Economics Insights @ CBS

The article explores the increasing popularity and importance of interest arbitration with regard to resolving collective bargaining disputes in public sector labor relations in the U.S. In avoiding or terminating strikes that threaten basic public interest, the use of arbitration may pose the only practical means of dealing with the situation. Furthermore, third-party figures brought to negotiating disputes harbors a fairness concept that is often viewed an important ingredient of labor stability.

The purpose of this paper is to study consumer information processing within the context of attitude formation and change. Examination of the cognitive rules used by consumers in manipulating information presented in a persuasive communication seems quite relevant to understanding the impact of such communications. Persuasive communications can be viewed as presenting data to the consumer, who then manipulates and combines those data in the process of forming or changing an attitude.

During the past several years, one of the more intensively studied areas in marketing and consumer research has been multi-attribute models of attitude [36]. The basic proposition of these models is that consumers form attitudes toward products on the basis of product attributes, a formulation which has considerable implications for marketing strategies.

In a field experiment three salesman employed six alternative messages in attempting to sell a magazine subscription to student subjects randomly selected from the registrar's listing at a major university. Three conversational and three nonconversational messages, developed from Bales's Interaction Process Analysis, were employed in a telephone selling paradigm, designed to minimize extraneous nonverbal communication. Each salesman contacted prospective subjects (n = 78, 73, 118) until he had completed 42 sales attempts, 7 per message, for which a postquestionnaire was administered.

A distinction is drawn between the multiattribute attitude model as a measurement device and as a theory of attitude formation and change. Using an analysis of variance paradigm to investigate the underlying multiplicative and summative assumptions, Fishbein's multiattribute theory is found to demonstrate reasonably high construct validity. Individual differences in attribute combination rules are identified, and the issue of cognitive averaging vs. cognitive summation is raised.