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Stigma Resistance through Body-in-Practice: Embodying Pride through Creative Mastery Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2024-02-20 Rohan Venkatraman, Julie L Ozanne, Erica Coslor
Stigma, as a process of shame, fosters social exclusion and diminishes bodily competences. Thus, stigmatized consumers often turn to the marketplace for respite. Based on an ethnographic study of drag artists, this study proposes a new understanding of the body that emerges from the mastery of creative consumption practices to combat shame. We theorize a novel “body-in-practice” framework to examine
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Easy to Be Selfish: When and Why is One Individual as Influential as Multiple Individuals Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Zheshuai Yang, Yan Zhang
Past research on social influence finds that, all else being equal, a group of people engaged in a particular behavior is generally more influential than a single individual in inspiring others to adopt that behavior. The current research challenges this seemingly intuitive idea by showing that its validity depends on whether the focal behavior is selfish. Seven experiments show that while multiple
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Consumer Work and Agency in the Analog Revival Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2024-01-17 Michael B Beverland, Karen V Fernandez, Giana M Eckhardt
Why do consumers choose difficult analog technologies over their labor-saving digital counterparts? Through ethnographic investigations of three once defunct analog technologies that have experienced a resurgence (vinyl music, film photography and analog synthesizers), we explore how the act of consumer work enables consumers to experience shifting dimensions of agency. We utilize the theoretical lens
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Gift Giving in Enduring Dyadic Relationships: The Micropolitics of Mother-Daughter Gift Exchange Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Chihling Liu, Robert V Kozinets, Anthony Patterson, Xin Zhao
This paper investigates the dynamics of long-term gift exchange between British mothers and their adult daughters, delving into the processes behind dyadic gift-giving. Through 54 comprehensive interviews, we elaborate the micropolitics that characterize these dynamics. Micropolitics refers to the subtle, everyday interactions, including gift exchange, that shape the ongoing negotiation of roles and
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Nudges Increase Choosing but Decrease Consuming: Longitudinal Studies of the Decoy, Default, and Compromise Effects Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-12-22 Evan Polman, Sam J Maglio
Research in marketing, psychology, economics, and decision making has long examined what people choose, when people choose, and why people choose. But almost no research has examined how long people consume their choices. Here, we examined an asymmetry between choosing an option and consuming it. Under the aegis of nudges, we conducted two randomized longitudinal experiments on how long people consumed
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When Language Matters Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-12-22 Grant Packard, Yang Li, Jonah Berger
Text analysis is increasingly used for consumer and marketing insight. But while work has shed light on what firms should say to customers, when to say those things (e.g., within an advertisement or sales interaction) is less clear. Service employees, for example, could adopt a certain speaking style at a conversation’s start, end, or throughout. When might specific language features be beneficial
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Class Conflict and Spatial Domination in the Neoliberal City Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-12-14 Rodrigo B Castilhos
This paper analyzes spatial domination in middle-classed spaces––the spaces that cater to the dispositions, status, and lifestyle ideals of middle-class groups––of the neoliberal city. Grounded in interdisciplinary scholarship on the neoliberal city, the paper introduces a typology of middle-classed spaces that maps out different combinations of cross-class hostility and cordiality in dynamics of spatial
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Curvy Digital Marketing Designs: Virtual Elements with Rounded Shapes Enhance Online Click-Through Rates Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Dipayan Biswas, Annika Abell, Roger Chacko
With the growing prevalence of digital platforms for online shopping, advertising, and marketing activities in general, it is imperative to better understand how designs of virtual elements on digital interfaces influence click behavior. Websites and online advertisements contain virtual elements such as call-to-action buttons, images, and logos. This research examines how curved versus sharp angled
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Unveiling the Mind of the Machine Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-11-25 Melanie Clegg, Reto Hofstetter, Emanuel de Bellis, Bernd H Schmitt
Previous research has shown that consumers respond differently to decisions made by humans versus algorithms. Many tasks, however, are not performed by humans anymore but entirely by algorithms. In fact, consumers increasingly encounter algorithm-controlled products, such as robotic vacuum cleaners or smart refrigerators, which are steered by different types of algorithms. Building on insights from
