Let Us Eat and Drink, for Tomorrow We Shall Die: Effects of Morality Salience and Self-Esteem on Self-Regulation in Consumer Choice,”

We examine how making mortality salient affects consumer choices. We develop a new theoretical framework predicting when consumer behaviors will be more (less) indulgent when mortality is salient, arguing that individuals focus more of their limited self-regulatory resources on domains that are important sources of self-esteem and less on domains that are not important sources. In two domains, food choice and charitable donations/socially conscious consumer behaviors, high mortality salience led to less indulgent choices among participants for whom that domain was an important source of esteem and more indulgent choices for participants for whom the domain was not an important esteem source

Evolving Health Guidelines: How Do Consumers Fare While Science Marches On?

The press is replete with guidelines regarding preventive behaviors, such as exercise, vitamins, or food choices. Such guidelines may have unintended negative effects on consumers if later reversed. We report a study examining the effect of evolving health guidelines on consumers' initial response and critical "spillover" outcomes-consumers' faith in health guidelines in general and consumers' intention to perform related health behaviors not part of the guideline. We find that a guideline change from taking an action to inaction increases negative spillovers, consistent with omission bias and betrayal aversion. A follow-up experiment with policy implications for mitigating this undesired backlash will also be reported. [to cite]: Christine Moorman, Mary Frances Luce, and James R. Bettman (2008) SESSION OVERVIEW From news reports on the radio, television, internet, and magazines to focused health campaigns targeting susceptible groups, consumers are bombarded with health messages produced by ongoing medical studies, government agencies, for-profit health and insurance firms, and community and public health non-profits. A Google search of "health" produced 939,000,000 hits, "nutrition" produced 148,000,000 hits, and the specific phrases "health news" (6,140,000) and "health communications (651,000) produced a sizable number of hits. These numbers suggest that health messages are a fundamental part of the mosaic of communications consumers encounter every day and constitute a key component of campaigns designed to reduce morbidity and mortality. These numbers and other indicators also point to trends involving increased consumer responsibility for their own care and shifts in medical culture from paternalism towards informed consent. Despite these positive forces, most health communications produce low compliance and rather dismal results. Most health communications are undertaken to alter consumer action. Conventional wisdom is that if health communications are sufficiently informative and persuasive (increasing knowledge, efficacy, or motivation), then appropriate action will follow. This session's papers challenge this wisdom. The first two papers sharpen our understanding of how to use health communication to alter consumer action; the second two papers point to important downstream problems occurring after consumers are motivated to act. Anand Keller and Lehmann report a meta-analysis of 85 health communications studies. They find that message factors, not individual differences or context, dominate explanations of effectiveness. They also show important differences in effects on attitudes toward health behaviors and intentions to change behaviors that may critically influence whether we judge a campaign to be successful or not. Their research underscores the importance of conceptualizing and measuring consumer action (rather than simply consumer attitudes) as a key health communication goal. The second paper, by Anand Keller, extends this theme of the focal nature of consumer action by using mental simulation of healthpromoting actions as a focus of intervention. She challenges the current idea that hope and confidence produce more preventive health behaviors and suggests that increasing consumer anxiety is more effective by producing higher need for action taken to regain control. The third and fourth papers illustrate complementary difficulties in using health communication to alter action. Moorman, Luce, and Bettman argue that consumers may not always benefit from the evolving nature of health guidelines. As medical science sheds more light on the effect of healthy choices or treatment options, communications that initially advocate positive actions (e.g., take a vitamin supplement) but later reverse these suggestions may ultimately degrade consumers' view of health guidelines and decrease their likelihood of performing related health behaviors. Tanner shows that teens may provide inaccurate reports of actions related to risky behaviors when participating in the evaluation of community-based health programs. Inaccuracy is particularly problematic when teens are made aware of desirable health behaviors, when they believe their anonymity may not be protected, or when minimizing, not exaggerating, certain behaviors. Looking across papers, we see several emerging questions regarding the promise and pitfalls of using health communications to alter health behavior: (1) Do health communications work in the short and long-term? Unsurprisingly, numerous studies have assessed the impact of different communication strategies (e.g. level of fear arousal or framing) on subjects' attitudes toward and intentions with respect to various health behaviors. However, the large number of studies and the variability of the findings suggest a quantitative synthesis of this area would be beneficial. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to assess the current state of knowledge in the field via metaanalysis. In particular, we wanted to identify the context, message and individual factors that increased attitudes and intentions to comply with the recommended health behaviors. For that purpose, we conducted a meta-analysis on data reported in 85 published and unpublished articles in the consumer research, psychology, health, and communications literatures

