Consumer Behavior

This empirical investigation tests the hypothesis that the benefits of personal choosing are restricted to choices made from among attractive alternatives. Findings from vignette and laboratory studies show that, contrary to people's self-predictions, choosers only proved more satisfied than non-choosers when selecting from among liked alternatives. When selecting from among disliked alternatives, the reverse is observed - that is, non-choosers proved more satisfied with the decision outcome than choosers.

The contribution of the feelings-as-information hypothesis to our understanding of the role of affect in judgment and decision making is discussed. Basic principles and regularities in how affective feelings guide judgments and decisions are then identified. Based on these principles and regularities, it is argued that the role of feelings in judgment and decision making may be more adaptive than has been assumed in most academic circles.

Participants in 401(k) retirement plans violate the basic principle of diversification by investing significant fractions of their savings in their employers' equity. This paper characterizes investors' active changes to their company stock investment over time by analyzing new inflows and transfers. The average investor seems to base active changes on salient information, paying attention to past returns, volatility, and business performance.

Many fundamental questions in oligopoly models reduce to the analysis of the monotonicity properties of various performance measures under the model's Nash equilibrium, with respect to specific exogenously specified parameters. These strategic parameters may have an impact on the demand functions of the various competitors, their cost structures or both.

Disputes by their nature involve contentious behavior. If one attributes such behavior to underlying personality traits, these attributions can be quite damning. The current research investigated negative trait attributions and their impact on dispute resolution decisions. We hypothesized that judging one's opponent to be low in agreeableness and high in emotionality (e.g. stubborn and volatile) shifts one?s preference towards more formal procedures ? formal in the sense that a third party judge controls the process and outcome.

The compromise effect denotes the finding that brands gain share when they become the intermediate rather than extreme option in a choice set. Despite the robustness and importance of this phenomenon, choice modelers have neglected to incorporate the compromise effect in formal choice models and to test whether such models outperform the standard value maximization model. In this article, the authors suggest four context-dependent choice models that can conceptually capture the compromise effect.

Disputes by their nature involve contentious behavior. If one attributes such behavior to underlying personality traits, these attributions can be quite damning. The current research investigated negative trait attributions and their impact on dispute resolution decisions. We hypothesized that judging one's opponent to be low in agreeableness and high in emotionality (e.g. stubborn and volatile) shifts one's preference towards more formal procedures ? formal in the sense that a third party judge controls the process and outcome.

Building on the work of Dhar, Menon, and Maach (2004), this commentary describes how the compromise effect models developed in the work of Kivetz, Netzer, and Srinivasan (2004) can be extended to predict complex (business-to-business) purchase decisions and additional behavioral context effects. The authors clarify their general modeling approach and outline how it applies to choices among solutions (augmented products) and group decision making.

In an environment where trading volume affects security prices and where prices are uncertain when trades are submitted, quasi-arbitrage is the availability of a series of trades that generate infinite expected profits with an infinite Sharpe ratio. We show that when the price impact of trades is permanent and time-independent, only linear price-impact functions rule out quasi-arbitrage and thus support viable market prices. When trades have also a temporary price impact, only the permanent price impact must be linear while the temporary one can be of a more general form.