About AMA

Executive Summary
Marketing activities frequently involve personalizing product offers or providing product recommendations to consumers' individually measured preferences. Nonetheless, the success of tailoring product recommendations to individually measured preferences is based on the assumptions that consumers have preferences that marketers can uncover and use to derive product offers and that consumers recognize the value of a recommendation that is tailored to their stated preferences.

However, research has shown that in many cases, consumers do not have clear and stable preferences to reveal but rather construct them when the need to make a choice arises. An implication of the unstable nature of preferences is that consumers often do not simply articulate but rather construct the preferences they state in the measurement task. A second implication is that consumers need to identify and understand their stated preferences to evaluate whether the personalized recommendation actually matches their tastes better than alternative product options. This suggests that consumers for whom it is more difficult to identify their constructed preference expressions may not recognize the superior value of a personalized recommendation that best fits their tastes.

Therefore, it is important to consider the conditions that affect the ease with which consumers are able to identify their stated preferences for attributes and attribute levels. In particular, this research identifies task transparency as a critical property of preference measurement methods that determines the ease with which consumers can identify their stated preferences, as well as subsequent evaluations of personalized recommendations based on these specifications. A series of studies tests the prediction that choices of personalized recommendations correspond more closely to preferences expressed in tasks that allow consumers to "see through" them more easily to identify their measured responses (i.e., transparent measurement tasks). However, the ease with which consumers can identify their stated preferences affects recommendation evaluations only for novices (versus experts), who are more likely to construct (versus retrieve) and rely on their responses to the measurement task. Further evidence for the task transparency hypothesis is found by showing that making the identification of stated preferences more difficult can eliminate the effect. Finally, the author finds support for the hypothesized process underlying the effect of the ease with which consumers can identify their stated preferences on choice by investigating the mediational role of consumers' understanding of their own preferences.

These findings have important implications, demonstrating that consumers must be able to see through the construction of their preferences to maximize utility. Thus, marketers who provide personalized recommendations immediately after eliciting preferences must ensure that consumers can correctly identify and understand the preferences stated in the measurement task.

Biography
Thomas Kramer is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, City University of New York. He received his PhD from Stanford University and his master's and bachelor's degrees from Baruch College. His research investigates consumer decision making and cross-cultural consumer behavior. He has taught both undergraduate and graduate-level courses in Marketing Management and International Marketing since joining the Baruch College faculty in 2003.