For sports fans, great games are the close ones—those between evenly matched opponents, where the game remains undecided until the very end. However, the dark side to sporting events is the incidence of traffic fatalities due to game-related drinking. Here, we ask whether the closeness of the...

Consumers hold a common intuition about their preferences for familiar things (e.g., "comfort food") in times of upheaval. This lay theory holds that familiar goods are attractive as a respite from dynamic environments and reflects a naive prediction that familiar favorites ameliorate the...

We show that formats used by retailers to organize assortments into subcategories can enhance or encumber consumers' learning and satisfaction. For more knowledgeable consumers, unexpected subcategory formats provide a newness cue, thereby increasing effort, learning, and satisfaction. That is,...

Conventional wisdom suggests that more concrete and detailed information is helpful in evaluating new products. The current research, however, demonstrates that when consumers use visualization to evaluate new products, the value of concrete versus abstract visualization is dependent on the...