Browsing by Author "Chakravarti, Dipankar"

Now showing 1 - 17 of 17
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    Algorithm Versus Human Expert Recommendations Preferences in Decision Support: Two Essays
    Lyvers, Aaron Kenneth (Virginia Tech, 2024-10-04)
    Algorithms refer to the software programs designed to support problem solving in a wide range of decision domains. Given the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution, algorithms have become an integral part of our personal, social, and professional lives. As technology rapidly advances, these algorithms are not only becoming more capable but are also finding a growing array of applications in managerial and consumer decision support. Despite their increasing presence, reactions to algorithms are mixed. While some research highlights a preference for algorithms over human judgment ("algorithm appreciation"), other studies reveal a contrary preference ("algorithm aversion"), where people favor human expertise. This research provides a conceptual framework and empirical evidence regarding factors that may influence preference for algorithmic versus human expert recommendations in business decision contexts. We use experimental psychological methods to investigate how algorithm characteristics, decision-maker psy
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    Attainment versus maintenance goals: Perceived difficulty and impact on goal choice
    Stamatogiannakis, Antonios; Chattopadhyay, Amitava; Chakravarti, Dipankar (Elsevier, 2018-09-19)
    We argue that individuals monitor and evaluate attainment and maintenance goals differently. Attainment goals feature a salient current-end state discrepancy that is processed more than the corresponding match for maintenance goals. For maintenance goals, for which a salient discrepancy is absent, contextual influences on goal success/failure receive more processing than for attainment goals. Thus, objectively more difficult attainment goals may be judged as easier than maintenance goals, when they feature sufficiently small discrepancies, or when context information is unfavorable. Study 1 establishes this core effect. Study 2 shows that thought listings capturing the relative processing of the current-end state discrepancy (match) and context information mediate perceived goal difficulty. Study 3 shows that the favorability of context information moderates the effect. Study 4 establishes joint difficulty evaluations as a boundary condition. Studies 5 and 6 (and Appendix B) show that such goal difficulty judgments affect consequential goal choices in real-world financial, workplace, and shopping situations.
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    Consumer Consequences of Economic Inequality
    Xiang, Jinyan (Virginia Tech, 2023-12-20)
    Despite the growing body of research in related disciplines, including economics, management, politics, psychology, and sociology, marketing research has largely overlooked the downstream consequences of economic inequality, despite its undeniable impact on individuals' consumption decisions and experiences. This dissertation endeavors to bridge this knowledge gap by uncovering two novel consumer consequences of economic inequality. To accomplish this, it draws upon a diverse range of data sources, including individual-level experimental and survey data, as well as aggregate-level transaction and census data. Additionally, it examines economic inequality across multiple levels, encompassing communities, counties, states, and countries, and operationalizes it both as objective and perceived economic inequality. In Essay 1, I investigate how economic inequality in a consumer's region affects their access to peer-to-peer (P2P) services. Across diverse types of P2P services, I find convergent evidence that increased economic inequality in a consumer's region reduces providers' willingness to serve them, ultimately resulting in their diminished access to P2P services. This adverse effect of economic inequality can be attributed to providers perceiving consumers from more unequal regions as less trustworthy. This perception leads them to perceive heightened financial risks associated with serving these consumers. Moreover, this negative impact of economic inequality attenuates when providers perceive greater interpersonal similarity with consumers from unequal regions. In Essay 2, I explore how economic inequality within one's society affects their education decisions through the lens of perceived education premium. Firstly, it encourages people to attend college as it amplifies the perceived education premium of college—the income gap between college graduates and high school graduates. Secondly, it motivates people to choose majors with higher earning potential but lower personal interests, as opposed to those that align more with their genuine interests but pay less. This shift towards prioritizing extrinsic motivations over intrinsic ones is driven by people's perception of a more significant education premium between majors—the income disparity between higher-paying and lower-paying majors.