Tourist choice processing: evaluating decision rules and methods of their measurement

A detailed understanding of decision rules is essential in order to better explain consumption behavior, yet the variety of decision rules used have been somewhat neglected in tourism research. This study adopts an innovative method, greedoid analysis, to estimate a noncompensatory type of decision rule known as lexicographic by aspect (LBA). It is quite different from the weighted additive (WADD) model commonly assumed in tourism studies. By utilizing an experimental research design, this study enables the evaluation of the two types of decision rules regarding their predictive and explanatory power. Additionally, we introduce a novel evaluation indicator (“cost”), which allows further investigation of the heterogeneity in the use of decision rules. The results suggest that although the out-of-sample accuracy is lower, the LBA model has a better explanatory performance on respondents’ preference order. Moreover, the different perspective provided by the LBA model is useful for obtaining managerial implications

The propensity to bargain while on a vacation

This article assesses how tourists' bargaining motivations and attitudes moderate their willingness to return to Italy, where bargaining is perceived as one of the best ways to deal with sellers. A non-probability quota sampling technique was used to survey domestic tourists in Italy through an online questionnaire which encompassed 26 bargaining values and one item to measure the likelihood that the tourists would bargain at the same destination in the future. The data comprised a total of 812 observations. An order probit model and marginal effects were estimated to measure the tourists' propensity to return to Italy for bargaining purposes. The study findings indicate that tourists' propensity to return for bargaining purposes is taken with the awareness that they will not obtain what they expected; as a matter of fact, they are unlikely to care about the final result but instead engage in this behaviour to have fun.FCT - National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology [UID/ECO/04007/2013 CEFAGE

Europe-wide air pollution modeling from 2000 to 2019 using geographically weighted regression

Previous European land-use regression (LUR) models assumed fixed linear relationships between air pollution concentrations and predictors such as traffic and land use. We evaluated whether including spatially-varying relationships could improve European LUR models by using geographically weighted regression (GWR) and random forest (RF). We built separate LUR models for each year from 2000 to 2019 for NO2, O3, PM2.5 and PM10 using annual average monitoring observations across Europe. Potential predictors included satellite retrievals, chemical transport model estimates and land-use variables. Supervised linear regression (SLR) was used to select predictors, and then GWR estimated the potentially spatially-varying coefficients. We developed multi-year models using geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR). Five-fold cross-validation per year showed that GWR and GTWR explained similar spatial variations in annual average concentrations (average R(2) = NO2: 0.66; O3: 0.58; PM10: 0.62; PM2.5: 0.77), which are better than SLR (average R(2) = NO2: 0.61; O3: 0.46; PM10: 0.51; PM2.5: 0.75) and RF (average R(2) = NO2: 0.64; O3: 0.53; PM10: 0.56; PM2.5: 0.67). The GTWR predictions and a previously-used method of back-extrapolating 2010 model predictions using CTM were overall highly correlated (R(2) > 0.8) for all pollutants. Including spatially-varying relationships using GWR modestly improved European air pollution annual LUR models, allowing time-varying exposure-health risk models

Segmenting Markets by Bagged Clustering: Young Chinese Travelers to Western Europe.