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How Traditional Production Shapes Perceptions of Product Quality Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-11-12 Keith Wilcox, Sandra Laporte, Gabriel Ward
The current research examines how the knowledge that a product is made using a traditional method influences perceptions of its quality. We propose that consumers believe a brand using traditional methods is beneficial for society because it is concerned about cultural preservation and this belief has a positive effect on perceived quality. Six experimental studies show consumers evaluate products
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Is ‘4 for $16’ Better Than ‘4 for $15.30’? The Price Divisibility Effect in Multipack Purchases Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-10-28 Hanyong Park, JaeHwan Kwon, Rajesh Bagchi
While much is known about product bundles comprised of different items, much less is known about multipacks—a product set comprised of multiple identical items (e.g., a 4-pack of body washes). Using the context of multipacks, the authors propose a novel price divisibility effect, which suggests that, a multipack’s price that is easily divisible (vs. non-divisible) by the number of component items in
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Better Together: How Clustering Can Attenuate Hedonic Decline Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-10-11 Jinjie Chen, Joseph P Redden
How should consumers sequence the different stimuli they consume: cluster each stimulus together, or intermix them to break things up? Surprisingly, prior literature has provided little insight into this question, even though consumers face it on a regular basis. We propose that clustering each stimulus type together can prolong enjoyment (versus intermixing the types). Six studies confirm that clustering
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Refund Psychology Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-10-04 Tianjiao Yu, Cynthia Cryder, Robyn A LeBoeuf
Consumers frequently receive refunds from prior purchases. In this research, we examine if money refunded from previous purchases is more likely to be spent than money that does not go through a refund process. Across nine pre-registered studies, we test how consumers’ willingness to spend depends on the transaction history of their money. We find that, when people receive a refund and do not need
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Dominance Effects in the Wild Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Ariel Fridman, On Amir, Karsten Hansen
In real-world marketplaces, one may encounter an alternative that is inferior to another one in the assortment. While the presence of such seemingly irrelevant inferior alternatives should ostensibly have no influence on consumers' decisions, an extensive literature using stylized lab experiments has found that, surprisingly, their presence matters. Specifically, the dominance effect suggests that
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Post-Colonial Consumer Respect and the Framing of Neocolonial Consumption in Advertising Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-09-23 Rohit Varman, Russell W Belk, Hari Sreekumar
This study of the production, representation, and reception of post-colonial advertising in India reveals a politics of consumer respectability. The post-colonial politics of consumer respectability is located at the intersection of center-periphery relations, class divisions, and colorism in a way that it frames neocolonial consumption. Advertisers depict middle-class consumer respectability by asserting
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It Looks Like "Theirs": When and Why Human Presence in the Photo Lowers Viewers’ Liking and Preference for an Experience Venue Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-09-23 Zoe Y Lu, Suyeon Jung, Joann Peck
Consumers and marketers often post photos of experiential consumption online. While prior research has studied how human presence in social media images impacts viewers’ responses, the findings are mixed. The present research advances the current understanding by incorporating viewers’ need for self-identity into their response model. Six studies, including an analysis of field data (14,725 Instagram
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We Do What We Are: Representation of the Self-Concept and Identity-Based Choice Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-09-21 Stephanie Y Chen, Oleg Urminsky, Jiaqi Yu
The current research proposes a novel approach to identity-based choice that focuses on consumers’ representations of the self-concept, as captured by the perceived cause-effect relationships among features of an individual consumer’s self-concept. More specifically, the studies reported here test the proposal that the causal centrality of an identity—the number of other features of a consumer’s self-concept
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Epistemological Jangle and Jingle Fallacies in the Consumer-Brand Relationship Subfield: A Call to Action Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-09-21 Noel Albert, Matthew Thomson