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    Death, Mortality and Consumer Decision Making: Two Essays  
    McGraw, Dwayne Scott (Virginia Tech, 2024-10-03)
    Death, Mortality and Consumer Decision Making: Two Essays Dwayne Scott McGraw ABSTRACT This dissertation presents two essays that address specific aspects of the broad domain of death, mortality and consumer decision making. Essay 1 examines how priming mortality salience (MS) and financial vulnerability (FV) influences insurance policy choices of young, middle aged and senior consumers. Essay 2 investigates how, in funeral planning contexts when consumer may be dealing with significant grief, manipulating choice architecture (via additive vs. subtractive framing of funeral package options) influences the composition and cost of the chosen funeral package. In Essay 1, we use a three-factor design: 2 (MS prime: present/absent) x 2 (FV prime: present/absent) x 3 (Age: Young/Middle-Aged/Senior) to examine how participants evaluate and choose among three hypothetical policies (premium/benefits: low, medium, and high). In a control group (neither prime present), the younger and middle age groups modally select the medium policy whereas the seniors select the high policy. However, the primes affect these choices. When MS alone is primed (FV prime absent), young adults move toward the low policy (assures death benefits at affordable cost). The middle-aged group moves toward the high policy. The seniors remain over-insured with the high policy. When FV is primed, the senior group seems to recognize that their strong financial situation and low obligation levels warrant the medium policy. Interestingly, sensitive to higher financial obligations, the middle-aged tend to buy the high policy. With both MS and FV primed, seniors continue to show affinity toward the medium policy (salience of lower FV tempers the MS effect). Sensitized to their financial situation, younger adults continue to favor the low policy. The middle-aged group remains with the higher policy: both primes have impact. These evaluation data are generally consistent with the choice data. The findings have significant implications for designing life insurance products attuned to the needs of consumers in various age groups. They provide insight into the factors that, if made salient at choice, may facilitate better consumer choices. The results also have important regulatory implications. In Essay 2, we examine if consumers are influenced by how funeral package options are presented at the time of choice. Specifically, we study these effects of choice architecture using manipulations of choice architecture (additive versus subtractive framing of package options). In study1, we examine how grief and related emotions surrounding death influence the effects of additive versus subtractive framing of items. In Study 2, we examine how these effects are moderated by when the funeral is pre-planned or planned at the time of death. These studies shed light on how options framing influence the choice of funeral packages and also the costs and benefits of preplanning funeral events and providing advanced directives for end-of-life care and death related expenses.
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    Designing Smart Agents to Support Physician-Patient Interactions: The Effect of Varying Communication Styles
    Ravella, Haribabu (Virginia Tech, 2022-01-21)
    This dissertation reports five experiments exploring the use of AI-based smart agents to support physician-patient interactions. In each experiment, a sample of female participants evaluates video tapes of simulated physician-patient interactions in a setting involving early stage breast cancer diagnosis. Experiment 1 manipulates communication style (empathetic/impassive) for both a human physician (played by an actor) and an avatar that mimics the human. Empathetic styles elicit more liking and trust from patients and are also more persuasive. The avatar loses less than the human physician on desirable patient outcomes when communication style changes from empathetic to impassive. A mediation analysis shows that the communication style and physician type effects flow serially through liking and trust to persuasion. Experiment 2 reports an extended replication, adding a new avatar with less resemblance to the human physician. The findings match those of Experiment 1: both avatars have similar effects on liking, trust, and persuasion and are similarly anthropomorphized. Experiment 3 examines whether the patient's mindset (hope/fear about the cancer prognosis) influences likely patient outcomes. The mindset manipulation does not influence patient outcomes, but we find support for the core serial mediation model (from liking to trust to persuasion). Experiment 4 explores whether it matters how the avatar is deployed. Introducing the avatar as the physician's assistant lowers its evaluations perhaps because the patients feel deprioritized. The human physician is evaluated significantly higher on all outcome dimensions. Experiments 1-4 focused on the first phase of a standard three-phased physician-patient interaction protocol. Experiment 5 examines communication style (empathetic/ impassive) and physician type (human/avatar) effects across the three sequential phases. Patient outcomes improve monotonically over the three interaction phases across all study conditions. Overall, our studies show that an empathetic communication style is more effective in eliciting higher levels of liking, trust, and persuasion. The human physician and the avatar elicit similar levels of these desirable patient interaction outcomes. The avatar loses less when communication style changes from empathetic to impassive, suggesting that patients may have lower expectations of empathy from avatars. Thus, if carefully deployed, smart agents acting as physicians' avatars may effectively support physician-patient interactions.
