Drawing from mental accounting, reference price, attribution and categorization theories, we propose that bundle price discounts will influence perceived prices and quality of the individual bundle components, thus influence purchase intentions. Meanwhile, we investigate how these bundling effects interplay with the forms of bundling, complementarity and brand images of bundle components. The empirical results indicate that the impact of bundle price discount on evaluations of individual bundle components varies across bundling forms. In a mixed-joint bundle, the price discount increases consumer perceptions of the regular price of bundle components, but does not change quality perceptions. In a mixed-leader bundle, the price discount hurt consumer price and quality evaluations of the discounted product, but increased the undiscounted product's perceived quality. These effects are moderated by complementarity and the brand images of bundle components. Implications of these findings for marketing researchers and managers are presented along with suggestions for further research. / Ph. D.

Mental accounting is a technique for asserting self-control in the face of consumption decisions, functioning as a categorization system for income and expenses. A body of evidence supports the concept that consumers are driven by perception and emotion, not rational economic thought. Mental accounting is subject to the effects of cognitive biases, leading to imperfect financial behavior. In the following paper, I present a proposal for three consecutive experiments designed to investigate the influence that advanced planning (the formation of mental budgets) and unexpected financial shocks (windfalls) can have on our use of mental accounting to regulate spending. The dependent variable is a dollar measure of how much consumers indicated they are “willing to pay” (WTP) to hypothetically purchase a typical good. The experiments share an intertemporal manipulation of a monthly budget creation task. Experiment one investigates the combined effects of positive and negative windfalls and budget creation on WTP. Experiment 2 explores boundary conditions of timing on loss aversion by manipulating the length of the time period that separates a negative windfall from the WTP task. Experiment 3 focuses on one time period, manipulating wording of a negative financial shock to focus on framing effects. The three experiments, if carried out, should reveal significant effects on WTP, suggesting that manipulations of framing and timing can lead to inconsistent spending behaviors even in the presence of a self-control tool (the mental budget).

No description available.

