The devil you know: The effect of brand recognition and product ratings on consumer choice
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2013, Vol 8, Issue 1
Abstract
Previous research on the role of recognition in decision-making in inferential choice has focussed on the Recognition Heuristic (RH), which proposes that in situations where recognition is predictive of a decision criterion, recognized objects will be chosen over unrecognized ones, regardless of any other available relevant information. In the current study we examine the role of recognition in preferential choice, in which subjects had to choose one of a pair of consumer objects that were presented with quality ratings (positive, neutral, and negative). The results showed that subjects’ choices were largely based on recognition, as the famous brand was preferred even when additional star ratings rendered it as less attractive. However, the additional information did affect the proportion of chosen famous items, in particular in the cases when star ratings for the recognised brand were negative. This condition also resulted in longer response times compared to neutral and positive conditions. Thus, the current data do not point to a simple compensatory mechanism in preferential choice: although choice is affected by additional information, it seems that recognition is employed as an initial important first step in the decision-making process.
Authors and Affiliations
Volker Thoma and Alwyn Williams
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678041
- DOI -
- Views 174
- Downloads 0
Not by desire alone: The role of cognitive consistency in the desirability bias
We demonstrate that the desirability bias, the elevation of the estimated likelihood of a preferred event, can be due in part to the desire for consistency between the preference for the favored event and its predicted l...
Normative arguments from experts and peers reduce delay discounting
When making decisions that involve tradeoffs between the quality and timing of desirable outcomes, people consistently discount the value of future outcomes. A puzzling finding regarding such decisions is the extremely h...
The role of cognitive reflection in decision making: Evidence from Pakistani managers
Assessing how managers discount and evaluate risks is crucial in designing effective managerial policies. In this work, we examine whether risk preferences (RP; both in the domains of gain and loss) and time preferences...
The effect of incomplete information on the compromise effect
Most research on the compromise effect focuses on how consumers make their decisions in a complete information scenario; however, consumers generally lack sufficient information when they make purchase decisions. This re...
Survey of time preference, delay discounting models
The paper surveys over twenty models of delay discounting (also known as temporal discounting, time preference, time discounting), that psychologists and economists have put forward to explain the way people actually tra...