On Amir and Jonathan Levav
Executive Summary
By now there is little doubt that except in some basic cases, (revealed)preferences can be labile and subject to contextual influence. This preference construction view assumes that people’s choices reflect preferences that are formed at the time of decision. Less is known about what happens after the preference is actually “constructed,” but there is an implicit assumption in the preference construction literature that growing familiarity with the preference object leads to a stable, context-independent preference for that object, and there is experimental evidence that expertise is associated with greater resistance to contextual influence. In this article, the authors suggest that people might approach choices as problem-solving situations and that rather than construct their preferences, they simply construct choices. The difference between preference construction and choice construction is that in preference construction, people are assumed to assess and learn subjective attribute values and eventually arrive at relatively stable preferences, whereas in choice construction, they simply learn context-specific choice strategies without ever engaging in difficult subjective value assessment. The authors show that in such situations, people are less likely to arrive at a stable preference in the subjective attribute value sense; instead, they simply learn to use contextual cues repeatedly.
For a marketing manager, this insight is important because it means that a consistent revealed preference captured by scanner data might represent a preference for the location of, for example, a specific detergent on the shelf (e.g., at eye level) rather than a preference for its particular attribute combination. When the detergent is moved to a different part of the shelf, the consumer might change his or her choice. To the marketing researcher, this change may signal a preference shift with respect to detergents. However, the choice of the new detergent will be consistent with a consumer’s preference in a context (i.e., he or she likes to pick what is at eye level on the shelf). The current research suggests that marketing managers should be sensitive to that notion that when consumers construct their choices, the critical variable affecting their choice is the context of the decision and not the value of a product’s attributes.
Biography
On Amir is an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Rady School at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Amir received his PhD in Management Science and Marketing from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management in 2003. Dr. Amir’s research focuses on using psychological and economic principles to identify successful strategies in different consumption environments. He investigates pricing issues and the dynamics of preferences in the market. He also investigates different consumer decision-making mechanisms and their influences on the offline and online marketplaces. He has received several research awards from the Marketing Science Institute for his work on consumer choice and reasoning. Before coming to University of California, San Diego, he was an assistant professor of marketing at Yale University.
Jonathan Levav is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Columbia Business School. Jonathan earned his bachelor’s degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and his doctorate in business administration from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. His research focuses on consumer behavior and the psychology of decision making and judgment.
Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. XLV, No. 2, April 2008
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