<p>A payment scheme specifies when payments are made between firms in a supply chain. It has direct implications on how supply chain inventory is financed and managed. Longer supply chains due to globalization and the recent credit crisis have increased the pressure to make financing the supply chain more efficient. It was recently reported that 81% of UK firms say that market conditions have brought procurement and finance strategies in closer alignment. Meanwhile, information technology platform advancements provide opportunity for increased variety of payment schemes. It is therefore important to understand how different payment schemes should be captured in inventory decisions. This dissertation examines the impact of supply chain finance (the set of financial payment transactions that are triggered by supply chain events) on inventory management from both normative and behavioral perspectives. </p><p>We seek to address the following questions. From a normative perspective: How does the optimal inventory policy depend on the supply chain financing structure? What is the right inventory financing scheme for a supply chain? From a behavioral perspective: How do real managers psychologically process payments when making inventory decisions, and how are they affected by the supply chain financing scheme? The results are reported in three chapters, described below.</p><p>In the first chapter, "Payment schemes and the financed inventory," we present a model of payment schemes in an echelon supply chain. A payment scheme specifies when payments are made between firms. Standard inventory decision models make strict assumptions about the payment scheme in order to avoid explicitly tracking financial flows. These assumptions, however, often do not hold in practice. We show that these assumptions can be relaxed. In particular, we introduce a model that allows us to track the financial flow of inventory models depending on the inventory policy and the payment scheme. We also define two new measures - financed inventory and margin backorders. These new measures allow us to leverage the structure of the payment scheme to define an equivalent problem that does not have to explicitly track financial flows. We apply this method to the base stock model and economic order quantity model to demonstrate the sensitivity of the optimal inventory policy to the payment scheme. Our results provide simple closed-form formulas for inventory managers and also sheds light on what is the right payment scheme for a supply chain.</p><p>The second chapter, "The effect of payment schemes on inventory decisions: The role of mental accounting," focuses on managerial behavior: how do manager's mentally process and evaluate payments when making an inventory decision? Keeping the net profit structure constant, we study how the payment scheme affects inventory decisions in the newsvendor problem. Specifically, we examine three payment schemes which can be interpreted as the inventory order being financed 1) by the newsvendor herself, 2) by the supplier, and 3) by the customer. We find in laboratory experiments that the order quantities may be higher or lower than the expected profit-maximizing solution depending on the payment scheme. Specifically, the order quantity under newsvendor own financing is greater than that under supplier financing, which is, in turn, greater than the order quantity under customer financing. This observed behavior biases orders in the opposite direction as what a regular or hyperbolic time-discounted utility model would predict, and cannot be explained by loss aversion models. Instead, the findings are consistent with a model that underweights the order-time payments, which is consistent with the "prospective accounting" assumption in the mental accounting literature. A second study shows the results hold even if all actual payments are conducted at the same time, suggesting that the framing of the payment scheme is sufficient to induce mental accounting of payments at different times. We further validate the robustness of our model under different profit-margin conditions. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the psychological processes involved in newsvendor decisions and have implications for supply chain financing practices and supply chain contract design.</p><p>The third chapter, "Reference prices and transaction utility in inventory decisions," studies another aspect of mental accounting in inventory decisions - the phenomenon that individuals often view a price as relative to other prices when making an evaluation. We present a descriptive model of the effects of reference prices and transaction utility in a newsvendor setting. The model predicts that an individual's order is irrationally increasing in past purchasing costs, decreasing in past selling prices, and decreasing in the proportion of high profit margin to low profit margin products in the decision portfolio. Three laboratory experiments support the model's predictions. These results suggest that managerial supervision and/or intervention are most valuable after a sudden increase or decrease in the cost or price of a product, or for a product that differs significantly in profit margin from other products in the category. We further extend the study to a supply chain setting. We show analytically that the supplier's optimal wholesale price is lower when the newsvendor is subject to reference effects compared to when the newsvendor is rational, and that the supplier's optimal retail price may be higher or lower depending on whether the reference effect is stronger for the newsvendor or for customers. Finally, we show that supply chains may suffer from a behavioral inefficiency we call a behavioral price whip: an increase in the transfer price between two nodes may influence the upstream node to order more than is rational while the downstream node demands less than is rational. These results suggest that suppliers should carefully evaluate the reference effect on both customers and retailers, and that everyday low pricing has a behavioral benefit over high-low pricing.</p> / Dissertation

O viés da tarifa fixa ocorre quando um consumidor contrata um determinado nível de serviço e, em média, consome menos do que ele/ela tem direito a consumir. Tal comportamento é documentado em variados setores, em especial no de telecomunicações. Nesta dissertação, espera-se que o tipo de tarifa que uma pessoa tem seja a causa de determinados comportamentos. Assim, este estudo se baseia nas teorias da contabilidade mental e da dissociação da transação, para medir o impacto de tipos diferentes de tarifas no comportamento de consumo de telefonia móvel. Em uma sequência de três experimentos, foi descoberto que usuários de tarifa fixa são mais dispostos a abrir mão do consumo e se sentem menos frustrados e menos arrependidos do que usuários de tarifa por uso. Este comportamento é condizente com os efeitos dos custos irrecuperáveis que, conforme hipotetizado, também são observados em serviços por assinatura, e não apenas transacionais. Adicionalmente, foi observado que na medida em que aumenta a quantidade de pessoas consumindo o mesmo plano, a disposição a renunciar o consumo permanece a mesma. Por fim, foi observado que o viés da tarifa fixa não compromete comportamentos futuros, como a intenção de migrar ou permanecer com o mesmo plano. Estes resultados apoiam tanto implicações gerenciais quanto teóricas, e oferecem novos caminhos de estudos em mercados menos típicos, porém promissores, de serviços por assinatura. / The flat-rate bias takes place whenever a consumer contracts a given service level and, in average, consumes only a fraction of what s/he is entitled. Such behavior is documented in a number of different sectors, specially the telecommunications sector. In this thesis, the type of tariff an individual has is expected to be the cause of particular behaviors. Therefore, this study draws on mental accounting and transaction decoupling theories, to measure the impact of different types of tariffs on mobile phone consumer behavior. In a series of three experiments, it was found that flat-rate consumers are more willing to forgo consumption and they feel less frustrated and less regretful than users of a pay-per-use plan. This behavior is consistent with the sunk cost effects which, as hypothesed, can also be seen in contract services, and not only in transactional ones. Additionally, it was noted that as the amount of people consuming the same plan increases, the willingness to forgo consumption remains unaltered. Finally, it was observed that the flat-rate bias does not commit future behavior, such as the intention to either change or stay with the same plan. These results support both managerial and theoretical implications, and offer new avenues of studies on the less typical, yet promising, markets of subscription services.