Market segmentation is ubiquitous in marketing. Hierarchical and nonhierarchical methods are popular for segmenting tourism markets. These methods are not without controversy. In this study, we use bagged clustering on the push and pull factors of Western Europe to segment potential young Chinese travelers. Bagged clustering overcomes some of the limitations of hierarchical and nonhierarchical methods. A sample of 403 travelers revealed the existence of four clusters of potential visitors. The clusters were subsequently profiled on sociodemographics and travel characteristics. The findings suggest a nascent young Chinese independent travel segment that cannot be distinguished on push factors but can be differentiated on perceptions of the current independent travel infrastructure in Western Europe. Managerial implications are offered on marketing and service provision to the young Chinese outbound travel market

Prior knowledge and complacency in new product learning."

Our research examines the role of prior knowledge in learning new product information. Three studies demonstrate that, compared to consumers with lower prior knowledge, those with higher prior knowledge learn less about a new product. Further, higher knowledge consumers are able to learn more but learn less due to motivational deficits; inferior learning of new product information by those with higher prior knowledge is caused by inattention at encoding rather than reconstructive errors at retrieval. These results hold both when prior knowledge is manipulated experimentally (studies 1 and 2) and when it is an individual difference factor (study 3). M ost practitioners see consumer knowledge as an advantage, targeting many new products at expert heavy users. This strategy seems intuitively appealing when based on the assumption that experts have a learning or information processing advantage, proportionately higher levels of interest or involvement, and a greater likelihood of opinion-leadership. As Rogers (1995, p. 166) states, "When an adequate level of how-to knowledge is not obtained prior to the trial and adoption of an innovation, rejection and discontinuance are likely to result. To date, few diffusion investigations are available that deal with how-to knowledge." But are those with higher prior knowledge better able to learn about a new product offering? Fifty years of expertise research have culminated in two conflicting pictures Our research examines the role of prior knowledge in learning about new products in situations where new information makes existing product knowledge obsolete. We posit that, compared to consumers with lower prior knowledge, those with higher prior knowledge may learn less about the new *Stacy L. Wood is assistant professor of marketing, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208 (e-mail: [email protected]). John G. Lynch, Jr., is Hanes Corporation Foundation Professor of Business Administration, Duke University, Box 90120, Durham, NC 27708-0120 (email: [email protected]). The authors thank Joe Alba, Bill Bearden, Jim Bettman, Lisa Bolton, Wes Hutchinson, Randy Rose, the editor, associate editor, and three reviewers for helpful comments, and Scott Swain and Danny Wadden for exemplary research assistance. This research was partially funded by the Moore School of Business and the Fuqua School of Business. product. More important, we present evidence that this inferior learning is due to motivation at encoding rather than to retrieval errors. Those with higher prior knowledge incorrectly generalize from knowledge of existing products and assume that they already know how to use the new product properly. With the presence of certain cues at encoding, those with higher prior knowledge learn more. We demonstrate this result both when prior knowledge is manipulated experimentally and when it is a measured individual difference factor. There are almost as many definitions of "expertise" as researchers who study it (Shanteau 1992). Similar to Spence and Brucks (1997), we define degree of expertise as a function of the amount of domain-specific knowledge acquired through experience or training. This definition is not materially different from the concept of prior knowledge (PK). Thus, we first test our hypotheses by comparing consumers with experimentally induced levels of PK to avoid confounding with correlated constructs of involvement or self-perception of goals. We then replicate these results when real prior experience is measured, allowing us to tie our findings back to experience-based definitions in the expertise literature (e.g., Alba and Hutchinson 1987). HYPOTHESIS DEVELOPMENT Advantages of High Prior Knowledge Cognitive science provides many examples of advantage in learning due to high PK Disadvantages of High Prior Knowledge Experts often fail to perform in accord with these processoriented advantages Overconfidence is a prevalent bias (Fischoff, Slovic, and Lichtenstein 1977); typically people assume that they know more than they do (e.g., Moorman 1999). One might expect that consumers with higher PK would be more overconfident (cf. Keren 1987). Repeated problem-solution patterns facilitate the formation of possibly inappropriate inference heuristics, which can subsequently lead to systematic biases (Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982; The feeling-of-knowing phenomenon (Hart 1965) provides