For more than 20 years, the consumer-brand relationship (CBR) subfield has flourished with scores of constructs being employed. We provide an epistemological examination of its 14 most commonly measured relational constructs (e.g., Brand Love, Self-Brand Connection) collected from 767 research articles, reflecting 1,753 scales and approximately 9,200 items. We demonstrate that constructs overlap an
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How Do Consumers React to Production Waste? Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-09-21 Haiyue (Felix) Xu, Lisa E Bolton
Production waste, or inefficiencies in product manufacturing, is a major contributor to environmental problems. Consider production waste in garment manufacturing—which has been criticized for wasteful use of natural resources (e.g., using excessive water and fabric) and wasteful disposal of resource residuals (e.g., discarding excessive wastewater and fabric scraps). The present research examines
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Crowdfunding as a Market-Fostering Gift System Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-09-09 Andre F Maciel, Michelle F Weinberger
Reward-based crowdfunding has enabled an unprecedented number of consumers to provision capital for commercial and artistic ventures. Each year, consumers use digital platforms to transfer billions of dollars to entrepreneurs and artists to help them develop a wide range of market innovations. Notably, these consumers obtain no financial benefits, no formal guarantee that their money will be used aptly
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How Does Time Pressure Influence Risk Preferences? Answers from a Meta-Analysis Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-09-09 Alex Belli, François A Carrillat, Natalina Zlatevska, Elizabeth Cowley
Four decades of research into the influences of time pressure on risky decisions have produced widely contrasting findings: 38.5% of the effects indicate that time pressure increases risk preferences, whereas 61.5% show the opposite. A theoretical framework with four conceptual categories of moderators is proposed to explain these heterogeneous findings: nature of the time constraint, negative outcome
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Appearance for Females, Functionality for Males? The False Lay Belief about Gender Difference in Product Preference Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-09-06 Xianchi Dai, Yu (Anna) Lin, Jianping Liang, Chen Yang
It is common that marketers design and position pretty products more to female consumers than to male consumers, suggesting they generally believe that females have a stronger preference than males for product form over function and apply this belief to their marketing practices. However, this research demonstrates that this belief is often inconsistent with actual preferences. Across seven studies
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Transnational Market Navigation: Living and Consuming across Borders Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-07-21 Zahra Sharifonnasabi, Laetitia Mimoun, Fleura Bardhi
Prior research has investigated global mobility through the lenses of consumer acculturation, identity, and possessions with a focus on consumers’ socialization and identity management in the host consumer culture. It has neglected, however, the ways that globally mobile consumers simultaneously navigate the multiple, cross-border markets in which they are embedded. We adopt the social network perspective
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Intergenerational Effects of Lay Beliefs: How Parents’ Unhealthy = Tasty Intuition Influences Their Children’s Food Consumption and Body Mass Index Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Barbara Briers, Young Eun Huh, Elaine Chan, Anirban Mukhopadhyay
Childhood obesity is a major problem worldwide and a key contributor to adult obesity. This research explores caregivers’ lay beliefs and food parenting practices, and their long-term, intergenerational effects on their children’s food consumption and physiology. First, a cross-cultural survey reveals the link between parents’ belief that tasty food is unhealthy (Raghunathan, Naylor, and Hoyer 2006)
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Liquid Consumer Security Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Aleksandrina Atanasova, Giana M Eckhardt, Katharina C Husemann
Systemic risks––pandemics, economic recessions, professional precarity, political volatility, and climate emergencies––increasingly erode previously taken for granted stabilities and consumers’ confidence in the future. How do consumers manage risk and uncertainty when economic and ontological security are on the decline? Traditionally, consumers have built a sense of security through solid consumption
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Final Price Neglect in Multi-Product Promotions: How Non-Integrated Price Reductions Promote Higher-Priced Products Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-07-05 He (Michael) Jia, Yunhui Huang, Qiang Zhang, Zhengyu Shi, Ke Zhang
Price reductions take either an integrated form (e.g., a discount shown directly on the price tag) or a non-integrated form (e.g., a discount contained in a coupon sent to consumers and thus separate from the price tag). This research examines how non-integrated versus integrated promotions influence choices among vertically differentiated products. Under an integrated promotion (e.g., $10) applicable
