We review existing knowledge about older consumers and decision making. We develop a conceptual framework that incorporates the notion of fit between individual characteristics, task demands and the contextual environment. When the fit is high, older consumers use their considerable knowledge and experience to compensate for the impact of any age-related changes in abilities and resources. When the fit is relatively low, older consumers feel increased need to adapt their decision making processes. We discuss these consumer adaptations and propose a number of research questions related to the processes underlying them in order to contribute to a better understanding of how they can lead to more effective consumer decision making for older adults. We further consider some pragmatic implications of the adaptations for marketing management and public policy.

Four studies investigate the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act's (NLEA's) impact on how consumers use nutrition information. Field and laboratory studies compare, but do not detect any changes in, consumers' search for nutrition information or their recall of this information in the pre-and post-NLEA periods. However, the search activities of a select group (highly motivated and less knowledgeable consumers) benefited more from the NLEA than did other groups. Additional results from the field and lab studies indicate that the NLEA changed attention to negative nutrition attributes (such as fat and sodium, of which less is better) more than it changed attention to positive attributes such as calcium and vitamins. Analyses of scanner databases confirm this trend (with the exception of calories). Focus group results also reflect these findings. The authors discuss implications for public policy, management, academic research, and consumer welfare.

After a service failure, consumers make appraisals or assessments about the characteristics of this failure. These appraisals, in turn, affect how a consumer responds emotionally and behaviorally. Using an appraisal-tendency framework, we predict that two negatively valenced emotions (anger and regret) underlie or mediate the effects of consumers’ appraisals about service failure on post-purchase behaviors. Consistent with the predictions, in a laboratory study, we find that anger plays a powerful role in explaining retaliatory behaviors, and that both anger and regret account for the effect of appraisals on conciliatory behaviors. We extend the same appraisal-tendency framework to predict how changes in emotions underlie the effects of recovery efforts on post-purchase behaviors. Again consistent with predictions, in the laboratory study and in a web-based study, we find that recovery efforts that reduce anger decrease retaliatory behaviors. However, both studies provide less clear-cut evidence about the emotional mediators between recovery efforts and conciliatory behaviors. Because conciliatory behaviors are important behaviors for businesses to promote, future research should explore what other emotions explain recovery effort effects on conciliatory behaviors. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007Post-purchase, Anger, Regret, Recovery,

The present series of three studies aims at investigating the hypothesis that some seemingly normal older persons have deficits in reasoning and decision making due to dysfunction in a neural system which includes the ventromedial prefrontal cortices. This hypothesis is relevant to the comprehensive study of aging, and also addresses the question of why so many older adults fall prey to fraud. To our knowledge, this work represents the first of its kind to begin to identify, from an individual-differences perspective, the behavioral, psychophysiological, and consumer correlates of defective decision making among healthy older adults. Our findings, in a cross-sectional sample of community-dwelling participants, demonstrate that a sizeable subset of older adults (approximately 35-40%) perform disadvantageously on a laboratory measure of decision making that closely mimics everyday life, by the manner in which it factors in reward, punishment, risk, and ambiguity. These same poor decision makers display defective autonomic responses (or somatic markers), reminiscent of that previously established in patients with acquired prefrontal lesions. Finally, we present data demonstrating that poor decision makers are more likely to fall prey to deceptive advertising, suggesting compromise of real-world judgment and decision-making abilities.

Antigen-specific T cells circulate freely and accumulate specifically at sites of antigen expression. To enhance the survival and targeting of systemically delivered viral vectors, we exploited the observation that retroviral particles adhere nonspecifically, or 'hitchhike,' to the surface of T cells. Adoptive transfer of antigen-specific T cells, loaded with viruses encoding interleukin (IL)-12 or Herpes Simplex Virus thymidine kinase (HSVtk), cured established metastatic disease where adoptive T-cell transfer alone was not effective. Productive hand off correlated with local heparanase expression either from malignant tumor cells and/or as a result of T-cell activation by antigen, providing high levels of selectivity for viral transfer to metastatic tumors in vivo. Protection, concentration and targeting of viruses by adsorption to cell carriers represent a new technique for systemic delivery of vectors, in fully immunocompetent hosts, for a variety of diseases in which delivery of genes may be therapeutically beneficial.

We investigated whether consumers in their sixties (or older) can use nutritional information as accurately as younger consumers in a pair of studies, the first conducted in a supermarket setting, the second in a laboratory. Both studies indicate that, when shoppers are instructed to select a cereal according to specific nutritional criteria, elderly subjects are less likely than younger subjects to search intensely and to select an appropriate cereal. In the laboratory setting, however, the agerelated differences diminished when subjects wrote down all the nutritional information acquired during their search. Age-related chan@es in information-processing ability may explain the findings. Implications for public policy are discussed.

Identifies some managerially relevant factors that influence the size of the price premium that consumers will pay for national brands over store brands in grocery products. We define price premium as the maximum price consumers will pay for a national brand over a store brand, expressed as the proportionate price differential between a national brand and a store brand. Overall, perceived quality differential accounts for about 12 percent of the variation in price premiums across consumers and product categories and is the most important variable influencing price premiums.

No abstract