a further reason to expect poor performance by experts. Feelingof-knowing is a metacognitive preretrieval process in which one assesses one's memory for a memory Thus, overconfidence, use of heuristics, or FOK effects may cause knowledgeable consumers to inappropriately rely on self-generated inferences. Poor performance in this context could arise due to inference making at encoding of new information or at retrieval. For example, overconfidence might cause encoding errors due to superficial processing of new information or cause retrieval errors based on insufficient effort to retrieve new product information. Prior Knowledge Effects and New Product Innovation Little expertise research has examined reactions to product innovations. Will those with prior product category information be better able to learn how to use new products? Research in other domains has shown that expert superiority in learning or problem solving is strongly impacted by the external characteristics of the given task (e.g., Shanteau 1992). With a cognitive science approach, one might expect that consumers with a high degree of product category knowledge would be best able to learn about and use new products in that category. Behavioral decision researchers have reported results that seem on the surface to conflict. It is unclear, though, whether classic findings of expert disadvantage in consumer research should be viewed as reflecting a curse of expertise or completely adaptive behavior on the part of more knowledgeable consumers. A similar argument can be made for Bettman and Park's (1980) result that search is lower for high PK than for moderate PK consumers. Several of the disadvantages of PK noted are based on the knowledgeable consumers' complacency in reliance on old knowledge. Higher PK may lead to overconfidence (e.g., "I will learn this new software program in one night"), and this may abbreviate search or processing in a dysfunctional, superficial way. Similarly, the use of inappropriate schemas may be exacerbated by a strong familiarity-induced FOK. Thus, we hypothesize: H1: When obsolescence of PK is not cued explicitly, higher PK may lead to lower scores for new product learning compared to those consumers with lower PK. The argument that PK is not detrimental to learning when change is explicitly cued assumes that the negative effect of PK on learning new product information is due to shallow processing at encoding. In other words, when consumers with higher PK do not recognize that the new product represents a substantial change within the product category (i.e., PK has become obsolete or does not apply to the new product), they may not devote sufficient attentional resources to the learning task. This is in accord with We reason that, when motivated by recognition of change, higher PK consumers may devote the necessary resources to benefit from their enriched cognitive resources. H2: When obsolescence of PK is explicitly cued at the time of new product information exposure, higher PK consumers' scores for new product learning will improve relative to uncued scores more than is true for lower PK consumers. This motivation to process new information may occur naturally via the change cues. Moreau, In real innovation adoption contexts, expert consumers may be affected by the correlated constructs of prior domain knowledge and increased product category involvement STUDY 1: PRIOR KNOWLEDGE AND NEW PRODUCT LEARNING The goal of the first study was to test the influence of PK about allergy medications on the learning of information about a new allergy remedy (hypotheses 1 and 2). To avoid confounds with involvement, we chose to manipulate PK. We PRIOR KNOWLEDGE AND NEW PRODUCTS 419 FIGURE 1 CONCEPTUAL-PROCEDURAL DIAGRAM NOTE.-The dotted arrows indicate that incentive timing differed by study. Motivational incentives occurred only at encoding in study 1 and either before or after encoding in studies 2 and 3. The dashed arrows represent conceptual influence of prior knowledge on new product learning. chose a product category about which our respondents would have low PK and administered a training exercise to the high PK group prior to receipt of new product information. We manipulated the observable newness of the new product by altering superficial similarity of the new product to the old product. The purpose of this manipulation was to determine if a salient newness cue would promote more careful processing by higher PK participants. If higher PK participants make inappropriate inferences or use shallow processing because they are unaware of substantive changes in the product category, this newness cue might trigger better performance by higher PK than by lower PK participants. Without the cue, we expected experts to learn less new product information than novices. We chose allergy medications because there is a clear relationship between proper use and efficacy with pharmaceutical products. If a drug that should be taken on an empty stomach is taken with food, it may not work effectively, or it may cause unexpected side effects. Thus, if subjects score poorly on a test of usage instructions (and this is indicative of their actual behavior), we can plausibly assume that these subjects risk subpar product performance and perhaps even severe illness or death. For ethical reasons, the new product we introduced was fictional at the time of the studies, but it is similar to Claritin (loratadine), introduced in 1994. Method Design. A 2 (Higher versus Lower Prior Knowledge) # 2 (Drug Form) # 2 (Side Effects) between-subjects design tested the influence of expertise on learning and intended usage. