Why are people often uncomfortable dealing with financial decisions? We propose that people perceive financial decisions – more so than decisions in many other equally complex and important domains – as compatible with a cold, analytical mode of thinking and as incompatible with feelings and...

Consumers often try to visually identify a previously encountered product among a sequence of similar items, guided only by their memory and a few general search terms. What determines their success at correctly identifying the target product in such “product lineups”? The current research...

The authors propose that preference construction is influenced by a transient “feeling of preference” – the perception that one has or should be able to form a preference in a given domain even before seeing the specific options in the choice-set and in the absence of any stored...

We propose that choice constructions strategies often meet the criteria for “habits.” As an example of a constructed preference habit, we focus on extremeness aversion, or the tendency to prefer a middle or “compromise” option versus an “extreme” option from a given options set. We...

Consumers face many options that are presented to them as bargains, but in reality only a fraction of these are subjectively construed as valuable. The authors propose that consumers are particularly attracted to offers they perceive as more valuable than presumably intended by the marketer....

Research has demonstrated that assortment size can influence whether consumers make a choice, but could it also influence what they choose? Five studies demonstrate that because choosing from larger assortments is often more difficult, it leads people to select options that are easier to...