Journal of Consumer Psychology最新文献

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.

Recent research shows that algorithms learn societal biases from large text corpora. We examine the marketplace-relevant consequences of such bias for consumers. Based on billions of documents from online text corpora, we first demonstrate that from gender biases embedded in language, algorithms learn to associate women with more negative consumer psychographic attributes than men (e.g., associating women more closely with impulsive vs. planned investors). Second, in a series of field experiments, we show that such learning results in the delivery of gender-biased digital advertisements and product recommendations. Specifically, across multiple platforms, products, and attributes, we find that digital advertisements containing negative psychographic attributes (e.g., impulsive) are more likely to be delivered to women compared to men, and that search engine product recommendations are similarly biased, which influences consumer's consideration sets and choice. Finally, we empirically examine consumer's role in co-producing algorithmic gender bias in the marketplace and observe that consumers reinforce these biases by accepting gender stereotypes (i.e., clicking on biased ads). We conclude by discussing theoretical and practical implications.

This work examines the trade-offs that consumers in relationships make between the overall quality of an activity (i.e., experience quality) and the ability to share the activity in physical proximity to a relationship partner (i.e., togetherness). A pilot study and five experiments demonstrate that consumers value togetherness (vs. experience quality) relatively more when they share the experience with a close (vs. distant) relationship partner. Importantly, this work documents a novel mechanism underlying the value that consumers place on togetherness: a desire to create shared memories. Supportive of this mechanism, the extent to which consumers value togetherness (vs. experience quality) is increased when outcomes for the self and the partner are asymmetrical (vs. symmetrical) if choosing to be apart and is reduced when the experience is framed as utilitarian (vs. hedonic) and when consumers are reminded that they can create shared memories even when apart. Taken together, this work extends previous research on shared consumption by documenting a desire to create shared memories as a novel driver of consumer decision-making in the context of close relationships.

The negative association between materialism and life satisfaction is well-documented, but it is unclear what the directionality of the association is. To address this issue, we (a) conducted a three-wave longitudinal study (N = 6551) over 3 years and examined the bidirectional relations between life satisfaction and materialism as a composite measure and with each of its three facets (happiness, success, and centrality), and (b) estimated Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Models (RI-CLPMs) that separate inter- and intra-individual effects and compared them with traditional CLPMs that do not. The traditional CLPM showed bidirectional negative associations between composite materialism and life satisfaction and strong negative bidirectional association for the happiness facet, but positive effects of the centrality facet on life satisfaction. However, and importantly, the RI-CLPM revealed that these relations exist predominantly between people. Within people, materialism does not impact life satisfaction, but life satisfaction does impact the happiness facet negatively. These findings challenge common ideas that the direction of the effect is from materialism to life satisfaction and that it is unilaterally negative.

Given its multi-faceted nature, consumer research has evinced interest from scholars both within and outside the marketing domain, resulting in ongoing knowledge contributions from a diverse range of disciplines. We conduct a comprehensive review and comparison across both marketing (“inside”) and non-marketing (“outside”) disciplines to identify which topics are most and least focused on within each disciplinary domain and which are emerging as the most impactful. We also identify which of the marketing (FT50) journals are at the forefront of cutting-edge research and demonstrate their contributions to the progression of the most impactful topics in the field. Based on our findings, we identify key gaps and under-researched areas of substantive interest, highlight impactful emerging topics in non-marketing journals where marketing could offer unique perspectives, and provide concrete suggestions and directions to further progress and stimulate consumer research.