Esta tesis nace, en una primera instancia, de un desafío personal de entender como el modelo de la teoría del comportamiento puede incorporarse en un modelo de conducta tan dominado por el pensamiento económico como lo es el de las decisiones de ahorro y consumo durante el ciclo de vida. Además, este trabajo pretende discutir y analizar las bases de las decisiones de elección – y en particular de consumo y ahorro- de los agentes económicos, de los métodos que usan estos frente a la situación de ahorro previsional y seguridad financiera. De cuales son las principales motivaciones para ahorrar, comparando la evidencia empírica encontrada con la teoría tradicional de la utilidad. Adicionalmente se pretende indagar sobre la eficiencia de los mecanismos existentes en la actualidad que proveen a las personas u hogares la opción de ahorrar.

Made available in DSpace on 2009-11-18T19:01:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 ACF2A.pdf: 540435 bytes, checksum: 02b08025ebca17ef4bedc0c2f60159d9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006 / This thesis treats some variables that can influence the consumer’s perception in the context of price’s comparative analysis in a purchase process. These variables were: the products’s offer presentation, study’s respondents scholarship and the product’s familiarity of the respondents. This study’s importance is grounded in the needs of perception’s understanding of a advantage in a product buying process in face of these study’s variables influencies, with the purpose to put in practice the results in the retail market. The research was developed as an empirical study, at São Luís City(MA), using a sample of one hundred and ninety two respondents equally divided between students of median and high scholarship degree. The study’s respondents evaluated purchase situations in a fictitious cenarios with different products presentation’ offers, where advantage’s perception was evaluated in terms of the scholarships and familiarities used in the study. The theoretical background to the work development considered Prospect’s Theory from Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and Mental Accounting Theory of Thaler (1985). Due to the nature of the database, was used non-parametric statistical tests of Friedman,Kruskal-Wallis, Wilcoxon and Mann-Wihtney. The final results confirm the hypothesis raised, and generated background for future research involving the variable of familiarity related to product’s brands. / Essa dissertação trata de algumas variáveis que podem influenciar a percepção dos consumidores no contexto de análises comparativas de preços durante o processo de compra. As variáveis estudadas foram: a forma de apresentação das ofertas dos produtos, a escolaridade dos participantes do estudo e a familiaridade para com o uso do produto. A importância desse estudo está fundamentada na necessidade de entendimento de como a percepção de vantagem na aquisição de produtos ocorre na presença das variáveis de influência estudadas, com o propósito prático de aplicação dos resultados no mercado varejista. A pesquisa foi realizada por meio de um estudo empírico, na cidade de São Luís ¿ MA, utilizando uma amostra de cento e noventa e duas pessoas, divididas igualmente entre estudantes de escolaridade média e superior. Os participantes do estudo avaliaram situações de compra em cenários fictícios com formas de apresentação de ofertas distintas, em que a percepção de vantagem foi avaliada em função das escolaridades e das familiaridades utilizadas no estudo. A base teórica para desenvolvimento do trabalho considerou a Teoria dos Prospectos de Kahneman e Tversky (1979) e a Teoria da Contabilidade Mental de Thaler (1985). Em função da natureza da base de dados foram utilizados testes não-paramétricos de Friedman, Kruskal-Wallis, Wilcoxon e Mann-Withney. Os resultados obtidos confirmaram as hipóteses levantadas e geraram subsídios para pesquisa futura envolvendo o aspecto familiaridade relacionada às marcas. Palavras-chave: contabilidade mental, percepção, preço de referência.

