Executive Summary
In several studies, the authors find that information used to screen alternatives becomes less important than information acquired later in the search process simply because it was used to screen. This article shows that the task of screening alternatives (i.e., narrowing down choice options on the basis of some initial information) induces a nonnormative tendency to deemphasize the prescreening information in subsequent stages of decision making. This tendency to deemphasize the prescreening information leads to systematically different final choices for decision makers who screen alternatives and decision makers who do not engage in screening. This is of concern especially when prescreening and postscreening information are negatively correlated.
The authors find that this effect persists even when the options have considerable variance on the prescreening attributes and when the prescreening information is considered more important than the postscreening information. The prescreening information is deemphasized when people actively categorize the items to be retained in their consideration set. This happens because after the screening stage is completed, decision makers perceive little variance among alternatives on the prescreening information and, consequently, feel licensed to ignore the prescreening information at the final choice stage.
The reduced consideration of information subsequent to its use could have implications in various situations. For example, consider the situation in which a decision maker collects information on an important attribute (e.g., quality), uses this information to create a consideration set, gathers additional information (e.g., price), and makes a choice. This process will encourage the decision maker to place more emphasis on price and less emphasis on quality than another decision maker who does not screen and makes a choice in an all-at-once fashion, using both price and quality information simultaneously. As a consequence, the decision maker who screens is more likely to choose a relatively low-priced option, and the decision maker who does not screen is more likely to choose a relatively high-quality option. As a result, a brand’s strength of consideration (i.e., how highly an option ranks on screening criteria) may have little influence on the likelihood that it is chosen in a postscreening choice process.
Likewise, consumers who place a strong emphasis on price during the choice of a primary product may place less emphasis on price when considering the purchase of complementary products. Similarly, consumers who place a strong emphasis on health (e.g., fat, calories) during grocery shopping may be less sensitive to health when selecting items for consumption. Although these two examples are divergent, they share the common theme of information neglect as a consequence of its prior use. Thus, the neglect of prescreening information that this article documents may be an example of a more general tendency for people to ignore information that has been considered and used at an earlier stage in the decision process.
Biography
Amitav Chakravarti is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University. He holds a PhD in Marketing from the University of Florida, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, and a BA in Economics from the University of Bombay (India). His current research interests include consideration set composition, effects of consideration on choice, role of categorization in decision making, generic versus brand-level advertising, the effect of externally imposed groupings, similarity and cognition, structural alignment theory, and consumer information processing under uncertainty. His research has been published in Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Marketing Research.
Chris Janiszewski is Faricy Professor of Marketing in the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida. His current research focuses on perception, learning theory, and context effects as applied to price perception, consumer responses to advertising, and consumer purchase behavior. Janiszewski has published in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Marketing and is a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Research.
Gülden Ülkümen is a doctoral student in Marketing in the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University. She received her MBA from Koç University, Istanbul, and her Bachelor of Science in Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering from Istanbul Technical University, Turkey. Her research focuses on categorization and grouping effects on consumer behavior. In particular, she studies the influence of perceptual category width on consumer decision making and the biases introduced by the grouping of time intervals on consumption planning.
J Marketing Research, Volume 43, Number 4, November 2006
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