Consumer Behavior

This article considers scientific and public understandings of climate change and addresses the following question: Why is it that while scientific evidence has accumulated to document global climate change and scientific opinion has solidified about its existence and causes, U.S. public opinion has not and has instead become more polarized? Our review supports a constructivist account of human judgment.

Global climate change poses one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in this century. This article, which introduces the American Psychologist special issue on global climate change, follows from the report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change.

What type of social network is associated with greater well-being? We argue that the effects of social networks on well-being depend on individuals' self-regulatory orientation — a basic motivational factor. We propose that brokerage networks fit a promotion-focused orientation that is concerned with eagerly pursuing gains, whereas closure networks fit a prevention-focused orientation that is concerned with vigilantly maintaining non-losses.

Some event managers and ticket resellers offer call options under which a customer can pay a small amount now for the guaranteed option to attend a future sporting event by paying an additional amount later. We consider the case of <em>tournament options</em> in which the identity of the two teams playing in a tournament final such as the Super Bowl or the World Cup final are unknown at the time that options are sold.

Using a cross-national survey of Citibank employees, the authors examine the persistent influence of ethnic background on perceptions of choice and its association with performance, intrinsic motivation, and well-being in the workplace. Among Anglo-Americans, task choice was prominent and associated with benefits for employees, whereas choices made by supervisors were less salient and associated with detriments.

Six studies show that subtle contextual cues that increase customers' self-awareness can be used to influence their satisfaction with service providers holding the objective service delivery constant. Self-awareness cues tend to increase customers' satisfaction when the outcome of a service interaction is unfavorable, but tend to decrease customers' satisfaction when the outcome of the interaction is favorable. This is because higher self-awareness increases customers' tendency to attribute outcomes to themselves as opposed to the provider.

Research on repeated ties has concluded almost lopsidedly that repeated exchanges are beneficial. Yet, most empirical evidences backing up this conclusion either do not measure real economic outcomes of repeated exchanges, or have performance data from only one side of the transaction. Our paper develops a synthetic view of the exchange dynamics through which positive or negative effects might take place, and exposes direct evidence of the impact of repeated ties on price, cost, profit and governance structure.

We examine whether securitization impacts renegotiation decisions of loan servicers, focusing on their decision to foreclose a delinquent loan. Conditional on a loan becoming seriously delinquent, we find a significantly lower foreclosure rate associated with bank-held loans when compared to similar securitized loans: across various specifications and origination vintages, the foreclosure rate of delinquent bankheld loans is 3% to 7% lower in absolute terms (13% to 32% in relative terms).