Shopping Goals, Goal Concreteness, and Conditional Coupons

assistance. The authors are especially grateful to Mr. Frank La Verde, Mr. Marc Semon, and all staff of La Verde’s Market for their kind support and co-operation, and to the Editor, Dawn Iacobucci, the Associate Editor, and three reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. 3 We propose a two-stage model to describe the increasing concreteness of consumers ’ goals during the shopping process, testing the model through a series of field experiments at a convenience store. Using a number of different process measures (experiment 1), we first established that consumers are less certain of their shopping goals and construe products in less concrete terms when they are in the first (vs. second) stage of the shopping process. The results of experiments 2 and 3 next demonstrate that goal-evoking marketing promotions (e.g. conditional coupons) are more effective in influencing consumers ’ spending when consumers’ goals are less concrete. 4 Accumulating evidence points to the pivotal role of goals in our daily lives, providing us with a sense of direction and clarity for our actions, and influencing the way we think and behave (Gollwitzer 1990; Kruglanski et. al. 2002; Kunda 1990; Locke and Latham 1990). It has bee

2113). Inefficient Provision of Liquidity

Abstract We study an economy where the lack of a simultaneous double coincidence of wants creates the need for liquidity. We show that the private provision of liquidity is inefficient: the private sector invests too much in collateralizeable assets and too much in relatively safe assets. The reason is that liquidity affects prices and the welfare of others, and creators do not internalize this. The government can eliminate the inefficiency by restricting the creation of liquidity by the private sector