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,...

How do markets change? Findings from a 7-year longitudinal processual investigation of consumer performances in the war on music downloading suggest that markets in the cultural creative sphere (those organizing the exchange of intellectual goods such as music, movies, software, and the written...

Consumer researchers have tended to equate consumer moralism with normative condemnations of mainstream consumer culture. Consequently, little research has investigated the multifaceted forms of identity work that consumers can undertake through more diverse ideological forms of consumer...

This article develops a critique of the dyadic model of consumer gift giving and an extension of the classic paradigm of gift giving as elaborated in fundamental anthropological and sociological texts. I conceptualize and present empirical evidence for the notion of a consumer gift system, a...

About $10 billion a year is spent by consumers worldwide on online gambling, and that number continues to grow. We present a qualitative, image-based study of 30 Las Vegas online and casino gamblers. By examining online gambling as a consumption experience, we examine what happens to consumption...

Evidence from three experiments shows that due to superior visuo-spatial elaboration, females (relative to males) have a heightened ability to identify visually incongruent products that are promoted among competing products. Females discriminate relational information among competing...

The diagnosticity of feelings in judgment depends not only on their representativeness and relevance, but also on people’s trust in their feelings in general. Trust in feelings is the degree to which individuals believe that their feelings generally point toward the “right” direction in...

Online social networks are used by hundreds of millions of people every day, but little is known about their effect on behavior. In five experiments, the authors demonstrate that social network use enhances self-esteem in users who are focused on close friends (i.e., strong ties) while browsing...