CHANG, Hanwen Hannah

Cho, Cecile

Lee, Leonard

Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University

Singapore Management UniversityInstitutional Knowledge at Singapore Management UniversityResearch Collection Lee Kong Chian School OfBusiness Lee Kong Chian School of Business10-2009Seeking Emotion Enhancement or UncertaintyResolution? A Dual-System Approach toExamining Post-Purchase Information SearchHanwen Hannah CHANGSingapore Management University, hannahchang@smu.edu.sgCecile ChoMoscow School of BusinessLeonard LeeColumbia UniversityFollow this and additional works at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_researchPart of the Marketing Commons, and the Sales and Merchandising CommonsThis Conference Proceeding Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Lee Kong Chian School of Business at Institutional Knowledge atSingapore Management University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business by an authorizedadministrator of Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University. For more information, please email libIR@smu.edu.sg.CitationChang, Hannah, Cecile Cho and Leonard Lee. 2010. "Seeking Emotion Enhancement Or Uncertainty Resolution? A Dual-SystemApproach to Examining Post-Purchase Information Search." Advances in Consumer Research, vol. 37, 192-193.Seeking Emotion Enhancement or Uncertainty Resolution?  A Dual-System Approach to Examining Post Purchase Information Search Hannah Chang, Singapore Management University, Singapore Cecile Cho, Moscow School of Management, Skolkovo, Russia  Leonard Lee, Columbia Business School, USA  Published in Advances in Consumer Research, Volume 37, Pages: 192-194  Product information search is typically assumed to follow the recognition of a purchase need and to occur before decision making. Once a sale transaction is completed, searching for information (e.g. price) on the purchased product seems futile and even irrational. Real-life observation and prior research (e.g. Russo and Leclerc 1994), however, suggest that such post-purchase search behavior is pervasive among consumers despite having no apparent consequence. In this research, we examine the prevalence of post-purchase information (particularly prices of already purchased products) search behavior in shopping and its underlying motivations. We propose two distinct reasons for this behavior—(1) to resolve uncertainty and ascertain that the right purchase decision has been made (Shani and Zeelenberg 2007); and (2) for emotion-enhancement particularly if consumers are confident of having made the right purchase decision. We draw upon Epstein’s (1994) Cognitive Experiential Self-Theory (CEST) as an integrative conceptual framework for these two accounts, and investigate whether the two information-processing styles (experiential or cognitive) may differentially drive post-purchase information search. Specifically, we hypothesize that, while consumers who rely more on cognitive processing during decision making would seek post-purchase product information when they are uncertain about having made the right decision, consumers who rely more on experiential processing focus on their current shopping experience and tend to seek such information for emotion-enhancement purposes, particularly when they are reasonably confident that they have made the right purchase decision. We tested our hypothesis in two experiments. In experiment 1 (N=86), we traced participants’ real-time search behavior in a two-stage online shopping experiment using the mouselab paradigm (Payne, Bettman and Johnson 1993). Participants were endowed with $10 and asked to shop at an online shopping website selling five desktop toys (e.g. stress ball, wood cube puzzle), each presented in the form of a picture, a short description, size specification, and price. Participants had to purchase one item with the given cash. After making their purchase, participants were asked to shop at a second store selling ten desktop toys including the five they had already seen in the first store. (We counterbalanced which five of the ten products participants could buy in the first store.) After a short filler task, participants had to complete the Rational-Experiential Inventory (REI) as a measure of their information-processing style (Epstein et al. 1996). To manipulate participants’ degree of confidence in whether they were paying a good price for their purchase in the first store, we told half the participants that the prices were discounted by 50% (“large”), and the other half, 10% (“small”). We found a significant crossover interaction between discount size and participants’ information processing style on their propensity to search within the second store for the price of the product they had already purchased in the first store (p=.05). Planned comparisons further revealed that whereas rationally-oriented participants were more likely to engage in post-purchase price search when the discount in the first store was small (57%) than when it was large (32%), experiential oriented participants were more likely to engage in post-purchase price search when the discount was large instead (43% vs. 27%). We replicated this result in experiment 2 (N=273) in which we manipulated participants’ information-processing style prior to shopping. Participants were asked to complete two purportedly unrelated tasks. In the first task, half the participants were asked to describe a difficult decision they had to make in the past and in which they decided based on careful thinking and it turned out to be the right decision, while the other half were asked to describe a difficult decision they had to make in which they used their feelings instead. Next, participants were asked to imagine that they needed a new MP3 player and decided to buy one after looking at various models at an electronics store; they were told that the store was having a semi-annual clearance sale with the discount size being 5% (“small”) or 50% (“large”). Subsequently, they saw another store that sells the same model of MP3 player they had just bought and had to indicate whether they would enter the store to check out the price of the player. Again, we found a significant crossover interaction between discount size and information-processing style on participants’ likelihood to seek out the price of the MP3 player they just purchased (p=.004); while cognitively-oriented participants were more likely to search when the discount in Store A was small (61%) than when it was large (50%), experientially-oriented participants were more likely to search when the discount was large (64%) than when it was small (45%). Together, these findings lend a first look at two contrasting motivations that spur consumers to seek post-purchase information that might appear non-consequential, suggesting disparate situations under which different types of consumers would engage in such behavior.  

