Marketing

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.

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.

We propose that consumers' investment decisions involve processes of promotion and prevention self-regulation that are managed across separate mental accounts, with different financial products seen as representative of promotion versus prevention.

Preference structures that underlie survey or experimental responses may systematically vary during the administration of such measurement. Maturation, learning, fatigue, and response strategy shifts may all affect the sequential elicitation of respondent preferences at different points in the survey or experiment. The consequence of this phenomenon is that responses and effects can vary systematically within the dataset.

Motivation research distinguishes two types of goals: (a) ideals, which relate to people's hopes, wishes, and aspirations, and (b) oughts, which relate to people's duties, obligations, and responsibilities. We propose that, in persuasion, the accessibility of ideals increases consumers' reliance on their subjective affective responses to the ad relative to the substance of the message, whereas the accessibility of oughts increases consumers' reliance on the substance of the message relative to their subjective affective responses.

It is increasingly apparent that the financial value of a firm depends on intangible assets (e.g., brands, customers, employees, knowledge) that are not on the balance sheet. In this paper, we focus on the most critical aspect of a firm—its customers. Specifically, we demonstrate how valuing customers makes it feasible to value firms, including high growth firms with negative earnings.

The authors propose and test a new "polyhedral" choice-based conjoint analysis question-design method that adapts each respondent's choice sets on the basis of previous answers by that respondent. Polyhedral "interior-point" algorithms design questions that quickly reduce the sets of partworths that are consistent with the respondent’s choices. To identify domains in which individual adaptation is promising (and domains in which it is not), the authors evaluate the performance of polyhedral choice-based conjoint analysis methods with Monte Carlo experiments.