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Not Just about Price: How Benefit Focus Determines Consumers’ Retailer Pricing Strategy Preference Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-07-01 Chris Hydock, Luc Wathieu
Recent research has highlighted a difference in the way consumers approach choice sets. Some consumers focus on products’ quality benefits (vertical differentiation): their selections are driven by the level of quality obtained relative to the price paid. Other consumers focus on products’ taste benefits (horizontal differentiation): their selections are driven by acquiring personal tastes at favorable
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The Effect of Pursuing Self-Regulatory Goals on Variety Seeking Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-06-30 Hoori Rafieian, Yanliu Huang, Barbara E Kahn
Pursuing a self-regulatory goal, such as weight-loss, motivates consumers to forego pleasure-seeking, typically by selecting virtue over vice. We propose that in the absence of virtuous options, consumers with a self-regulatory goal will instead choose less variety in choice sets of exclusively vice options because the extra pleasure that variety affords seems incompatible with the goal. We find converging
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Learning to Live with an Unruly Consuming Body Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-06-26 Kushagra Bhatnagar, Jack S Tillotson, Sammy Toyoki, Benjamin Laker
Past research shows that successful consumer learning takes place in environments that support cooperative communities of practice, that enable access to refined didactic resources, and that provide a safe, sympathetic backstage for a controllable and able learning body to durably transition from one repertoire to another. This study complements existing research by investigating a group of lactose-intolerant
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Morality Appraisals in Consumer Responsibilization Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-06-12 Michelle Barnhart, Aimee Dinnín Huff, Inara Scott
In recent decades, U.S. gun rights lobbying groups, politicians, courts, and market actors have sought to responsibilize U.S. consumers to use firearms to address the societal problem of crime. These efforts center an interpretation of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment as an entitlement for individuals to practice armed self-defense. Using interview and
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When Fields Are Destabilized: Mobilizing Gendered Capital to Resolve Hysteresis Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Sunaina R Velagaleti, Amber M Epp
In the fight for legitimacy, understanding the rules of status games is critical. This idea holds true in the wedding marketplace. However, when legalization of marriage for same-sex couples disrupted the binary wedding script, the rules of the game became less clear to consumers. Couples sometimes found their gendered bodies, roles, and expressions were out of sync with the evolving script of a destabilized
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Dominated Cosmopolitanism: Consumer Habitus Dynamics among Low-Resource Migrants Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-05-17 Zuzana Chytkova, Dannie Kjeldgaard
Cosmopolitanism is often cast as an elite cultural orientation and as a privileged disposition to an increasingly globalized marketplace, instigated by, and lived through, mobility. But how does cosmopolitanism evolve among consumers at intersectional subordinate positions of power? This article analyses the emergence of cosmopolitanism through a 9-year longitudinal extended case study of female migrants
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Intel Inside: The Linguistic Properties of Effective Slogans Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-05-15 Brady T Hodges, Zachary Estes, Caleb Warren
How can marketers create slogans that consumers like and remember? We answer this question by analyzing how the lexical, semantic, and emotional properties of a slogan’s individual words combine to influence slogan liking and slogan memory. Through a large correlational study with over 800 brand slogans, laboratory experiments, a biometric eye tracking experiment, and a field study, we unearth the
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“Want” versus “Need”: How Linguistic Framing Influences Responses to Crowdfunding Appeals Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Lei Su, Jaideep Sengupta, Yiwei Li, Fangyuan Chen
This research uses a crowdfunding context to examine when and why a simple difference in frame—using “want” versus “need” in the request—affects funders’ compliance with an appeal for contributions. Building on the semantic framing and psycholinguistics literature, we propose that using “want” (versus “need”) signals that the fundraiser is a relatively less (vs. more) dependent person. This perception
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Cross-Period Impatience: Subjective Financial Periods Explain Time-Inconsistent Choices Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-05-02 Minkwang Jang, Oleg Urminsky