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    Essays on the Management of Online Platforms: Bayesian Perspectives
    Gupta, Debjit (Virginia Tech, 2020-08-06)
    This dissertation presents three essays that focus on various aspects pertaining to the management of online platforms, defined as "digital services that facilitate interactions between two or more distinct, but interdependent sets of users (whether firms or individuals) who interact through the service via the Internet" (OECD, 2019). The interactions benefit both the users and the platform. Managing online platforms involves developing strategies for one or more of three value adding functions: (a) lowering search costs for the parties connecting through the platform, (b) providing a technology infrastructure that facilitates transactions at scale by sharing both demand and supply side costs; and (c) locating other audiences or consumers for the output that results from the transaction. The platform manager must manage these value adding functions. Thus, one important management task is to recognize potential asymmetries in the economic and/or psychological motivations of the transacting parties connected through the platform. In this dissertation, I empirically examine these issues in greater detail. The first essay, "Incentivizing User-Generated Content—A Double-Edged Sword: Evidence from Field Data and a Controlled Experiment," addresses the conundrum faced by online platform managers interested in crowdsourcing user-generated content (UGC) in prosocial contexts. The dilemma stems from the fact that offering monetary incentives to stimulate UGC contributions also has a damping effect on peer approval, which is an important source of non-monetary recognition valued by UGC contributors in prosocial contexts. The second essay, "Matching and Making in Matchmaking Platforms: A Structural Analysis," examines matchmaking platforms, focusing specifically on the problem of misaligned incentives between the platform and the agents. Based on data from the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) on fighter characteristics, and pay-per-view revenues associated with specific bouts, we identify the potential for conflicts of interest and examine strategies that may be used to mitigate such problems. The third essay, "Matching and Making in Matching Markets: A Managerial Decision Calculus," extends the empirical model and analytical work to a class of commonly encountered one-sided matching market problems. It provides the conceptual outline of a decision calculus that allows managers to explore the revenue and profitability implications of adaptive changes to the tier structures and matching algorithms.
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    Exploring Antecedents to Environmentally-Consequential  Consumer Choices and Behaviors
    Stuebi, Richard Theodore (Virginia Tech, 2024-06-25)
    This dissertation presents two essays that explore the antecedents of consumer decision-making when choices or behaviors have significant environmental consequences. The first essay involves theoretical development and experimental testing of a conceptual model describing the process by which a car-buyer evaluates the choice between an electric vehicle (EV) and a gasoline vehicle, while the second essay consists of empirical analysis of a large panel dataset of household-level 15-minute interval electricity consumption data to identify the drivers of different behavioral response patterns to electric utility requests for energy conservation on hot summer afternoons. The first essay is motivated by the observation that increased consumer adoption of battery-powered EVs is important for commercial and environmental reasons, but EV adoption is currently inhibited by both an up-front price disadvantage and the inconveniences associated with battery recharging. The research presented in the first essay leverages the Theory of Reasoned Action as well as the literature on identity signaling to develop a model on how consumers with interests in the environmental and/or technological implications of EV ownership evaluate the potential purchase of an EV versus a conventional automobile. The model generates ten pairs of hypotheses that are tested via estimation of a structural equation model using data from three online experiments. Bayesian pooling of the three sets of estimated path analysis coefficients finds considerable support for the conceptual model. These pooled results show that EV ownership signals the owner's concern about both environmental protection and technology advancement, but the effect of the environmental signal on EV purchase likelihood is positive whereas the effect of the technology signal on EV purchase likelihood is negative. Moreover, in addition to lowering EV purchase likelihood via a direct effect, the perceived inconveniences associated with EV ownership (e.g., needs for battery charging) offset the negative effect of technology signaling on EV purchase likelihood, while the corresponding interaction of inconvenience with environmental signaling value was found to be not significant. Meanwhile, a larger EV price premium had a direct negative effect on EV purchase likelihood but did not moderate the effects of either technology signaling value or environmental signaling value on EV purchase likelihood. Among other findings, specific knowledge about how EVs affect technological advancement has a direct positive influence on EV purchase likelihood. However, all downstream effects of specific knowledge about EVs effects on environmental protection are mediated by perceptions of EV effectiveness in benefitting the environment. Meanwhile, the second essay investigates consumer behavior concerning household electricity