A great deal of research in consumer decision-making and social-cognition has explored consumers' attempts to simplify choices by bolstering their tentative choice candidate and/or denigrating the other alternatives. The present research investigates a diametrically opposed process, whereby...

Consumers face many options that are presented to them as bargains, but in reality only a fraction of these are subjectively construed as valuable. The authors propose that consumers are particularly attracted to offers they perceive as more valuable than presumably intended by the marketer....

Over the past few years, customer relationship management and loyalty programs (LPs) have been widely adopted by companies and have received a great deal of attention from marketers, consultants, and, to a lesser degree, academics. In this research, we examine the effect of the level of effort...

Two current trends, information overload combined with increased control of marketers (e.g., on the Internet) over the manner in which their products are sold and presented to buyers, suggest that deciding what information to provide or not to provide can determine a product's success in the...

The notion that effort and hard work yield desired outcomes is ingrained in many cultures and affects our thinking and behavior. However, could valuing effort complicate our lives? In the present article, the authors demonstrate that individuals with a stronger tendency to link effort with...

The compromise effect denotes the finding that brands gain share when they become the intermediate rather than an extreme option in a choice set (Simonson 1989). Despite the robustness and importance of this phenomenon, choice modelers have neglected to incorporate the compromise effect within...

Decisions often involve trade-offs between a more normative option and a less normative but more tempting one. The authors propose that the intrapersonal conflict that is evoked by choices involving incompatible goals can be resolved through scope-insensitive justifications. The authors describe...

The goal-gradient hypothesis denotes the classic finding from behaviorism that animals expend more effort as they approach a reward. Building on this hypothesis, the authors generate new propositions for the human psychology of rewards. They test these propositions using field experiments,...

Scientific inquiry often advances in triadic waves of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. We concur with Simonson [Simonson, I., (2008). Will I Like a "Medium" Pillow: Another Look at Constructed and Inherent Preferences. Journal of Consumer Psychology, this issue.] that BDT's antithesis of...

The compromise effect denotes the finding that brands gain share when they become the intermediate rather than an extreme option in a choice set (Simonson 1989). Despite the robustness and importance of this phenomenon, choice modelers have neglected to incorporate the compromise effect within...