Consumers often use an expected future price of a product as a reference for judging the current price, and consequently make purchase decisions such as whether to buy and how much to buy. Extant literature has acknowledged the use of an expected future price of a product in formation of price judgments in relatively expensive and infrequently purchased product categories such as technological products and consumer durables. Although previous research has argued that consumers may also use an expected future price as a reference in the relatively inexpensive, frequently purchased categories such as consumer packaged goods, research has not clearly identified the factors that may lead consumers to use an expected future price as a reference in these product categories. The current dissertation research addresses this research gap in the extant literature by investigating the factors that may lead to the use of an expected future price of a product as a reference in formation of price judgments. Specifically, the current dissertation research argues for and provides evidence in support of the influence of contextual factors such as the frequency of price promotions, temporal pattern of price promotions, and price trends as the factors that may lead to the use of an expected future price as a reference. Further, the current research also discusses the influence of psychological factors such as consumers' motivation to process price information and their mode of acquisition of price information in the use of an expected future price as a reference. / The current dissertation research contributes to marketing theory in the areas of behavioral pricing and consumers' forward looking behaviors. In the area of behavioral pricing, this research contributes to the discussion on reference prices by identifying the factors that may lead to the use of expected future prices as a reference. In the area of consumers' forward looking behaviors, the current research contributes by showing direct evidence to the psychological mechanisms underlying the purchase timing and quantity decisions in response to the frequency and temporal pattern of price promotions. / The current dissertation research also contributes to managerial understanding of consumers' likely responses to the frequency of price promotions, temporal pattern of price promotions, and price trends. The research findings suggest that when a brand is promoted frequently, it may influence consumers' expectations about the future promotions, and consumers may try to postpone their purchases during a regular period to a promotional period. Further, the research findings suggest if a brand is promoted less frequently, then consistently (versus randomly) spaced promotions are less likely to lead to the use of expected future prices as a reference. The research findings imply that managers may want to promote their brands relatively infrequently and keep their price promotions consistently spaced in order to minimize the likelihood of purchase postponement during regular periods.

This dissertation primarily studies reputation effects in internet auctions. It explores bidding fee auctions (BFAs) and the reputations within them, marketplace auctions and the reputations across them, and choice overload studies and the consistencies between them. The first chapter examines BFAs---an auction format in which bidders pay a fee every time they bid. In these auctions, the prize value diminishes as the auction progresses, and the person who pays the most does not necessarily win. BFA websites are an increasingly common way to shop online. In my sample of Swoopo.com auctions, there is heavy overbidding as revenues routinely double prize values. Even experienced users frequently earn negative returns. Despite this apparent violation of individual-rationality constraints, bidders generally respond to underlying economic incentives. I identify the aggressive strategies employed by savvy users and I interpret the causes of their (relative) success. In the second chapter, I consider the eBay feedback mechanism, which epitomizes trust-building systems in the anonymous world of online marketplaces. Despite many years of analysis, the feedback mechanism's efficacy is surprisingly poorly understood (Hasker and Sickles 2010). This paper helps fill the void. Using a dataset that is unique for its variety and longevity, this paper advances comprehension of the reputations process and, by extension, the nature of trust in anonymous settings. I find that recent rule changes---e.g., the barring of sellers from leaving neutral or negative feedback---have rekindled the importance of a good reputation for most products, although the record has been mixed. Finally, the third chapter conducts a meta-analysis of the choice overload phenomenon. Despite numerous studies investigating choice overload, recent meta-analytic research concluded that its main effect is non-significant and questioned the existence of reliable triggers. In contrast, my coauthors and I document a significant main effect and identity four key factors that reliably moderate overload. More importantly, we generalize these factors into a cohesive conceptual framework, quantify their impact, and compare their effect sizes to show that they can sufficiently predict choice overload.