consumption. Utilities use demand response (DR) programs to induce customers to reduce electricity consumption during selected hot summer afternoons when power generation supplies may be challenged to satisfy regional demand levels. The research presented in the second essay leverages panel data on electricity consumption from households in a community where an experimental pro-social DR program was conducted to explore drivers of household responses to utility requests to voluntarily reduce electricity consumption. Analysis of the panel data shows that, on average, households with solar rooftops respond differently to utility DR notifications than non-solar households: solar households reduce electricity consumption as requested by the utility, whereas non-solar households receiving the same request actually increase electricity consumption. However, although solar households respond favorably to DR notification, they also consume significantly more electricity than non-solar households during most hours. These empirical results – greater responsiveness to DR notifications, but otherwise higher levels of electricity consumption – beg reconciliation and explanation. An experimental research study is proposed for a future examination of alternative psychological explanations for the observed differences in behavioral responses between solar and non-solar households.
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    Fostering a More Sustainable World through Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle: The Role of Perceived Value in a Circular Economy
    Lai, Yuhang (Virginia Tech, 2023-05-26)
    The last few decades have seen an explosion in population growth and along with this growth we have also witnessed an increase in demand for products. Although our resources are limited, consumers' needs know no bounds. It is not surprising that we are also increasingly demanding more from our environment. It is therefore imperative that we make better use of our resources and reassess how we construe a product's lifecycle. Instead of a linear perspective, which typically follows a product's lifecycle from mining of raw materials to manufacturing, but then stops when products are trashed, we need to use a circular perspective, where we focus on the entire lifecycle of products, from not just manufacturing to usage, but also from usage to creation of new products through recycling. The focus of this dissertation is on understanding two important processes in the circular economy: that of usage and disposal. I focus on the role that consumers' product valuations play in these processes. In essay 1, I show that consumers value products made from recycled materials more than comparable regular products. I also document why this happens and demonstrate how this affects usage. In essay 2, I investigate the relationship between reuse and product disposal. The circular economy is based on what is now referred to as the 3R approach: reduce, reuse, and recycle. However, I show that consumers are more (vs. less) likely to trash products that they have used extensively (vs. rarely). This then leads to a conundrum: if we encourage consumers to reuse products extensively, it appears that they are more likely to trash them. It is therefore imperative that we understand this relationship better and find interventions to mitigate this negative relationship.
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    Giving Smart Agents a Voice: How a Smart Agent's Voice Influences Its Relationships with Consumers
    Han, Yegyu (Virginia Tech, 2020-06-04)
    Advances in speech recognition and voice synthesis software now allow "smart agents" (e.g., voice-controlled devices like Amazon's Alexa and Google Home) to interact naturally with humans. The machines have a skills repertoire with which they can "communicate" and form relationships with consumers – managing aspects of their daily lives and providing advice on various issues including purchases. This dissertation develops three essays that examine the role played by the smart agent's voice (rational vs. emotional) in such relationships. The social cognition and persuasion literature on interpersonal communication serves as a comparison backdrop. In Essay 1, I investigate how identical purchase recommendations delivered in a rational or an emotional voice elicit different consumer responses, when the voice is ascribed to a human versus a smart agent. I argue that consumers distinctively categorize smart agents and humans, which, in turn, leads them to have different expectations when interacting with them. In Essay 2, I focus on how a smart agent's vocal tone (rational vs. emotional) influences consumer compliance with the agent's recommendation as well as the role of trust as a mediator of the underlying process. I find that the level of intimacy in the relationship between the smart agent and the human user moderates whether the voice effect on persuasion operates through trust that is cognitively or affectively rooted. In Essay 3, I examine the proposition that consumers may anthropomorphize a smart agent both mindfully (consciously) and mindlessly (non-consciously), depending on the agent's voice. In addition to using extant measures of the degree to which anthropomorphism is explicit (conscious), I develop an auditory analog of the implicit association test (IAT) that assesses implicit (non-conscious) anthropomorphism. In additional experiments, I further assess the robustness of the auditory IAT test and demonstrated a dissociation between the measures of the explicit and implicit subconstructs of anthropomorphism. Taken together, these essays contribute to our understanding of the factors driving consumer relationships with smart agents in the rapidly evolving IoT world.
