Does asking people about their future behavior increase or decrease the likelihood that they will repeat their past behavior? In two laboratory and two field experiments, we find that behavior prediction strengthens behavior repetition, making people more likely to do what they normally do, when...

Having people predict whether they will perform a socially normative behavior increases their probability of performing that target action. Recent empirical evidence supports a dissonance-based theoretical explanation for this self-prophecy effect. While the effect is robust, few boundary...

Past research has shown that monetary promotions (e.g., discounts) are more likely to be processed relative to and integrated with the original product price than are free promotions. We posit that because of this difference, free promotions are more focal and salient than monetary promotions....

Using a goal theoretic approach we examine how goal-related mind-sets influence consumers' reactions to participative pricing mechanisms (where consumers participate in price determination; e.g., auctions) relative to economically equivalent, fixed price offers. We show that the congruence...

Consumers' budgets are influenced by the temporal frame used for the budget period. Budgets planned for the next month are much lower than recorded expenses, while those for the next year are closer to recorded expenses (study 1). The difficulty of estimating budgets for the next year imparts...

Ample research shows that consumers accept influence from a source they identify with and reject influence from a source they wish to dissociate from. The current article moves beyond the well-established identification principle and delineates a new influence process. Influence via...

Past research has found that changes in price endings can result in “left‐digit effects” whereby the magnitude of an item’s price relative to the price of a reference product is influenced by the leftmost digits of both prices. We extend this work by investigating the impact of changes in...

It is widely believed that increasing the equality of material possessions or income in a social group should lead people at the bottom of the distribution to consume less and save more. However, this prediction and its causal mechanism have never been studied experimentally. Five studies show...

Why is America a land of low-calorie food claims yet high-calorie food intake? Four studies show that people are more likely to underestimate the caloric content of main dishes and to choose higher-calorie side dishes, drinks, or desserts when fast-food restaurants claim to be healthy (e.g.,...