Journal of Consumer Psychology最新文献

Technological innovation is shaping products and markets to appeal to consumer enduring needs. Given the rise in non-physicality of products and consumers' increasing participation in peer-to-peer markets, this research examines the relationship between non-physicality of goods and disparities in seller–buyer valuations, a critical component of market inefficiencies. In a meta-analysis of 598 observations across 129 articles, the authors find that non-physical (vs. physical) goods have significantly larger seller–buyer valuation disparities (i.e., larger endowment effects). This pattern is consistent across non-physical categories, including market and non-market goods. The authors argue the immateriality of non-physical goods reduces evaluability and enhances perceived complexity, leading to greater asymmetries in information processing between sellers and buyers. Congruent with construal level theory, marketing tactics associated with low categorization levels (emphasizing product features) influence consumer valuations of physical goods, but not non-physical goods. Instead, consumer valuations of non-physical goods are asymmetrically influenced by tactics with high categorization levels (accentuating collective identity). This research foreshadows challenges in, and provides managerial implications for, the marketing and transactions of non-physical products.

This research examines how the effort that consumers exert to earn money affects their risk tolerance. We theorize and find that working harder—that is, more effortful earning—increases perceived ownership and valuation of earnings, and thus aversion to losing them, resulting in lower risk tolerance, even when risk is associated with better expected outcomes. Documenting this causal negative effort–risk relationship is important because it (1) runs contrary to consumers' lay beliefs and population-level analysis which conversely suggest a positive effort–risk correlation (i.e., a Simpson's paradox, Experiment 2), (2) expands understanding of how the way in which people acquire money affects risk tolerance beyond classic research on windfall gains (i.e., unanticipated rewards) and house money (i.e., unrealized gains), and hence (3) reveals a unique mechanism of perceived ownership that drives this negative causal relationship. Leveraging this unique mechanism, we further show that this negative effort–risk relationship can be attenuated by changing the currency of the money that consumers earn to be one that consumers have low ownership over (e.g., Bitcoin for non-crypto users).

Nostalgia is a prevalent emotion that confers psychological benefits and influences consumer behavior. We developed and validated the 98-word Nostalgia Dictionary to automatize the assessment of nostalgicity in narratives (e.g., customer reviews, social media). First, we created an initial wordlist by identifying the most frequently used words in nostalgia narratives and by relying on the nostalgia literature. Second, we finalized the dictionary by testing experimentally the expanded wordlist for its capacity to differentiate nostalgia from related emotions. Third, we validated the dictionary by demonstrating that it corresponds to self-reports and coder-ratings of nostalgia, produces result patterns expected by theory, and predicts favorability ratings of books and consumer experiences, even after adjusting for positive emotion words. We discuss the potential of the Nostalgia Dictionary to advance research and practice.

This work offers a multidisciplinary perspective on the Metaverse, focusing on its potential implications for consumer behavior. We begin by proposing a conceptualization of the Metaverse as being uniquely defined by the convergence of five key elements—it is digitally mediated, spatial, immersive, shared, and operates in real-time. We then discuss how these components might collectively alter our understanding of consumer behavior in three domains: consumer identity, social influence, and ownership. We conclude by outlining an agenda for future research to help broaden our understanding of the Metaversal marketplace and its impact on consumer behavior. This work serves as a starting point to characterize a shift that is unfolding in the marketplace and to consider, through a consumer behavior lens, the numerous changes it may bring.

This commentary questions two common assumptions underlying discussions of how digital technology can enrich the consumer experience. First, broad conceptualizations tend to accommodate augmented reality and virtual reality under a single metaverse umbrella. This commentary draws attention to differences between the two and to the present-day prevalence of augmented reality experiences. Second, discussions of the metaverse tend to focus on visual experiences. This commentary draws attention to the impact that augmented reality is having through other senses. I argue that augmented reality experiences are ubiquitous because smartphones and wearables enrich our everyday life with haptic and sonic information.

Hadi et al. (Journal of Consumer Psychology, 34, 2023) have created a masterful and wide-sweeping review of the consumer behavior literature on the Metaverse. They envision our encounter with the Metaverse as a consumer journey. In this commentary, I highlight some of their unique contributions and suggest additional insights that emerge when we view the digital frontier as a liminal place betwixt and between now and then, here and there, and reality and virtuality. The Metaverse is also a metaphor and I entertain three metaphoric interpretations. First, the Metaverse is an experience machine of the sort that Robert Nozick imagined in his thought experiment involving real and artificial pleasures. Alternatively, consumers themselves can be seen as desiring machines as Gilles Deleuze and Féliz Guattari characterized them, and the Metaverse can be seen as an instantiation of our collective desires. Or thirdly, the Metaverse can be regarded as a shared hallucination. As these diverse metaphors suggest, imagining the metaverse is a projective exercise. But the consequences may involve up to a trillion dollars in revenues, so I hope these provocations prove useful whether they are ultimately borne out or not.

Product returns incur a substantial financial loss for retailers. We demonstrate how, when, and why cross-selling during the product returns process can reduce this loss in revenue. We find consumers more readily spend money refunded from product returns than unspent money. We theorize that this refund effect occurs because consumers psychologically realize the loss of money when purchasing products and earmark that money for spending. Thus, consumers feel a smaller psychological loss when spending refunded money than unspent money on a subsequent purchase. In six experiments, we find consumers spend refunded money more freely than unspent money, even more than windfall gains like lottery winnings, on products in similar and different product categories (e.g., groceries vs. apparel). However, the refund effect only holds when consumers do not expect to return products at the point of purchase and before refunded money is commingled with money in other accounts. Our findings identify a new fungibility violation due to mental accounting (i.e., a new source effect), and illustrate its value for generating, validating, and explaining revenue retention strategies.

Marketers' proclivity for just-below prices (e.g., $9.99) is rooted in an expected higher demand than for round prices ($10.00). The literature, however, lacks a comprehensive assessment of when and how price endings matter. Three mechanisms might explain price-ending effects on consumers' purchase decisions: just-below prices (1) improve price perceptions, but (2) impair perceived product quality, and (3) cause consumers to underestimate prices. A preregistered meta-analysis (k = 69 studies, m = 362 effect sizes, N = 40,541) established that just-below (vs. round) prices tend to increase purchase decisions (g = 0.13, CI_95%[0.01, 0.25]), result in an advantageous price image (g = 0.28, CI_95%[0.09, 0.48]), have no effect on perceived product quality (g = 0.00, CI_95%[−0.17, 0.18], p = 0.96), and are more often underestimated (g = 0.67, CI_95%[0.04, 1.30]). Participant, study, price, and product characteristics moderate the magnitude of these effects. Overall, the effect sizes are small and highly heterogenous, p-curve analyses revealed a large proportion of nonsignificant effects, and publication bias corrections suggest smaller and, at times, nonsignificant true effects. We discuss theoretical and applied implications for the pricing literature.