O viés da tarifa fixa ocorre quando um consumidor contrata um determinado nível de serviço e, em média, consome menos do que ele/ela tem direito a consumir. Tal comportamento é documentado em variados setores, em especial no de telecomunicações. Nesta dissertação, espera-se que o tipo de tarifa que uma pessoa tem seja a causa de determinados comportamentos. Assim, este estudo se baseia nas teorias da contabilidade mental e da dissociação da transação, para medir o impacto de tipos diferentes de tarifas no comportamento de consumo de telefonia móvel. Em uma sequência de três experimentos, foi descoberto que usuários de tarifa fixa são mais dispostos a abrir mão do consumo e se sentem menos frustrados e menos arrependidos do que usuários de tarifa por uso. Este comportamento é condizente com os efeitos dos custos irrecuperáveis que, conforme hipotetizado, também são observados em serviços por assinatura, e não apenas transacionais. Adicionalmente, foi observado que na medida em que aumenta a quantidade de pessoas consumindo o mesmo plano, a disposição a renunciar o consumo permanece a mesma. Por fim, foi observado que o viés da tarifa fixa não compromete comportamentos futuros, como a intenção de migrar ou permanecer com o mesmo plano. Estes resultados apoiam tanto implicações gerenciais quanto teóricas, e oferecem novos caminhos de estudos em mercados menos típicos, porém promissores, de serviços por assinatura. / The flat-rate bias takes place whenever a consumer contracts a given service level and, in average, consumes only a fraction of what s/he is entitled. Such behavior is documented in a number of different sectors, specially the telecommunications sector. In this thesis, the type of tariff an individual has is expected to be the cause of particular behaviors. Therefore, this study draws on mental accounting and transaction decoupling theories, to measure the impact of different types of tariffs on mobile phone consumer behavior. In a series of three experiments, it was found that flat-rate consumers are more willing to forgo consumption and they feel less frustrated and less regretful than users of a pay-per-use plan. This behavior is consistent with the sunk cost effects which, as hypothesed, can also be seen in contract services, and not only in transactional ones. Additionally, it was noted that as the amount of people consuming the same plan increases, the willingness to forgo consumption remains unaltered. Finally, it was observed that the flat-rate bias does not commit future behavior, such as the intention to either change or stay with the same plan. These results support both managerial and theoretical implications, and offer new avenues of studies on the less typical, yet promising, markets of subscription services.

O viés da tarifa fixa ocorre quando um consumidor contrata um determinado nível de serviço e, em média, consome menos do que ele/ela tem direito a consumir. Tal comportamento é documentado em variados setores, em especial no de telecomunicações. Nesta dissertação, espera-se que o tipo de tarifa que uma pessoa tem seja a causa de determinados comportamentos. Assim, este estudo se baseia nas teorias da contabilidade mental e da dissociação da transação, para medir o impacto de tipos diferentes de tarifas no comportamento de consumo de telefonia móvel. Em uma sequência de três experimentos, foi descoberto que usuários de tarifa fixa são mais dispostos a abrir mão do consumo e se sentem menos frustrados e menos arrependidos do que usuários de tarifa por uso. Este comportamento é condizente com os efeitos dos custos irrecuperáveis que, conforme hipotetizado, também são observados em serviços por assinatura, e não apenas transacionais. Adicionalmente, foi observado que na medida em que aumenta a quantidade de pessoas consumindo o mesmo plano, a disposição a renunciar o consumo permanece a mesma. Por fim, foi observado que o viés da tarifa fixa não compromete comportamentos futuros, como a intenção de migrar ou permanecer com o mesmo plano. Estes resultados apoiam tanto implicações gerenciais quanto teóricas, e oferecem novos caminhos de estudos em mercados menos típicos, porém promissores, de serviços por assinatura. / The flat-rate bias takes place whenever a consumer contracts a given service level and, in average, consumes only a fraction of what s/he is entitled. Such behavior is documented in a number of different sectors, specially the telecommunications sector. In this thesis, the type of tariff an individual has is expected to be the cause of particular behaviors. Therefore, this study draws on mental accounting and transaction decoupling theories, to measure the impact of different types of tariffs on mobile phone consumer behavior. In a series of three experiments, it was found that flat-rate consumers are more willing to forgo consumption and they feel less frustrated and less regretful than users of a pay-per-use plan. This behavior is consistent with the sunk cost effects which, as hypothesed, can also be seen in contract services, and not only in transactional ones. Additionally, it was noted that as the amount of people consuming the same plan increases, the willingness to forgo consumption remains unaltered. Finally, it was observed that the flat-rate bias does not commit future behavior, such as the intention to either change or stay with the same plan. These results support both managerial and theoretical implications, and offer new avenues of studies on the less typical, yet promising, markets of subscription services.