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of eight conditions. To manipulate PK, participants read an information booklet on either allergy medications or toothwhitening processes. Those who read about allergy medications were designated as higher PK, while those who read about tooth-whitening processes were lower PK. The new product introduced later in the session was a new hybrid antihistamine. Two newness cue factors, Drug Form and Side Effects, manipulated the superficial similarity of the new medicines to existing medicines. For Drug Form, the new product was shown to be either a pill (similar to existing products, thus no newness cue) or a topical patch (dissimilar to existing products, providing a newness cue). For Side Effects, the new medicine was reported to have 420 JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH few side effects (similar to existing products, thus no newness cue) or no side effects (dissimilar to existing products, providing a newness cue). Drug Form produced no effects on any dependent variable, so the results reported below collapse across this factor. One hundred and eighty-eight students at the University of South Carolina participated in the experiment for course credit. Sixty-five subjects who indicated that they had suffered from allergies in the past were eliminated from the data analysis. Mean responses for both the eliminated sufferers and the remaining subjects will be reported in the results section. Results of reported analyses replicate when these sufferers are included, however, we exclude them because, when the training manipulation is layered on existing PK, it is theoretically nonobvious whether the potential resultant increase in knowledge will outweigh the potential increase in overconfidence. Procedure. Each session lasted one hour and was conducted in groups of two to 12 participants. After a study introduction, participants read general product category information booklets, ostensibly as a warm-up task. Participants in the higher PK condition read about allergy medications. Participants in the lower PK condition read about tooth-whitening processes. Both information booklets were similarly structured and contained similar amounts of information. After this, the booklets were taken from the participants, and the manipulation check-a short general knowledge test on allergies and allergy medications-was administered. Finally, participants read an information booklet that contained information about a new product, a hybrid antihistamine allergy medication. This information was prefaced with the true statement that most allergies are developed in the early to mid-twenties, and it was hoped that this knowledge would motivate active consideration of the new medication. Participants were given as much time as they desired to read about the new product. The brochure did not differ between conditions except for the picture of the medicine (shown as a pill or a patch) and the description that "Certizol does not interact with known medications and has few (no) side effects." The text contained some new product information and usage instructions that were congruent with existing products; however, some information and instructions differed from the PK. This represented the obsolescence of some PK common in product innovation. Then, the product information was removed, and participants responded to a survey about the new product in which items were embedded pertaining to current/past experience with allergy medications, confidence, participants' purchase intentions if an allergy were later developed, and a quiz concerning proper usage of the new medication. This quiz constituted the important dependent variable to measure new product learning. (See example questions in table 1.) The quiz tested subjects on their knowledge of how to use the new medication properly (i.e., "this medicine should be taken at night") and only covered information that was similar across all conditions

Magnetic resonance imaging in patients with meningitis induced hearing loss

The aim of this multicentre study was to compare T1 with T2 weighted MRI scans of the labyrinth after meningitis and to investigate whether waiting with scanning improved the reliability of diagnosing an ongoing process such as cochlear osteogenesis. Forty-five patients were included who suffered from meningitis induced hearing loss (radiological imaging <1 year after meningitis). Twenty-one gadolinium enhanced T1 and 45 T2 weighted MRI scans were scored by two radiologists regarding the condition of the labyrinth. These radiological observations were compared with the condition of the cochlea as described during cochlear implantation. A higher percentage of agreement with surgery was found for T2 (both radiologists 73%) than for T1 weighted MRI scans (radiologist 1: 62%, radiologist 2: 67%), but this difference is not significant. There was no significant difference between early (0–3 months) and late (>3 months) scanning, showing that radiological imaging soon after meningitis allows early diagnosis without suffering from a lower agreement with surgical findings