More than a billion dollars is spent annually on generic advertisements that promote the consumption of commodity goods. Generic advertising is designed to increase primary demand, or the "size of the pie," without affecting selective demand, or the "share of the pie." We find evidence to the...

Consumers often have to create consideration sets when purchasing goals are not well defined. In these situations, the contents of a consideration set depend on a combination of two motives. First, consumers prefer to create a consideration set of easy-to-compare alternatives. It is easier to...

Several studies show that information used to screen alternatives becomes less important relative to information acquired latter in the search process simply because it was used to screen. Experiment 1 shows that the tendency to deemphasize prescreening information leads to systematically...