noise

The primary objective of speech enhancement is to reduce background noise while preserving the target's speech. A common dilemma occurs when a speaker is confined to a noisy environment and receives a call with high background and transmission noise. To address this problem, the Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) Challenge focuses on removing the background noise with the next-generation deep learning models to enhance the target's speech; however, researchers fail to consider Voice Over IP (VoIP) applications their transmission noise. Focusing on Google Meet and its cellular application, our work achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Google Meet To Phone Track of the VoIP DNS Challenge. This paper demonstrates how to beat industrial performance and achieve 1.92 PESQ and 0.88 STOI, as well as superior acoustic fidelity, perceptual quality, and intelligibility in various metrics

Speech Enhancement for Virtual Meetings on Cellular Networks

We study speech enhancement using deep learning (DL) for virtual meetings on cellular devices, where transmitted speech has background noise and transmission loss that affects speech quality. Since the Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) Challenge dataset does not contain practical disturbance, we collect a transmitted DNS (t-DNS) dataset using Zoom Meetings over T-Mobile network. We select two baseline models: Demucs and FullSubNet. The Demucs is an end-to-end model that takes time-domain inputs and outputs time-domain denoised speech, and the FullSubNet takes time-frequency-domain inputs and outputs the energy ratio of the target speech in the inputs. The goal of this project is to enhance the speech transmitted over the cellular networks using deep learning models

What’s mine is a hologram? How shared Augmented Reality augments psychological ownership

Augmented Reality (AR) holograms are 3D digital objects projected into a customer’s physical environment through mobile technology. Applied as potential substitutes to physical products, AR holograms pose a unique challenge for conventional configurations of product ownership. Taking a socially situated cognition perspective, we demonstrate how customers’ shared experience of AR holograms leads to distinct perspectives on psychological ownership. In Study 1, we demonstrate how customisation of AR holograms lets customers feel psychological ownership of digital products. In Study 2, we highlight the mechanisms of social adaptation related to assimilation and differentiation that drive the relationship between customisation and psychological ownership of AR holograms in social settings. In Study 3, we illustrate how these mechanisms are influenced by the affordances of AR technology when customers switch between personal or shared devices. We discuss implications for theory and marketing practice of this potentially novel class of digital consumer products

Navigating Residue Sensitivity in the Used Goods Marketplace

How does a previous owner's contact with used goods affect consumer judgments of these objects? This research identifies a trait measure of sensitivity to the residue of another's essence or taint found in a used possession. Those highly sensitive to residue respond to the transfer of contaminants from a previous owner of an object. Six samples in Study 1 show that residue sensitivity is a reliable and valid measure that is related to constructs of possession attachment and disease transfer. Still, residue sensitivity explains consumer behavior in the secondhand marketplace in ways that these existing constructs do not. Studies 2 and 3 illustrate how consumers highly sensitive to residue shift their judgments of secondhand goods according to information about the valence of a source of prior ownership