Browsing by Author "Chaxel, Anne-Sophie"
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- The Effect of Ownership on Consumers' Disposal Decisions: Research on Food Wastage and Recycling BehaviorsXie, Jieru (Virginia Tech, 2022-04-11)Research in consumer behavior has focused predominantly on how consumers make purchase decisions. However, much less attention has been directed toward examining post-purchase behaviors. In this dissertation, I examine how ownership affects individuals' disposal decisions of their current possessions. In essay 1, I investigate how differences in duration of ownership affect consumers' food waste behaviors. I demonstrate that the same food products are more likely to be wasted as well as wasted more of when they are owned for a longer duration (vs. purchased more recently). I also delineate how this wastage can be reduced. In essay 2, I explore how a specific post-ownership experience, evaluations (positive vs. negative), influences consumers' recycling behaviors, even when these evaluations (e.g., taste of a drink) do not affect recyclability (e.g., of the bottle). I demonstrate that consumers will be more likely to recycle products associated with positive (vs. negative) evaluations, and, thus, will be more likely to recycle a drink's bottle when the taste is evaluated more positively.
- Giving Smart Agents a Voice: How a Smart Agent's Voice Influences Its Relationships with ConsumersHan, 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.
- Intuitive Numerical Information Processes in Consumer JudgmentVillanova, Daniel Joseph Bodin (Virginia Tech, 2018-04-09)Numerical information is ubiquitous in modern life. The prevalence of numerical information in the marketplace necessitates understanding how consumers handle and interpret that information, for both theoretical and practical reasons. Past research has largely focused on consumers’ encoding of numbers, calculative limitations, and usage of heuristics. This dissertation will contribute to this burgeoning literature in several ways. First, I identify a general tendency in how consumers calculate ratios based on an intuitive model of division. Specifically, consumers tend to divide larger numbers by smaller numbers. The intuitive model of division has marketing implications for both consumers’ evaluations of quantity offers and sensitivities to promotions. Next, I examine how consumers draw inferences from distributional information. In contrast to the assumption that consumers utilize means to assess central tendency, I demonstrate that consumers use the modal response to judge what is typical, with implications for consumers’ inferences about product ratings and other social distributions.
- Preference-driven biases in decision makers’ information search and evaluationChaxel, Anne-Sophie; Russo, J. Edward; Kerimi, Neda (Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) and the European Association for Decision Making (EADM), 2013-09)While it is well established that the search for information after a decision is biased toward supporting that decision, the case of preference-supporting search before the decision remains open. Three studies of consumer choices consistently found a complete absence of a pre-choice bias toward searching for preference-supporting information. The absence of this confirming search bias occurred for products that were both hedonic and utilitarian, both expensive and inexpensive, and both high and low in expected brand loyalty. Experiment 3 also verified the presence of the expected post-choice search bias to support the chosen alternative. Therefore the absence of a pre-choice search bias in all three studies was not likely to be due to our using a method that was so insensitive that a search bias would not be observed under any circumstances. In addition to the absence of an effect of prior preferences on information selection, subjects’ self-reported search strategies exhibited a clear tendency toward a balance of positive and negative information. Across the three studies, we also tested for the presence of a preference-supporting bias in the evaluation of the information acquired in the search process. This evaluation bias was found both pre- and post-choice.
- Two Essays on Hope and Consumer BehaviorJuma, 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.