Prior studies have shown that people sometimes base judgments on the subjective meta-cognitive experience, for example, the ease or difficulty with which relevant information comes to mind (referred to as “ease-of-retrieval” by Schwarz et al.1991). For instance, Wänke et al. (1997) have shown that consumers evaluate a BMW less favorably after generating ten reasons to choose a BMW over a Mercedes than with only one self-generated reason. Our research ultimately intends to look into three possible mechanisms for this “ease-of-reasoning” effect. The first two explanations have been offered by prior studies, but there seem to be mixed findings in the literature (see Haddock 2000 and Wänke & Bless 2000 for reviews). The first possible mechanism suggested by prior studies is the ‘availability heuristic’ based processing. This heuristic-based account suggests that people infer a scarcity of good reasons from the experienced difficulty of Abstract Most important goals cannot be attained without considerable self-regulation and effort (Cantor and Blanton, 1996). During the process to attain the desirable end state that the personal goal focuses on, consumers need to choose between multiple goals (Kruglanski, Shah, Fishbach, Friedman, Chun and Sleeth-Keppler, 2002), to restrain “irresistible” impulses (Baumeister, 2002), and need commitment to persistently pursue the current goals (Brunstein, 1993; Locke and Latham, 2002). Altogether, the process of goal striving can be quite exhausting leading many times to interruptions of current goal-pursuit (Baumeister, Heatherton and Tice, 1994). A common assumption in the literature is that in order to reach a specific goal, consumers need to progress through some sequence of steps when making a choice (Bettman, 1979), consistently regulating their activities in alignment with their focal goals (Hacker, 1985). For example, Bettman (1979) proposed that in order to reach goals, a set of sub-goals must be

A default option is the choice alternative a consumer receives if he/she does not explicitly specify otherwise. In this article we argue that defaults can invoke a consumer's "marketplace metacognition," his/her social intelligence about marketplace behavior. This metacognitive account of defaults leads to different predictions than accounts based on cognitive limitations or endowment: in particular, it predicts the possibility of negative or "backfire" default effects. In two experiments, we demonstrate that the size and direction of the default effect depend on whether this social intelligence is invoked and how it changes the interpretation of the default.

We resolve competing explanations for bolstering (dissonance, endowment, pre-choice distortion) in an experiment directly manipulating whether or not a subject freely chooses the evaluated item. We then separately model the effects of pre-choice distortions on selection and on bolstering of an item given that it is chosen, while accounting for endogeneity present in the data. Our results generally support the notion that bolstering is rooted in pre-choice distortion processes.

Consumers sometimes treat trivial attributes as though they were critically important in the sense that they have a significant impact on choice. We propose a reasons-based account to explain the valuation of trivial attributes and in particular why valuation is in some cases positive and in others negative. We suggest that consumers treat trivial attributes as though they had value when such valuation is instrumental, that is, helps accomplish a task goal. The valence of the effect can depend on whether a positive or negative reason provides a clearer justification for preferring a single brand over its competitors. Thus the same trivial attribute can generate a positive or negative valuation depending on the choice setting. Such valuation is not always driven by inferences about the attribute itself but can reflect transitory reasoning about the brand as a whole, based on the way it is differentiated from its competitors. Results from two experiments support the reasons-based model and help resolve some apparently conflicting effects previously reported for trivial attributes.

Consumers' understanding of their own preferences can be aided by a "consumption vocabulary"-a taxonomy or framework that facilitates identifying the relation between a product's features and one's evaluation of the product. In the absence of such a vocabulary, consumers' understanding of their own preferences will require more extensive experience and may never fully develop. The effect of such a vocabulary is tested in two experiments in which subjects provided with a vocabulary (1) exhibit better-defined and more consistent preferences than control subjects, (2) show improved cue discovery, and (3) show learning (i.e., increases in consistency over time). All results hold regardless of the functional form of the model used to assess subjects' preference formation.

Abstract