<p>Since the cognitive ability to process information is limited, people often rely on stereotypes to help them make sense of their social environment. These knowledge structures allow people to utilize past experiences and social learning to infer the characteristics and behaviors of individual group members. Stereotypes provide their holders with scripts, specifying how to interact with members of specific social groups (e.g., what products to choose or avoid and how certain actions may be interpreted). Despite the prevalent use of stereotypes in daily life, little research in consumer behavior has examined the role of stereotypes from this perspective. I propose that consumers use stereotype knowledge to navigate interpersonal interactions through adjusting their self-evaluations and product choices to match the needs of the social situation. My research suggests that both the stereotypes applied to the self and those applied to others have implications for how consumers strategically leverage this socially shared knowledge when interacting with others. </p><p>In Essay 1, I examine how consumers use stereotypes to guide their self-evaluations when preparing to interact with someone who may stereotype them. Most interestingly, consumers are selective in what aspects of the stereotype they take on, depending on whether they have more interdependent or independent self-construals. In three studies, I demonstrate that individuals with more interdependent self-construals engage in selective self-stereotyping and that these shifts in self-evaluations are specifically tailored to the preferences and expectations of the interaction partner. However, I find that individuals with more independent self-construals engage in selective counter self-stereotyping in order to distance themselves from the constraints of the stereotype and also to rebuff the expectations of the interaction partner. </p><p>Essay 2 examines the various impression management concerns that arise when consumers choose products to share with others. I find that when the consumer has little information regarding his consumption partner, stereotypes related to the consumption partner's social group are used to guide product choices. Whether the chosen products are stereotype consistent or inconsistent depend on the consumer's social goals and the consumption partner's expectations. Across four studies, I take both the perspectives of the consumer making the choice and the consumption partner to examine the various strategies adopted for making joint consumption choices and also to evaluate the interpersonal consequences of these strategies.</p> / Dissertation

Landscape character refers to the general impression people have of an environment. The literature suggests that certain perceived dominant features of the environment create this impression. One of the ways to investigate the dominant features of a landscape has been a classification task where people are asked to classify a group of photographs of places into categories. Each of the categories is then investigated to determine the visible features that define that class. In a progressive classification task, this dissertation investigated the dominant features in resort environments and identified the hierarchical order among the dominant features discovered. The results revealed visual features in the following hierarchy: presence of water, presence of development, amount of development, type of water body present, presence of mountains. These features are often encountered in the landscape character and landscape aesthetics literature, a fact that verifies their importance in the perception of the landscape.

Research in consumption behavior often assumes emotion to be an antecedent or consequence of consumption rather than an integral part of consumption as it occurs. Psychological approaches to emotion often magnify this issue by using a cognitive model focussed on emotion as an outcome. This paper proposes a conceptualization of emotion as a process and an integral part of the consumption experience, perhaps even the reason for the experience. The focus is not specifically on emotional outcomes and their subsequent impact on behavior but on the process by which we experience emotion in a consumption environment and how that process is affected by emotional antecedents and results in emotional outcomes. Using a process trace method, a means of understanding emotional experiences as they occur is presented. The model is tested using a multilevel analysis method that preserves the time series nature of process measures by modeling at both the individual and group levels.

This dissertation explores the manner in which a marketing strategy known as cross-promotion affects consumer processing and evaluation of promotional information. Specifically, variation in key dimensions of cross-promotion is examined to determine the effects on attitude formation and memory retention. Cross-promotion is defined as any promotion that combines two or more different products and brands in a cooperative manner. Based on the presence of both multiple products and multiple brands, a unique aspect of cross-promotion is the two-dimensional nature of fit on both the brand and the product levels. It is this two-dimensional fit that is examined as the key variable that affects both memory and attitude. Literature in the fields of cognitive and social psychology provides a foundation for the development of a theoretical framework of cross-promotion. Specifically, the concepts of categorization and congruency provide a relevant application of the how distinct items present in a given context affect cognitive and evaluative processes. Based on this literature, it is proposed that brand fit and product fit each affect different dimensions of elaboration in distinct manners. The involvement of elaboration processes in cross-promotional evaluation leads to the logical development of hypothesized relationships between cross-promotional fit and memory and attitude. A 2 x 2 factorial experiment is designed as a means of testing the hypotheses. Using original print advertisements as stimuli, participants are presented with cross-promotional material in a laboratory setting and tested for levels of the dependent measures. The data from this study are examined through a series of ANOVAs. Results provide partial support for the hypotheses. The most interesting finding is the confirmation that a low level of brand fit, crossed with a high level of product fit, can actually lead to the highest level of memory retention and the development of more positive attitudes than when both dimensions of fit are high.

