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...

Some food items that are commonly considered unhealthy also tend to elicit impulsive responses. The pain of paying in cash can curb impulsive urges to purchase such unhealthy food products. Credit card payments, in contrast, are relatively painless and weaken impulse control. Consequently,...

Psychological distance can reduce the subjective experience of difficulty caused by task complexity and task anxiety. Four experiments were conducted to test several related hypotheses. Psychological distance was altered by activating a construal mind-set and by varying bodily distance from a...

Through five experiments, we provide a cognitive account of when and why nine-ending prices are perceived to be smaller than a price one cent higher. First, this occurs only when the leftmost digits of the prices differ (e.g., $2.99 vs. $3.00). Second, the left-digit effect also depends on the...

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...

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...

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...