Inconsistency in consumer time preferences has been well-established and used to explain seemingly short-sighted behaviors (e.g., failures of self-control). However, prior research has conflated time-inconsistent preferences (discount rates that vary over time) with present bias (greater discounting when outcomes are delayed specifically from the present, as opposed to from a future time). This research
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The One-Away Effect: The Pursuit of Mere Completion Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-04-27 Bowen Ruan, Evan Polman, Robin J Tanner
A series of controlled studies found that consumers counter-normatively prefer something nearly complete over something complete. We call this phenomenon the “one-away effect” because we find that when consumers are, for example, one stamp away from completing a punch card loyalty program, they value the card more than a completed card. This is because their valuation of the one-away card is influenced
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Rejections Are More Contagious than Choices: How Another’s Decisions Shape Our Own Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 lana Xianglan Nan, Sang Kyu Park, Yang Yang
Every day, we learn about others’ decisions from various sources. We perceive some of these decisions as choices and others as rejections. Does the mere perception of another’s decision as a choice versus as a rejection influence our own behavior? Are we more likely to conform to another’s decision if we view it in one way or the other? The current research investigates the social influence of decision
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When Connection Turns to Anger: How Consumer-Brand Relationship and Crisis Type Moderate Language on Social Media Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-04-19 Buffy Mosley, David A Schweidel, Kunpeng Zhang
Social media offers brands the ability to gauge consumer reactions to marketing and brand crises. While social media listening has focused on aggregate patterns, consumers differ in how they react to a crisis faced by a particular brand. Analyzing consumer behavior for 39 brands pertaining to 77 brand crises through the lens of consumer posts on brands’ Facebook pages, we find that consumers’ prior
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Consumer-Driven Memorialization Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Stephanie Anderson, Kathy Hamilton
Consumer research has focused on market-mediated efforts to memorialize the past, but this overshadows the issues that arise when consumers, as non-professionals, make the past consumable. Consumer-driven memorialization is defined as consumer engagement with traces of the past in memoryscapes of low market-mediation that creates a complex interplay of remembering and forgetting. Based on an ethnographic
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Dominance versus Prestige Hierarchies: How Social Hierarchy Base Shapes Conspicuous Consumption Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Perrine Desmichel, Derek D Rucker
Consumers are known to seek out and display conspicuous goods— items that are exclusive and signal wealth and high social standing. Though many factors can drive such conspicuous consumption, the present work looks at an unexplored element: whether consumers find themselves in a dominance versus prestige-based hierarchy. Dominance-based hierarchies encourage consumers to use threatening, assertive
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Between Cultural Appreciation and Cultural Appropriation: Self-Authorizing the Consumption of Cultural Difference Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-04-03 Angela Gracia B Cruz, Yuri Seo, Daiane Scaraboto
Countervailing discourses of cultural appreciation versus cultural appropriation are fueling a tension between the ethnic consumer subject, who views the consumption of cultural difference as a valorized identity project, and the responsibilized consumer subject, who is tasked with considering the societal impacts of such consumption. Drawing on an extended qualitative investigation of international
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Understanding and Improving Consumer Reactions to Service Bots Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-04-03 Noah Castelo, Johannes Boegershausen, Christian Hildebrand, Alexander P Henkel
Many firms are beginning to replace customer service employees with bots, from humanoid service robots to digital chatbots. Using real human-bot interactions in lab and field settings, we study consumers’ evaluations of bot-provided service. We find that service evaluations are more negative when the service provider is a bot versus a human—even when the provided service is identical. This effect is
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Common Cents: Bank Account Structure and Couples’ Relationship Dynamics Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-03-14 Jenny G Olson, Scott I Rick, Deborah A Small, Eli J Finkel
When a romantic relationship becomes serious, partners often confront a foundational decision about how to organize their personal finances: pool money together or keep things separate? In a six-wave longitudinal experiment, we investigated whether randomly assigning engaged or newlywed couples to merge their money in a joint bank account increases relationship quality over time. Whereas couples assigned
