Incentives are an increasingly common tool used by organizations, managers, and policymakers to change behavior. We propose that more than just motivating behavior for monetary reasons, incentives also have an important, undiscovered consequence: they leak information about social norms. Four...

Customers often must decide not only whether to purchase, but also what quantity to buy. The current research introduces and compares the quantity-sequential (QS) selling format, under which shoppers make the purchase and quantity decisions separately, with the quantity-integrated (QI) selling...

The current research demonstrates that temporally separating a consumer's initial decision to perform a guilt-inducing action from its actual enactment reduces the guilt felt while acting. This hypothesis follows from the development of a dynamic model that unpacks guilt into two distinct...

Academic research in several disciplines has demonstrated that consumers generally show a preference for certainty in the domain of gains. The current research provides evidence for an important psychological antecedent to this effect. Specifically, the authors find that the likelihood of...

In this article, we consider the reasons why employing realistic experimental designs and measuring actual behavior is important and beneficial for consumer research. More specifically, we discuss when, where, and how researchers might go about doing this in order to increase the veracity and...

Interruptions to consumer decision making are ubiquitous. Across three studies, we find that interruptions in decision making can increase risk-taking. When an individual is interrupted during a risky decision, we find that his/her previous consideration of the decision causes it to feel more...

Things change. Things also get changed—often. Why? The obvious reason is that revising things often makes them better. We document a less obvious reason: revising things makes consumers think they are better, even absent objective improvement. Eleven studies document the preference for...