Consumer Behavior

While the high savings rate in China has global impact, existing explanations are incomplete. This paper proposes a competitive saving motive as a new explanation: as the country experiences a rising sex ratio imbalance, the increased competition in the marriage market has induced the Chinese, especially parents with a son, to postpone consumption in favor of wealth accumulation. The pressure on savings spills over to other households through higher costs of house purchases. Both cross-regional and household-level evidence supports this hypothesis.

The principal performance measures in an inventory system involve key characteristics of the system's inventory position, i.e., the total inventory the firm is economically committed to, as well as the average order size or order frequency. As to the former, the focus among operation managers is on the maximum inventory (position), the average inventory and the minimum inventory, the latter being related to the so-called safety stock concept. Financial analysts and macroeconomists pay particular attention to the sales/inventory ratio, also referred to as the inventory turnover.

Capacity decisions in service operations often involve a trade-off between operating cost and the level of service offered to customers. Although the cost of attaining a pre-specified level of service has been well-studied, there isn't much research studying how customer service levels affect revenue and profit. This paper conducts an empirical study to analyze how waiting in a queue in the context of a retail store affects customer purchasing behavior. Our methodology uses a novel technology based on digital imaging to record periodic information about the queuing system.

Historical studies reveal how organizational markets supplied artifacts that became fashionable because they met not only consumers' cultural tastes, but also their technological preferences. This article calls such artifacts cultural-technological fusions. The digital mode of production tends to generate more types of fashionable fusions, which replace each other at a growing rate, and travel increasingly swiftly across consumers globally.

Although people have been shown to rely on feelings to make judgments, the conditions that moderate this reliance have not been systematically reviewed and conceptually integrated. This article addresses this gap by jointly reviewing moderators of the reliance on both subtle affective feelings and cognitive feelings of ease-of-retrieval.

A great deal of research in consumer decision-making and social-cognition has explored consumers’ attempts to simplify choices by bolstering their tentative choice candidate and/or denigrating the other alternatives. The present research investigates a diametrically opposed process, whereby consumers complicate their decisions.

We examine how consumers update their confidences in ordinal (relative) judgments while evaluating sequential product-ranking and source-accuracy data in percentage versus frequency formats. The results show that when sequential data are relatively easier to mathematically combine (e.g., percentage data), consumers revise their judgments in a way that is consistent with an averaging model but inconsistent with the normative Bayesian model.

In this research we propose a web-based adaptive self-explicated approach for multi-attribute preference measurement (conjoint analysis) with a large number (ten or more) of attributes. Our approach overcomes some of the limitations of previous self-explicated approaches. We developed a computer-based self-explicated approach that breaks down the attribute importance question into a sequence of constant-sum paired comparison questions.