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I Really Know You: How Influencers Can Increase Audience Engagement by Referencing Their Close Social Ties Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-03-14 Jaeyeon (Jae) Chung, Yu Ding, Ajay Kalra
Despite firms’ continued interest in using influencers to reach their target consumers, academic and practical insights are limited on what levers an influencer can use to enhance audience engagement using their posts. We demonstrate that posting stories with or about people whom they share close ties with—such as family, friends, and romantic partners—can be one effective lever. Content that incorporates
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How Sensory Language Shapes Influencer’s Impact Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-03-08 Giovanni Luca Cascio Rizzo, Jonah Berger, Matteo De Angelis, Rumen Pozharliev
Influencer marketing has become big business. But while influencers have the potential to spread marketing messages and drive purchase, some posts get lots of engagement and boost sales, while others do not. What makes some posts more impactful? This work examines how sensory language (e.g., words like “crumble” and “juicy” that engage the senses) shapes consumer responses to influencer-sponsored content
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Does Cash Really Mean Trash? An Empirical Investigation into the Effect of Retailer Price Promotions on Household Food Waste Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-03-06 Arjen van Lin, Aylin Aydinli, Marco Bertini, Erica van Herpen, Julia von Schuckmann
Retailer price promotions, and in particular multi-unit deals such as the ubiquitous “buy one, get one,” are often criticized as a cause of food waste, presumably because they lure households into buying more than they can realistically consume. In this research, the authors combine field data and experiments to provide the first systematic test of this claim. The field data, which span eight frequently
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Cyclical Time is Greener: The Impact of Temporal Perspective on Pro-Environmental behavior Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-03-03 Lan Xu, Shuangshuang Zhao, June Cotte, Nan Cui
The natural environment is deteriorating. However, humans have not slowed down their pace of resource depletion and environmental destruction. This research takes a particular path to understanding environmental consumption—through a focus on temporal perspective. Evidence from six studies demonstrates the positive effect of a cyclical temporal perspective, versus a linear temporal perspective, on
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Machine Talk: How Verbal Embodiment in Conversational AI Shapes Consumer-Brand Relationships Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-03-03 Anouk S Bergner, Christian Hildebrand, Gerald Häubl
This research shows that AI-based conversational interfaces can have a profound impact on consumer-brand relationships. We develop a conceptual model of verbal embodiment in technology-mediated communication that integrates three key properties of human-to-human dialogue – (1) turn-taking (i.e., alternating contributions by the two parties), (2) turn-initiation (i.e., the act of initiating the next
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Loan Amount versus Monthly Payments: The Effect of Loan Application Formats on Consumer Borrowing Decisions Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-02-24 Alicia M Johnson, Daniel Villanova, Ronn J Smith
Do different loan application formats affect consumer loan requests? Six studies show that when consumers are asked to provide a preferred monthly payment (vs. loan amount), they request different principal amounts. This is because these loan application formats differ in the scale-compatible information they bring to consumers’ mind. When loan amounts are elicited, consumers think of and request the
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The Emergence and Evolution of Consumer Language Research Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-02-17 Grant Packard, Jonah Berger
Over the last 50+ years, there has been a huge rise in interest in consumer language research. This manuscript spotlights the emergence and evolution of this area, identifying key themes and trends, and highlighting topics for future research. Work has evolved from exploration of broad language concepts (e.g., rhetorics) to specific linguistic features (e.g., phonemes) and from monologues (e.g., advertiser
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On Breaking Functional Fixedness. How the Aha! Moment Enhances Perceived Product Creativity and Product Appeal Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-02-15 Sara Caprioli, Christoph Fuchs, Bram Van den Bergh
How do consumers react to products assembled from existing components? Nine studies in both the lab and the field demonstrate that consumers evaluate products as more creative and more appealing when they consist of components that originally served entirely different functions. When consumers realize that the intended functionality of a component is not fixed, but versatile, they experience an aha
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Divergent Effects of Budgeting for Gifts versus Personal Purchases Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-02-15 Yuna Choe, Christina Kan, Evan Polman