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    Innovating the Mind: Three Essays on Technology, Society, and Consumer Neuroscience
    Penrod, Joshua Morgan (Virginia Tech, 2018-05-18)
    This dissertation examines the emerging practice of consumer neuroscience and neuromarketing, combined called CNNM. CNNM utilizes tools and technologies to measure brain activity and human behavior coupled with scientific theories for explaining behavior and cognition. Consumer neuroscience is one of the newest areas of application of neuroscience and related techniques, and is of significant social consequence for its possible deployment in the market place to both study and shape consumer behavior. Concerns arise in terms of consumer influence and manipulation, but there are also concerns regarding the actual efficacy and utility of the technologies and the application of behavioral theories. The dissertation's three essays each examine a facet of CNNM. Using historical sources, conference participation, and ethical analyses, the dissertation forms a multi-prong effort at a better understanding of CNNM through the use of science and technology studies (STS) methods. The first essay is an historical review of the usage of technologies to measure brain activity and behavior, parallel to the development of psychological theories created to account for human decisionmaking. This essay presents a new conception of "closure" and "momentum" as envisioned by social construction of technology and technological momentum theories, arriving at a new concept for inclusion called "convergence" which offers a multi-factor explanation for the acceptance and technical implementation of unsettled science. The second essay analyzes four discourses discovered during the review of approximately seventy presentations and interviews given by experts in the field of CNNM. Using and adapting actor-network theory, the essay seeks to describe the creation of expertise and group formation in the field of CNNM researchers. The third essay draws on a variety of ethical analyses to expand understanding of the ethical concerns regarding CNNM. It raises questions that go beyond the actual efficacy of CNNM by applying some of the theories of Michel Foucault relating to the accumulation of power via expertise. This essay also points in the direction for actionable steps at ameliorating some of the ethical concerns involving CNNM. CNNM is a useful technique for understanding consumer behavior and, by extension, human behavior and neuroscience more generally. At the same time, it has been routinely misunderstood and occasionally vilified (for concerns about both efficacy and non-efficacy). This dissertation develops some of the specific historical movements that created the field, surveys and analyzes some of the foremost experts and how they maneuvered in their social network to achieve that status, and identifies novel ethical issues and some solutions to those ethical issues.
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    An Investigation Into How Sources of Information Influence Consumers' Perceptions and Decision Making
    Essig, Richard Alexander (Virginia Tech, 2021-12-16)
    Consumers rely on sources of information to learn about products and make informed purchasing decisions. In fact, one of the first factors consumer consider when evaluating product information, is the source of that information. Yet despite the importance of the source, research on this topic is sporadic, leaving my unanswered questions. This dissertation advances our understanding of how three different sources of information influence consumers' perceptions and decision making. In the first study, we examine two sources (consumer originated and third party) to determine which one dominates in a persuasion episode. We find consumers overwhelmingly prefer consumer originated versus third party sources because they believe fellow consumers convey information that is diagnostic of future product experiences. In our second study, we show how a subtle firm-dominated characteristic, firm size, influences manufacturing assumptions and purchase behavior. We find consumers prefer small to large firms for unique products, because they assume small firms have a high degree of human intervention in the manufacturing process.
