Abstract:We examine how individuals' regulatory focus affects their donation behavior and how personal events experienced before the donation moderate this relationship. In this research, regulatory focus refers to the basic motivational orientation that affects how individuals pursue their goals. We propose that donors will judge potential rewards and risks associated with making a donation when deciding whether to donate and that regulatory focus and personal events will have a significant influence on this judgment. The results from both the survey and the experiment confirmed that participants with promotion focus were more likely to donate than those with prevention focus. In addition, the experimental results revealed that compared to those experiencing no personal event, the donation likelihood of prevention-focused participants increased significantly after experiencing a positive personal event but did not change after experiencing a negative personal event. In a similar vein, experiencing a negative event decreased the donation likelihood of promotion-focused participants whereas experiencing a positive event did not. Our research contributes new findings and insights to both regulatory focus and donation literature and provides useful guidelines for nonprofit organizations to design and implement donation programs.

We investigated the combined effect on consumers of the perceptual fluency of price discounts and the two promotional cues of discount duration and frequency. We proposed that consumers' initial responses to price discounts would be maintained or modified depending on the processing fluency of discount information. Results from 2 experiments showed that when a promotional cue implied a short discount duration or low discount frequency and the discount information was difficult to process, participants perceived the duration as longer or the frequency as higher, and they evaluated the product less favorably if the discount information was difficult to process compared to if it was easy to process. On the contrary, when a cue implied a long discount duration or a high discount frequency, participants perceived the duration as shorter or the frequency as lower and evaluated the product more favorably if the discount information was difficult to process compared to if it was easy to process. We show conditions in which processing disfluency can be beneficial.