Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online labor system run by Amazon.com, provides quick, easy, and inexpensive access to online research participants. As use of MTurk has grown, so have questions from behavioral researchers about its participants, reliability, and low compensation. In this article, we review recent research about MTurk and compare MTurk participants with community and student samples on a set of personality dimensions and classic decision-making biases. Across two studies, we find many similarities between MTurk participants and traditional samples, but we also find important differences. For instance, MTurk participants are less likely to pay attention to experimental materials, reducing statistical power. They are more likely to use the Internet to find answers, even with no incentive for correct responses. MTurk participants have attitudes about money that are different from a community sample's attitudes but similar to students' attitudes. Finally, MTurk participants are less extraverted and have lower self-esteem than other participants, presenting challenges for some research domains. Despite these differences, MTurk participants produce reliable results consistent with standard decision-making biases: they are present biased, risk-averse for gains, risk-seeking for losses, show delay/expedite asymmetries, and show the certainty effect-with almost no significant differences in effect sizes from other samples. We conclude that MTurk offers a highly valuable opportunity for data collection and recommend that researchers using MTurk (1) include screening questions that gauge attention and language comprehension; (2) avoid questions with factual answers; and (3) consider how individual differences in financial and social domains may influence results. Copyright

positive WOM can decrease the uniqueness of one's possessions, which hurts high-uniqueness individuals (pilot study). As a result, high-(vs. low-) uniqueness individuals are less willing to generate positive WOM for publicly consumed products that they own. However, high uniqueness does not decrease willingness to generate WOM for privately consumed products (study 1). Study 2 demonstrates that for publicly consumed products, WOM that includes positive recommendations is perceived to be more persuasive than WOM that only contains product details. Consequently, the effect of uniqueness is more pronounced for WOM recommendations, compared to WOM that provides details (study 3). Study 4 confirms that high-(vs. low-) uniqueness consumers are less willing to recommend a public product to others, but are as willing to discuss product details. Study 5 content-analyzes real-world WOM and finds evidence that supports these results. Dichter (1966, 166) argues that "advertising cannot replace interpersonal influence."Our research focuses on the fundamental drivers underlying WOM. Most prior research studies the benefits of WOM (e.g., Sundaram, Mitra, and Webster 1998) rather than the costs (see Frenzen and Nakamoto 1993 for an exception). We explore a psychosocial cost associated with a consumer's decision to provide positive WOM about products. While providing WOM may be attractive for several reasons, we demonstrate that consumers who promote a product through WOM may also decrease the uniqueness of their possessions. Thus, positive WOM may hurt consumers who have high need for uniqueness. Additionally, we expect this social cost of decreased uniqueness to vary across contexts. We propose that the detrimental effect of WOM (in terms of its potential to decrease the uniqueness of products) is perceived to be greater for publicly (vs. privately) consumed products (Bourne 1957), greater when the product is owned (vs. not intended to be owned), and greater when the WOM includes positive reviews and purchase recommendations, compared to when the WOM only contains product details.This research strives to make three important contributions. First, it responds to Bagozzi's (1975, 39) Second, we respond to a call for research regarding the types of products that people will talk about with others. Brown and Reingen (1987, 361) state that "an enhanced understanding of the social influence processes in consumer behavior may simply be obtained by examining which products or services consumers are more likely to talk about." We study the effects of need for uniqueness on WOM for different product categories to address this issue.Third, we explore the effect of individual and contextual differences on consumers' willingness to engage in different types of WOM. Specifically, we consider how consumers' need for uniqueness, the product category, and product ownership influence their willingness to provide positive WOM (and purchase recommendations) versus only providing product details.We therefore provide a clearer picture on WOM c...

Mental accounts are often characterized as self‐control devices that consumers employ to prevent excess spending and consumption. However, under certain conditions of ambiguity, the mental accounting process is malleable; that is, consumers have flexibility in assigning expenses to different mental accounts. We demonstrate how consumers flexibly classify expenses, or construct accounts, to justify spending. An expense that can be assigned to more than one account (i.e., an ambiguous expense) is more likely to be incurred than an unambiguous expense that is constrained either by existing budgets or by previously constructed accounts. We explore the justification processes that underlie these results and their implications for mental accounts as self‐control devices.

The objective of the present research is to study consumer decisions to utilize a line of credit. The life-cycle hypothesis from economics argues that consumers should intertemporally reallocate their incomes over their life stream to maximize lifetime utility. One form of intertemporal allocation is to use past income (in the form of savings) in the future. A second form is the use of future income in the present. This can only be done if consumers have access to a temporary pool of money that they can draw from and replenish in the future—a function performed by consumer credit. However, our research reinforces prior findings that consumers are unable to correctly value their future incomes, and that they lack the cognitive capability to solve the intertemporal optimization problem required by the life-cycle hypothesis. Instead, we argue that consumers use information such as the credit limit as a signal of their future earnings potential. Specifically, if consumers have access to large amounts of credit, they are likely to infer that their lifetime income will be high and hence their willingness to use credit (and their spending) will also be high. Conversely, consumers who are granted lower amounts of credit are likely to infer that their lifetime income will be low and hence their spending will be lower. However, based on research in the area of consumer skepticism and inference making, we also argue for a moderating role of the credibility associated with the credit limit. Specifically, we argue that the above effect of credit availability would be particularly strong for consumers who believe that the credit limit credibly signals their future earnings potential (i.e., a naïve consumer who has limited experience with consumer credit). However, as consumers gain experience with credit, they start discounting credit availability as a predictor of their future and start questioning the validity of the process used to set the credit limit. Hence, with experience the effect of credit limit on the willingness to use credit should be attenuated. We test these predictions in five separate studies. In the first experimental study, we manipulate credit limit and credibility and pose subjects with a hypothetical purchase opportunity. Consistent with our prediction, credit limit impacted the propensity to spend, but only when the credibility was high. In the second experimental study, we replicate these findings even when subjects were given information about their expected future salaries, and also show that the credit limit influences their expectation of future earnings potential. In the third study, we show that the mere availability (and increase) of current liquidity cannot explain our findings. In the fourth study, we conduct a survey of consumers in which we measure a number of demographic characteristics and also ask them for their propensity to spend in a given purchase situation. In the fifth study we use the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) dataset, a triennial survey of U.S. families that is designed to ...

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