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    Is Corporate Taxation Bad for the Environment? An Empirical Analysis of the Association between State-Level Taxation and Corporate Environmental Performance
    Meersman, James Elliot (Virginia Tech, 2024-07-09)
    I investigate the impact of statutory tax rates on U.S. firms' environmental performance. Prior literature emphasizes the effect of manager influence on the relation between tax avoidance and environmental activities. However, it is unclear how taxes imposed on a firm impact environmental performance. Firms subject to higher statutory tax rates experience more restricted cash flows. As such, higher statutory tax rates may limit managers' ability to address environmental concerns. Firms that experience higher statutory tax rates may not prioritize environmental efforts, which are often non-essential to a firm's operations, despite government incentives. Alternatively, higher tax rates may encourage firms to address environmental concerns due to the tax shield that these expenses provide and the relatively lower cost to shareholders. Observing tax rate variation at the state level, I find higher state tax rates are associated with weaker environmental performance. My study contributes to regulators' understanding of the interaction between tax policy and firms' abilities to address their environmental impact.
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    The New Generation of Recommendation Agents (RAs 2.0): An Affordance Perspective
    Wang, Jeremy Fei (Virginia Tech, 2023-01-03)
    Rapid technological advances in artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, big data, the semantic web, the Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud and mobile computing have given rise to a new generation of AI-driven recommendation agents (RAs). These agents continue to evolve and offer potential for use in a variety of application domains. However, extant information systems (IS) research has predominantly focused on user perceptions and evaluations of traditional non-intelligent product-brokering recommendation agents (PRAs), supported by empirical studies on custom-built experimental RAs that heavily rely on explicit user preference elicitations. To address the lack of research in the new generation of intelligent RAs (RAs 2.0), this dissertation aims to study consumer responses to AI-driven RAs using an affordance perspective. Notably, this research is the first in the IS discourse to link RA design artifacts, RA affordances, RA outcomes, and user continuance. It examines how actualized RA affordances influence user engagements with and evaluations of these highly personalized systems, which increasingly focus on user experiences and long-term relationships. This three-essay dissertation, consisting of one theory-building paper and two empirical studies, conceptually defines "RAs 2.0," proposes a comprehensive theoretical framework with testable propositions, and conducts two empirical studies guided by smaller carved-out models to test the validity of the comprehensive framework. The research is expected to enrich the IS literature on RAs and identify potential areas for future research. Moreover, it offers key implications for industry professionals regarding the effective system development of the new generation of intelligent RAs.
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    Priming consequences of Homophone Confusion
    Davis, Derick Francis (Virginia Tech, 2013-04-27)
    I investigate how reading a homophone (e.g. "bye")"a word that sounds the same as another but has different spelling and meaning"can prime judgments and behaviors related to the complementary homophone (e.g. "buy"). Initial reading processes use word sound, not word spelling, to activate word meaning stored in memory. I theorize homophone priming occurs when consumers encounter and process homophones and a secondary, relatively controlled process fails to suppress meanings associated with the incorrect homophone. Additionally, this effect is more likely to occur when consumers experience cognitive load, which reduces ability to suppress the alternate homophone meanings. In this dissertation I document homophone behavioral and perceptual priming, investigate the process underlying the effects, and contribute to the priming literature in general. More specifically, this dissertation contributes to the understanding of the role of phonology (word sound) in behavioral and perceptual priming in general and in consumer contexts.
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    Subjective Assessments of Self and Competitor Expertise: Influences on Bidding and Post-Auction Product Valuation
    Hood, Stephen (Virginia Tech, 2022-01-12)
    This dissertation contains two essays focusing on how Self and Competitor Expertise influence valuation both during and post-auction. The first essay, "Competitor Expertise: Influences on bidding behavior and post-auction values in ascending auctions," considers how a bidder's perception of competitors' expertise types and levels influences valuation both during (bid level), after (WTP/WTA), and over time (∆WTP/∆WTA). Generally, I find that despite normative predictions regarding bidding behavior in a competitive auction environment, bidders tend to bid higher and maintain higher post-auction valuations when competing against experts in the product domain, although not amateurs or experts in other domains (e.g., auction bidding strategies). Post-auction valuation patterns further depended on Auction Outcome. The second essay, "Assessed Self-Expertise: Influences on Bidding Behavior and Post-Auction Values Against Competitors of Varying Expertise Levels," extends our investigation to consider how a bidder's perception of their own expertise type and level also influences valuation both during and post-auction. Broadly, I find additional support that bidders post higher valuations both during and post-auction when competing against Experts vs. Amateurs, but that this behavior is primarily driven by bidders who assess themselves as Experts and further depends on Auction Outcome.
