Evolution of consumption: a psychological ownership framework

Technological innovations are creating new products, services, and markets that satisfy enduring consumer needs. These technological innovations create value for consumers and firms in many ways, but they also disrupt psychological ownership––the feeling that a thing is “MINE.” The authors describe two key dimensions of this technology-driven evolution of consumption pertaining to psychological ownership: (1) replacing legal ownership of private goods with legal access rights to goods and services owned and used by others and (2) replacing “solid” material goods with “liquid” experiential goods. They propose that these consumption changes can have three effects on psychological ownership: they can threaten it, cause it to transfer to other targets, and create new opportunities to preserve it. These changes and their effects are organized in a framework and examined across three macro trends in marketing: (1) growth of the sharing economy, (2) digitization of goods and services, and (3) expansion of personal data. This psychological ownership framework generates future research opportunities and actionable marketing strategies for firms aiming to preserve the positive consequences of psychological ownership and navigate cases for which it is a liability.Accepted manuscrip

How I Decide Depends on What I Spend: Use of Heuristics Is Greater for Time than for Money

We demonstrate that decision making is more heuristic in situations that involve spending time rather than money. Relative to participants in the money condition, those in the time condition show a higher propensity to choose a compromise option (experiment 1) and to rely on an arbitrary anchor (experiment 2). We propose that such heuristics are used more for time because, compared to monetary expenditures, temporal expenditures are harder to account for. Consistent with this proposition, when participants in both time and money conditions are primed to account for their expenditures, they no longer differ in their use of heuristics. The associated response times offer additional process evidence (experiment 3). (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

The Fading of Optimism: Temporal Changes in Expectations About Product Performance

EXTENDED ABSTRACT -Product expectations refer to predictions about how good a product's performance will be (Boulding, For the chosen camera, the consumer can have expectations about the quality of photographs. Moreover, these expectations can exist both before and after choice. The actual performance, in terms of photograph quality, will be revealed only after the consumer takes pictures and gets the film roll processed. In this paper, we try to understand whether expectations about product performance (e.g., about photograph quality) change over time, from the pre-choice stage to the post-choice stage, before actual product performance is revealed. This paper therefore adds to post-choice research like that on satisfaction (e.g., Oliver 1980) by studying how expectations might changer after choice, before performance is revealed. [to cite]

Buyers versus sellers: How they differ in their responses to framed outcomes

Consumers’reactions to a difference in price can depend on how it is framed. If buyers interpret paying $60 rather than$65 as getting a $5 discount, then they are likely to consider paying$60 to be a gain and paying $65 to be a nongain. Alternatively, if they interpret having to pay$65 rather than $60 as incurring a$5 penalty, then they may consider paying $60 to be a nonloss and paying$65 to be a loss. Similarly, sellers can also experience gains, nongains, nonlosses, and losses. This article suggests that buyers are prevention focused and consequently place a greater emphasis on loss-related frames, whereas sellers are promotion focused and place a greater emphasis on gain-related frames. Therefore, for equivalent positive outcomes, buyers feel better about nonlosses, but sellers feel better about gains. For equivalent negative outcomes, buyers feel worse about losses, but sellers feel worse about nongains. These effects, however, disappear when there is little motivation to process information about the monetary transaction. Consumers acquire products as buyers and dispose them of as sellers. After they decide to buy or sell, however, they might interpret the price they pay or receive using differen

How Consumers Forecast: Buyer-Seller Relationship as a Boundary Condition of the Impact Bias

People frequently overestimate the impact of an event when they imagine it, relative to when they actually experience it. This phenomenon, known as the impact bias, has been well established as an intrapersonal phenomenon. We extend it to the inherently interpersonal marketing setting involving buyer–seller dyads in which the two entities are bound by a relationship, and propose a moderating effect based on the strength of the buyer–seller relationship. An online panel study and three laboratory experiments provide converging evidence such that the impact bias emerges when the buyer–seller relationship is strong, but disappears when the relationship is weak

Swayed by the Numbers: The Consequences of Displaying Product Review Attributes

Prior research has shown the independent effects of average product ratings and number of reviews for online purchases, but the relative influence of these aggregate review attributes is still debated in the literature. In this research, the authors demonstrate the conditional influences of these two attributes as a function of the valence of average product ratings and the level of review numbers in a choice set. Specifically, they argue that the diagnosticity of the number of reviews, relative to average product ratings, increases when average product ratings are negative or neutral (vs. positive) and when the level of review numbers in a choice set is low (vs. high). As a result, when consumers choose among the best options on one of the review attributes (average product ratings or the number of reviews), their preference shifts from the higher-rated option with fewer reviews toward the lower-rated option with more reviews. The authors demonstrate this preference shift in seven studies, elucidate the underlying process by which this occurs, and conclude with a discussion of the implications for retailers and brands