The predominant, but largely untested, assumption in research on food choice is that people obey the classic commandments of rational behavior: they carefully look up every piece of relevant information, weight each piece according to subjective importance, and then combine them into a judgment or choice. In real world situations, however, the available time, motivation, and computational resources may simply not suffice to keep these commandments. Indeed, there is a large body of research suggesting that human choice is often better accommodated by heuristics-simple rules that enable decision making on the basis of a few, but important, pieces of information. We investigated the prevalence of such heuristics in a computerized experiment that engaged participants in a series of choices between two lunch dishes. Employing MouselabWeb, a process-tracing technique, we found that simple heuristics described an overwhelmingly large proportion of choices, whereas strategies traditionally deemed rational were barely apparent in our data. Replicating previous findings, we also observed that visual stimulus segments received a much larger proportion of attention than any nutritional values did. Our results suggest that, consistent with human behavior in other domains, people make their food choices on the basis of simple and informationally frugal heuristics.
In this article, we argue that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) challenge established marketing understanding of digital ownership, uniqueness, and value; authenticity, status, and sharing; and branding and distribution. We propose a set of preliminary research questions rooted in these areas, in hopes of offering entry points to future programmatic investigation of the broader field of “crypto-marketing.” This emerging subdiscipline offers opportunities to expand our understanding of consumer behavior, pricing, and product design and may be crucial in predicting the future of our discipline as NFTs further evolve.
Mass customization interfaces typically guide consumers through the configuration process in a sequential manner, focusing on one product attribute after the other. What if this standardized customization experience were personalized for consumers on the basis of how they process information? A series of large-scale field and experimental studies, conducted with Western and Eastern consumers, shows that matching the interface to consumers’ culture-specific processing style enhances the effectiveness of mass customization. Specifically, presenting the same information isolated (by attribute) to Western consumers but contextualized (by alternative) to Eastern consumers increases satisfaction with and likelihood of purchasing the configured product, along with the amount of money spent on the product. These positive consumer responses emerge because of an increase in “interface fluency”—consumers’ subjective experience of ease when using the interface. The authors advise firms to personalize the customization experience by employing processing-congruent interfaces across consumer markets.
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