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The Connected Customer: Essays on Individualistic-Collectivistic Decision-making

The traditional approach to the study of consumer behaviour is to regard them as isolated islands of preferences, needs, motives, and goals; however, this approach neglects the impact of others on consumers judgments and preferences. For this reason, the theme of this thesis is the connected customer.
Chapter 2 and 3 provides a theoretical and empirical treatment of a situation often encountered in households: how do an individuals private risk preferences translate into preferences over risk when making decisions on behalf of a group of people in which the decision-maker is a member? It is hypothesized that the decision-makers degree of altruism and perception of the group members risk preferences are the driving forces in the relation between private and social risk preferences. The results suggest that social preferences can be characterized as a mixture of individuals private risk preferences and the beliefs-private risk differential.
Chapter 4 looks at individuals information processing strategy under conditions of low and high cultural salience. Recent findings suggest that consumers in both individualist and collectivist cultures use a dual processing approacha heuristic versus a systematic processing strategywhen assessing product alternatives. However, collectivist members tend to rely more on consensus information than attribute. This chapter examines whether priming individuals on their cultural identity will make them to switch processing strategy toward consensus information and hence become more similar to collectivist members. The results largely support this prediction. / Marketing

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:AEU.10048/1094
Date06 1900
CreatorsEnstrm, Rickard
ContributorsTerry Elrod (School of Business, University of Alberta), Adam Finn (School of Business, University of Alberta), Joffre Swait (School of Business, University of Alberta), Yuanfang Lin (School of Business, University of Alberta), Wiktor Adamowicz (Department of Rural Economy, University of Alberta), Dilip Soman (Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto)
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
Format829657 bytes, application/pdf

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