Consumers often set budgets with the goal to minimize their spending. Contrary to this traditional interpretation, our research suggests that budgets can take on a different psychological meaning depending on whether the budget is for a personal- or gift-purchase. Across 11 studies, we find that consumers aim to spend below their budgets for personal-purchases (budget-minimizing), but aim to spend
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Beyond Numbers: An Ambiguity-Accessibility-Applicability Framework to Explain the Attraction Effect Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-02-14 Sharlene He, Brian Sternthal
The attraction effect (AE) occurs when the addition of an inferior alternative (i.e., a decoy) to a choice set increases the choice share of the alternative to which it is most similar (i.e., a target), a phenomenon that violates the regularity principle. The AE occurs reliably when the attribute values are represented numerically, but not when the stimuli are perceptual. Such conceptual replication
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Vocalizing Search: How Voice Technologies Alter Consumer Search Processes and Satisfaction Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-02-10 Shiri Melumad
The effect of voice technology on how consumers search for information online is explored. Results from a field survey of consumer experiences with voice-assisted search, three controlled experiments involving dictated (vs. typed) Google searches, and a supplemental experiment (N = 10,385) find that vocalizing (vs. typing) a query leads consumers to provide more specific, detailed descriptions of what
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Paper Meets Plastic: The Perceived Environmental Friendliness of Product Packaging Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-01-28 Tatiana Sokolova, Aradhna Krishna, Tim Döring
Packaging waste makes up more than ten percent of the landfilled waste in the U.S. While consumers often want to make environmentally friendly product choices, we find that their perceptions of the environmental friendliness (PEF) of product packaging may systematically deviate from its objective environmental friendliness. Eight studies document the PEF bias whereby consumers judge plastic packaging
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Undermining Desire: Reducing Unhealthy Choices by Highlighting Short-Term (vs. Long-Term) Costs Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-01-23 Paul E Stillman, Kaitlin Woolley
What motivates consumers to avoid unhealthy behaviors (e.g., consuming sugar, energy drinks, and fast food)? Traditional interventions and lay intuition suggest that to motivate themselves, consumers can consider the negative long-term health consequences of their decisions. Yet, consumers still struggle to avoid unhealthy behaviors. Seven experiments (N = 4,021) offer a different approach. We find
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How Verb Tense Shapes Persuasion Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-01-21 Grant Packard, Jonah Berger, Reihane Boghrati
When sharing information and opinions about products, services, and experiences, communicators often use either past or present tense (e.g., “That restaurant was great” or “That restaurant is great”). Might such differences in verb tense shape communication’s impact, and if so, how? A multimethod investigation, including eight studies conducted in the field and lab, demonstrates that using present
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How Do Consumers Read and Encode a Price? Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-01-14 Gilles Laurent, Marc Vanhuele
Do consumers really read a price from left to right, as assumed in past research? Or does price reading operate like word reading, with a single fixation towards the middle? Three eye-tracking lab studies reject both theories, revealing instead a distinct reading pattern: multiple fixations, with the first located on average between the first third and middle of the price; the first eye movement is
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A Turn of the Tables: Psychological Contracts and Word of Mouth about Sharing Economy Platforms When Consumers Get Reviewed Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-01-11 Laura Schrier Rifkin, Colleen P Kirk, Canan Corus
The Peer-to-Peer sector of the sharing economy relies on reputation systems through which consumers and providers review each other. Whereas prior research has examined the effects of reviews by consumers on providers and firms, this research examines, for the first time, a turn of the tables in which consumers are evaluated. Across a pilot and seven studies (five preregistered), using multiple actual
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How Social Media Influencers Impact Consumer Collectives: An Embeddedness Perspective Journal of Consumer Research (IF 8.612) Pub Date : 2023-01-06 Rebecca Mardon, Hayley Cocker, Kate Daunt
Research has documented the emergence of embedded entrepreneurs within consumer collectives. This phenomenon is increasingly prevalent as social media enables ordinary consumers to become social media influencers (SMIs), a distinct form of embedded entrepreneur. Whilst research has considered the implications of embeddedness for embedded entrepreneurs themselves, we lack insight into embedded entrepreneurship’s