The objective of this thesis is to improve the understanding of human behavior that goes beyond monetary rewards. In particular, it investigates social influences in individual’s decision making in situations that involve coordination, competition, and deciding for others. Further, it compares how monetary and social outcomes are perceived. The common theme of all studies is uncertainty. The first four essays study individual decisions that have uncertain consequences, be it due to the actions of others or chance. The last essay, in turn, uses the advances in research on decision making under uncertainty to predict behavior in riskless choices. The first essay, Fairness Versus Efficiency: How Procedural Fairness Concerns Affect Coordination, investigates whether preferences for fair rules undermine the efficiency of coordination mechanisms that put some individuals at a disadvantage. The results from a laboratory experiment show that the existence of coordination mechanisms, such as action recommendations, increases efficiency, even if one party is strongly disadvantaged by the mechanism. Further, it is demonstrated that while individuals’ behavior does not depend on the fairness of the coordination mechanism, their beliefs about people’s behavior do. The second essay, Dishonesty and Competition. Evidence from a stiff competition environment, explores whether and how the possibility to behave dishonestly affects the willingness to compete and who the winner is in a competition between similarly skilled individuals. We do not find differences in competition entry between competitions in which dishonesty is possible and in which it is not. However, we find that due to the heterogeneity in propensity to behave dishonestly, around 20% of winners are not the best-performing individuals. This implies that the efficient allocation of resources cannot be ensured in a stiff competition in which behavior is unmonitored. The third essay, Tracing Risky Decision Making for Oneself and Others: The Role of Intuition and Deliberation, explores how individuals make choices under risk for themselves and on behalf of other people. The findings demonstrate that while there are no differences in preferences for taking risks when deciding for oneself  and for others, individuals have greater decision error when choosing for other individuals. The differences in the decision error can be partly attributed to the differences in information processing; individuals employ more deliberative cognitive processing when deciding for themselves than when deciding for others. Conducting more information processing when deciding for others is related to the reduction in decision error. The fourth essay, The Effect of Decision Fatigue on Surgeons’ Clinical Decision Making, investigates how mental depletion, caused by a long session of decision making, affects surgeon’s decision to operate. Exploiting a natural experiment, we find that surgeons are less likely to schedule an operation for patients who have appointment late during the work shift than for patients who have appointment at the beginning of the work shift. Understanding how the quality of medical decisions depends on when the patient is seen is important for achieving both efficiency and fairness in health care, where long shifts are popular. The fifth essay, Preferences for Outcome Editing in Monetary and Social Contexts, compares whether individuals use the same rules for mental representation of monetary outcomes (e.g., purchases, expenses) as for social outcomes (e.g., having nice time with friends). Outcome editing is an operation in mental accounting that determines whether individuals prefer to first combine multiple outcomes before their evaluation (integration) or evaluate each outcome separately (segregation). I find that the majority of individuals express different preferences for outcome editing in the monetary context than in the social context. Further, while the results on the editing of monetary outcomes are consistent with theoretical predictions, no existing model can explain the editing of social outcomes.