Seeking Emotion Enhancement or Uncertainty Resolution? A Dual-System Approach to Examining Post-Purchase Information Search

Singapore Management University 
Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of 
Business Lee Kong Chian School of Business 
10-2009 
Seeking Emotion Enhancement or Uncertainty Resolution? A Dual-
System Approach to Examining Post-Purchase Information 
Search 
Hanwen Hannah CHANG 
Singapore Management University, hannahchang@smu.edu.sg 
Cecile Cho 
Moscow School of Business 
Leonard Lee 
Columbia University 
Follow this and additional works at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research 
 Part of the Marketing Commons, and the Sales and Merchandising Commons 
Citation 
Chang, Hannah, Cecile Cho and Leonard Lee. 2010. "Seeking Emotion Enhancement Or Uncertainty 
Resolution? A Dual-System Approach to Examining Post-Purchase Information Search." Advances in 
Consumer Research, vol. 37, 192-193. 
This Conference Proceeding Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Lee Kong Chian School of 
Business at Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University. It has been accepted for inclusion in 
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business by an authorized administrator of Institutional Knowledge 
at Singapore Management University. For more information, please email library@smu.edu.sg. 
Seeking Emotion Enhancement or Uncertainty Resolution?  
A Dual-System Approach to Examining Post Purchase Information Search 
Hannah Chang, Singapore Management University, Singapore 
Cecile Cho, Moscow School of Management, Skolkovo, Russia  
Leonard Lee, Columbia Business School, USA  
Published in Advances in Consumer Research, Volume 37, Pages: 192-194 
 
Product information search is typically assumed to follow the recognition of a purchase need and to 
occur before decision making. Once a sale transaction is completed, searching for information (e.g. 
price) on the purchased product seems futile and even irrational. Real-life observation and prior 
research (e.g. Russo and Leclerc 1994), however, suggest that such post-purchase search behavior is 
pervasive among consumers despite having no apparent consequence. In this research, we examine the 
prevalence of post-purchase information (particularly prices of already purchased products) search 
behavior in shopping and its underlying motivations. We propose two distinct reasons for this 
behavior—(1) to resolve uncertainty and ascertain that the right purchase decision has been made 
(Shani and Zeelenberg 2007); and (2) for emotion-enhancement particularly if consumers are confident 
of having made the right purchase decision. We draw upon Epstein’s (1994) Cognitive Experiential Self-
Theory (CEST) as an integrative conceptual framework for these two accounts, and investigate whether 
the two information-processing styles (experiential or cognitive) may differentially drive post-purchase 
information search. Specifically, we hypothesize that, while consumers who rely more on cognitive 
processing during decision making would seek post-purchase product information when they are 
uncertain about having made the right decision, consumers who rely more on experiential processing 
focus on their current shopping experience and tend to seek such information for emotion-
enhancement purposes, particularly when they are reasonably confident that they have made the right 
purchase decision. We tested our hypothesis in two experiments. In experiment 1 (N=86), we traced 
participants’ real-time search behavior in a two-stage online shopping experiment using the mouselab 
paradigm (Payne, Bettman and Johnson 1993). Participants were endowed with $10 and asked to shop 
at an online shopping website selling five desktop toys (e.g. stress ball, wood cube puzzle), each 
presented in the form of a picture, a short description, size specification, and price. Participants had to 
purchase one item with the given cash. After making their purchase, participants were asked to shop at 
a second store selling ten desktop toys including the five they had already seen in the first store. (We 
counterbalanced which five of the ten products participants could buy in the first store.) After a short 
filler task, participants had to complete the Rational-Experiential Inventory (REI) as a measure of their 
information-processing style (Epstein et al. 1996). To manipulate participants’ degree of confidence in 
whether they were paying a good price for their purchase in the first store, we told half the participants 
that the prices were discounted by 50% (“large”), and the other half, 10% (“small”). We found a 
significant crossover interaction between discount size and participants’ information processing style on 
their propensity to search within the second store for the price of the product they had already 
purchased in the first store (p=.05). Planned comparisons further revealed that whereas rationally-
oriented participants were more likely to engage in post-purchase price search when the discount in the 
first store was small (57%) than when it was large (32%), experiential oriented participants were more 
likely to engage in post-purchase price search when the discount was large instead (43% vs. 27%). We 
replicated this result in experiment 2 (N=273) in which we manipulated participants’ information-
processing style prior to shopping. Participants were asked to complete two purportedly unrelated tasks. 
In the first task, half the participants were asked to describe a difficult decision they had to make in the 
past and in which they decided based on careful thinking and it turned out to be the right decision, while 
the other half were asked to describe a difficult decision they had to make in which they used their 
feelings instead. Next, participants were asked to imagine that they needed a new MP3 player and 
decided to buy one after looking at various models at an electronics store; they were told that the store 
was having a semi-annual clearance sale with the discount size being 5% (“small”) or 50% (“large”). 
Subsequently, they saw another store that sells the same model of MP3 player they had just bought and 
had to indicate whether they would enter the store to check out the price of the player. Again, we found 
a significant crossover interaction between discount size and information-processing style on 
participants’ likelihood to seek out the price of the MP3 player they just purchased (p=.004); while 
cognitively-oriented participants were more likely to search when the discount in Store A was small 
(61%) than when it was large (50%), experientially-oriented participants were more likely to search 
when the discount was large (64%) than when it was small (45%). Together, these findings lend a first 
look at two contrasting motivations that spur consumers to seek post-purchase information that might 
appear non-consequential, suggesting disparate situations under which different types of consumers 
would engage in such behavior. 
 


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Seeking Emotion Enhancement or Uncertainty Resolution? A Dual-System Approach to Examining Post-Purchase Information Search

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