This dissertation posits an entirely new approach for understanding the reference price phenomenon. It is proposed that Festinger's (1957) theory of dissonance reduction provides a practical framework for studying situations in which consumers' encountered prices are significantly different from their expectations. The three modes of dissonance reduction initially proposed by Festinger (to change one's attitude or cognition, to seek consonant information, or to trivialize some element of the dissonant relationship) are experimentally manipulated. These three modes of dissonance reduction are then evaluated for their impact on consumers' perceptions of value and consumers' purchase intentions. A computer-controlled shopping experiment is utilized to test the hypotheses.

The Shapley Value, a cooperative game theory model, is adapted for use as a category preference measure in marketing. The model collects overall ratings for bundles of choices. These are then decomposed into individual preference scores by estimating the average marginal contribution of each choice over all applicable bundles. The technique provides a holistic rating alternative to constant sum for estimating preferences. It is applicable where choices are disparate, incommensurable, and apportionment difficult, where the questioning might gain from indirection or obfuscation, or where unambiguous attribute sets are not available. It provides a metric in circumstances when respondents are reluctant to choose between alternatives, but when one can elicit ratings (that do not appear to yield preference orderings). The Shapley Value is compared to weighted additive and indirect share preference models based upon proximity to a constant sum standard. Proximity is measured by two distance metrics: a Euclidean distance and a directional cosine (correlation) measure. Statistical testing demonstrates that Shapley Value is significantly closer to constant sum than either weighted additive or indirect share in two categories--fast food restaurants and actors in Seinfeld. Testing was conducted in a computer-aided laboratory setting. Subjects were 93 undergraduate business majors enrolled in an introductory marketing course. They were compensated for their participation with both a monetary and course credit incentives.

The purpose of this dissertation is twofold. First, it is to enhance conceptual clarity in the consumer behavior literature on consumer disadvantage by investigating the role of racial inequality in consumer experiences in markets for basic needs products. That is, this research analyzes how consumer disadvantage is experienced in markets for food and health care in order to illustrate the operation of racial inequality situated in a context where class and gender inequality also operate simultaneously. A second purpose of this project is to construct and assess a grounded typology of consumer responses to disadvantage in such settings. The emergent findings in this study are that racial inequality primarily structures the operation of disadvantage in markets for food, and class-based inequality primarily structures the operation of disadvantage in markets for health care. However, while a single inequality form may structure the operation of disadvantage in each market multiple forms of inequality are present. An additional emergent finding is that consumers employ resistance and coping strategies to address their disadvantaged status consistent with human ecology theory. These individual acts of human agency also interact with impediments produced by social structure to create an array of responses to disadvantage that have varying degrees of effectiveness and functionality.

Although international business-to-business marketing is pervasive, little systematic empirical work has been conducted on face-to-face interactions between channel members from different cultures. Greater knowledge regarding cross-cultural communication strategies (e.g. verbal and non-verbal language choices) and behavioral adaptations (e.g. rapport building, increased flexibility with timing, and contractual format) will enhance the strength, efficiency and longevity of relationships between channel partners from distinct cultures. More importantly, a lack of this knowledge seriously jeopardizes cross-cultural understanding and the ability to develop and maintain intercultural exchange relationships. This dissertation presents an empirically derived conceptual framework of cross-cultural communication and behavioral processes. This framework is drawn from extensive ethnographic fieldwork in two intercultural channels of distribution and from academic literature. Acculturation moderates the influence that culture of the producer and the power situation have on the choice of communication strategies and behaviors in interactions between intercultural channel partners. The more the choice of communication strategies and behavioral adaptations is consistent with cultural traditions of the channel members, the higher the levels of trust engendered through the relationship. Hence, trust was expected to be a critical predictor of satisfaction and performance. This was consistent in the interview data, but not in the observation data. The conceptual framework is tested using survey research in the same industries. Power and acculturation were found to have limited effects on the choice of communication strategies. Trust was shown to play a very limited role as a mediating variable. However, significant correlations between the communication strategies and behavioral adaptations and the business outcome variables were revealed. In the conclusion, implications for marketing managers are discussed, limitations of this research are outlined, and future research ideas are proposed.