Across four experiments, the authors find that when information pertaining to the assessment of the healthiness of food items is provided, the less healthy the item is portrayed to be, (1) the better is its inferred taste, (2) the more it is enjoyed during actual consumption, and (3) the greater is the preference for it in choice tasks when a hedonic goal is more (versus less) salient. The authors obtain these effects both among consumers who report that they believe that healthiness and tastiness are negatively correlated and, to a lesser degree, among those who do not report such a belief. The authors also provide evidence that the association between the concepts of "unhealthy" and "tasty" operates at an implicit level. The authors discuss possibilities for controlling the effect of the unhealthy = tasty intuition (and its potential for causing negative health consequences), including controlling the volume of unhealthy but tasty food eaten, changing unhealthy foods to make them less unhealthy but still tasty, and providing consumers with better information about what constitutes "healthy."

The primary goal of this research is to conceptualize and develop a scale of green consumption values, which we define as the tendency to express the value of environmental protection through one's purchases and consumption behaviors. Across six studies, we demonstrate that the six‐item measure we develop (i.e., the GREEN scale) can be used to capture green consumption values in a reliable, valid, and parsimonious manner. We further theorize and empirically demonstrate that green consumption values are part of a larger nomological network associated with conservation of not just environmental resources but also personal financial and physical resources. Finally, we demonstrate that the GREEN scale predicts consumer preference for environmentally friendly products. In doing so, we demonstrate that stronger green consumption values increase preference for environmentally friendly products through more favorable evaluations of the non‐environmental attributes of these products. These results have important implications for consumer responses to the growing number of environmentally friendly products.

Manufacturers are increasingly producing and promoting sustainable products (i.e., products that have a positive social and/or environmental impact). However, relatively little is known about how product sustainability affects consumers' preferences. The authors propose that sustainability may not always be an asset, even if most consumers care about social and environmental issues. The degree to which sustainability enhances preference depends on the type of benefit consumers most value for the product category in question. In this research, the authors demonstrate that consumers associate higher product ethicality with gentleness-related attributes and lower product ethicality with strength-related attributes. As a consequence of these associations, the positive effect of product sustainability on consumer preferences is reduced when strength-related attributes are valued, sometimes even resulting in preferences for less sustainable product alternatives (i.e., the "sustainability liability"). Conversely, when gentleness-related attributes are valued, sustainability enhances preference. In addition, the authors show that the potential negative impact of sustainability on product preferences can be attenuated using explicit cues about product strength.

By 2011, approximately 83% of Fortune 500 companies were using some form of social media to connect with consumers. Furthermore, surveys suggest that consumers are increasingly relying on social media to learn about unfamiliar brands. However, best practices regarding the use of social media to bolster brand evaluations in such situations remain undefined. This research focuses on one practice in this domain: the decision to hide or reveal the demographic characteristics of a brand's online supporters. The results from four studies indicate that even when the presence of these supporters is only passively experienced and virtual (a situation the authors term “mere virtual presence”), their demographic characteristics can influence a target consumer's brand evaluations and purchase intentions. The findings suggest a framework for brand managers to use when deciding whether to reveal the identities of their online supporters or to retain ambiguity according to (1) the composition of existing supporters relative to targeted new supporters and (2) whether the brand is likely to be evaluated singly or in combination with competing brands.

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Across four studies, including one involving an actual monetary decision, the authors demonstrate that forming a product consideration set by excluding versus including alternatives induces consumers to place more weight on ethical attributes, such as company labor practices and animal testing. This nonnormative difference reflects a compatibility between exclusion and ethics, and it holds regardless of attribute framing or consumer emotion. The authors also find that consumers judge others’ behavior more negatively for excluding ethical products than for including ethical products. These results have implications for the marketing of ethical products, both specifically (e.g., it is important to encourage exclusion modes) and generally (e.g., the failure to consider ethical products may reflect seemingly minor contextual issues guiding the decision process and not consumer disinterest in ethical issues).

Marketers of food products have recently introduced a variety of "functional foods" that promise consumers improvements in targeted physiological functions. However, despite the proliferation of functional food health claims promising more than basic nutrition, little is known about consumer responses to these claims, particularly in information environments in which inconsistent information may be available about the efficacy of a particular functional ingredient. Across two studies, the authors demonstrate that consumers with lower health consciousness are particularly sensitive to conflicting information about the validity of a functional food health claim; specifically, the presentation of conflicting (versus complementary) information significantly lowers their likelihood of choosing a functional over a nonfunctional food. In contrast, consumers with higher health consciousness do not reduce their likelihood of choosing a functional food when confronted with conflicting information. The authors demonstrate that this effect is driven by a confirmatory bias to believe the functional food health claim on the part of more health conscious consumers. The authors discuss implications for the successful marketing of functional foods and for public policy makers and consumers.

A s logistics and supply chain managers face increasingly complex challenges, there is a critical need to better understand the nuances of decision making in today's global business environment. However, the systematic effect of behavioral biases and cognitive limits on managerial judgment and decision making in our discipline has not received much attention to date. Behavioral experiments represent a potentially valuable and currently underutilized approach for gaining insight into logistics and supply chain decision making that is commonly characterized by departures from rational thought. This article challenges logistics and supply chain researchers to consider the opportunities and realities associated with using behavioral experiments in pursuit of knowledge in this area.