Consumers are often faced with choice sets whose composition changes over time. For example, while a consumer shops for a vacation over the Internet, a preferred option may disappear while he or she deliberates over the choices. In political contests, a candidate may enter and subsequently exit the race. Even if the option that disappears is irrelevant (because it is dominated by one of the other options), its initial presence and subsequent disappearance may influence the consumer’s eventual choice.
The authors examine the issue of disappearing options on choice shares of remaining options. They consider the context of political candidates entering and disappearing from the political marketplace. For example, Ralph Nader is widely regarded as having played the role of a spoiler for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election by his continued presence in the consideration set. The authors examine a different but related class of problem—specifically, the effect of the unexpected elimination of an alternative on the choice shares of the original option. Do shares return to the original level that existed before the introduction of the third option, or does one of the original options benefit from the exit of the third option? If so, which of the original options benefits and why? That is, would Al Gore have benefited from Nader’s entry and exit from the race more than if Nader had never entered the race in the first place?
In a series of studies, the authors demonstrate that the original option that is deemed to be most similar to the option that unexpectedly becomes unavailable benefits from the entry and exit of the option that becomes unavailable. The presence of multiple options that perform well on a particular attribute results in that attribute receiving greater weight in the evaluation process. The authors observe the effect for political candidates, for beer, for housing options, for vacations, for health insurance, and for automobiles. The conclude that Al Gore would have benefited if Ralph Nader had entered and then exited the presidential race because the presence of two liberal candidates would have increased the importance of attributes on which liberal candidates dominate.
Biography
William Hedgcock is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Henry B. Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa. He received his BAs in Economics and Psychology at Macalester College and his PhD in Business Administration from the University of Minnesota. Hedgcock conducts research in the areas of decision neuroscience and behavioral decision theory. He uses choices, response time analysis, and brain-imaging techniques to study cognitive functions while people make decisions.
Akshay R. Rao is General Mills Chair in Marketing and Director of the Institute for Research in Marketing in the Department of Marketing & Logistics Management, Carlson School of Management, at the University of Minnesota. He has a bachelor’s degree in Economics (honors) from Madras University in India, an MBA from Xavier Institute in India, and a PhD in Marketing from Virginia Polytechnic Institute. A winner of the 1987 Robert Ferber Award and the 2000 Harold H. Maynard Award, he has published articles on pricing and brand management in various scholarly journals, such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Business, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, as well as managerially oriented journals, such as Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review. For the 1993–1994 academic year, he was a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 2000–2001 he was a visiting professor at the Hong Kong Institute of Science and Technology. He currently serves on the editorial review boards of Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Consumer Psychology.
Haipeng (Allan) Chen is an assistant professor and May Research Fellow in Marketing at the Texas A&M University. He received his BEng (with honors) in Mechanical Engineering from Shandong Institute of Engineering (Zibo, China), his MA in Applied Linguistics from Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, China), and his PhD in Business Administration from the University of Minnesota. Chen conducts research in the area of behavioral decision theory, and his research interests focus on examining information processing and decision-making processes of individual consumers and managers and identifying cross-cultural differences in those processes. His research has been published or accepted for publication in Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of Monetary Economics and has been presented at the 2004 National Bureau of Economic Research Monetary Economics Program Meeting, the 2004 Society for Consumer Psychology Winter Meeting, the 2002 North American Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society, and the 2000 Association for Consumer Research Conference.
J Marketing Research, Volume 46, Number 3, June 2009
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