Depending on the shopping context, consumers may develop different mental representations of complex shopping trip decision problems to help them interpret the decision situation that they face and evaluate alternative courses of action. To investigate these mental representations and how they...

Increasingly, firms adopt mass customization, which allows consumers to customize products by self-selecting their most preferred composition of the product for a predefined set of modules. For example, PC vendors such as Dell allow customers to customize their PC by choosing the type of...

This paper develops a theoretical model of optimal effort in consumer choice.The model extends previous consumer choice models in that the consumer not only chooses a product, but also decides how much effort to apply to a given choice problem.The model yields a unique optimal level of effort,...

How consumers’ waiting times affect their retrospective evaluations of Internet Web Sites is investigated in four computer-based experiments. Results show that waiting can but does not always negatively affect evaluations of Web Sites. Results also show that the potential negative effects of...

Recent increases in flexibility and automation in the production of goods and services allow a growing number of suppliers to offer their products in flexible sets of modules from which consumers can create their own individualized packages. This paper addresses the question how consumer choices...