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    Three Essays on Price Framing and Price Perceptions
    Mukherjee, Sudipta (Virginia Tech, 2019-06-10)
    This dissertation focuses on contextual frames that influence how consumers perceive prices and how that in turn affects their product evaluations and consumption decisions. This research consists of three essays and attempts to further the understanding of contextual factors that affect how consumers perceive prices (essay 1) and how perceptions about prices influence product inferences (essay 2) and decision making (essay 3). While there is a substantial body of research on price framing and price perception, my research identifies and attempts to fill some important gaps in the existing research. In my first essay, I introduce a new price framing effect – the upper limit framing effect. This essay shows that framing the upper limit of a price estimate as less than vs. not more than can result in systematic differences in perceptions regarding the underlying price. This research contributes to the existing price framing research, which primarily focuses on set prices, by investigating price estimates. It also makes important contributions to the temporal and monetary costs and semantic framing literatures and to the literature on negations. In my second essay, I contribute to the existing perceived price-quality research that primarily concerns only the market prices. This essay shows that consumers over-apply the perceived price-quality heuristic when setting product prices by themselves (self-decided prices). Specifically, this research shows that contextual factors that affect self-decided prices in turn influence product inferences, with the relationship between contextual frame and product inferences being mediated by self-decided prices. In my third essay, I contribute to the existing price framing research by showing that in the context of multiple price presentation, the price presentation order (ascending vs. descending) affects the perceived importance of price in the decision making – an effect I term as the price order effect – an effect that is explained by prospect-theory driven loss aversion. Specifically, this research shows that descending (vs. ascending) price presentation order results in significantly lower perceived importance of price in the decision making process which in turn influences subsequent consumption decisions. In addition to the individual contributions of each essay, this dissertation makes an overall contribution to the price framing and price perception research by identifying new price framing effects and by furthering the understanding of how consumers perceive prices and how perceptions about price influences consumer decision making.
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    Two Essays on Hope and Consumer Behavior
    Juma, Stephen O. (Virginia Tech, 2021-09-14)
    This dissertation consists of two essays on the impact of hope on financial decision making. While hope is a commonly experienced positive emotion, research on the impact of hope on consumer decision making is relatively sparse. The first essay examines the impact of hope on gambling intentions. Findings from seven studies, including one consequential, demonstrate that in a gambling context, hope leads to suboptimal decisions when the focus of hope is on winning. We theorize and show empirically that this effect occurs because hope triggers experiential processing, which in turn increases gambling, interestingly without affecting rational expectations of winning. Evidence from a variety of gambling contexts suggest that hope leads to both intent and actual gambling behavior. This effect of hope on gambling does not hold for individuals low on trait experiential processing and is attenuated when individuals are prompted to not rely on their feelings. Thus, the authors contribute to the literature on hope by providing a detailed understanding of how hope impacts processing of information, which in turn leads to suboptimal decisions in a gambling context. More broadly, this work offers implications for policy makers and consumers to understand and to become aware of how everyday positive emotion can be detrimental to consumer welfare. The second essay examines the impact of hope on savings. Across five studies, this research displays that hope increases willingness to save. The effect of hope on savings intention is mediated by hope's focus on the future. When hope is no longer focused on the future but is instead focused on the past, this effect disappears. To rule out positive emotion in general as a driving effect, we examine pride, a positive emotion which is generally focused on the past and find that pride does not lead to savings intention unless the focus of pride is shifted to the future. We also examine an alternative potential explanation that a sense of closeness with one's future self is driving the effect of hope on savings intention but do not find support for this, rather it is a future time perspective that mediates the effect of hope on willingness to save. These findings and their implications for research on positive emotion, time perspective and financial decision making are discussed.