Akshay Rao

• University of Minnesota

John Jost (2017 – this issue) provides a thoughtful review of the literature in political psychology that speaks to important distinctions between conservatives and progressives. I use his essay as a point of departure to accomplish three goals: a) further elaborate on the left/right segmentation scheme, identifying other portions of the political...

When processing visually presented information, people move their eyes. This eye movement is governed by the employment of a general motor procedure related to direction. In three studies, we show that when subjects re-employ this directional motor procedure (that had been employed in a prior or contemporaneous (unrelated) task) when evaluating a p...

This study investigates the relationship between awareness, attitudes, intentions, media habits, and demographics and the frequency of flying during a one year period. Multiple discriminant analysis is used to profile market segments based on services offered by a general aviation airport. Awareness was found to have the least predictive power and...

In a series of studies, we document an advantage in sales volume for a bonus pack relative to an economically equivalent price discount. We provide evidence that consumers’ preferences for quantity changes (including bonus packs and quantity decreases) are due to their tendency toward neglecting the base value of percentages.

Prevailing wisdom on “pay what you want” (PWYW) pricing focuses on the influence of altruism or fairness on consumers’ payments. In this paper, we offer a different perspective by demonstrating that, if the seller and consumers interact repeatedly, and future provision of PWYW depends on whether current revenue under PWYW is sufficient for the sell...

This paper examines the attitudes and intentions of two very diverse segments of the market, general consumers and organizational buyers, towards new services proposed by a general aviation airport. Data were collected from 800 households and 200 businesses to test differences. These differences related to the degree of positivity of attitudes and...

We examine how brand-switching varies across cultures, depending on the drivers of a prior unsatisfactory consumption experience. We draw from the literature on regret, norm theory and cross-cultural psychology to predict that Westerners are more likely to switch brands when the unsatisfactory consumption experience is a consequence of their inacti...

In this commentary, I build on Cheng and Monroe’s paper on price perception and discuss how and why price is perceived in the manner in which it is, and how understanding this process can benefit theory and practice.

Purpose - Although some literature exists on how consumers may interpret firm-generated signals about the unobservable quality of their product, there has been little effort to examine whether and how managers deploy signals about unobservable quality to compete. Design/methodology/approach - In this chapter, we address this issue by examining whet...

Research suggests self-control relies on a limited set of resources that can be diminished by use. Recent theories posit that there are two stages of self-control: recognizing the need for control and implementing controlled responses. We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment and an intervention experiment to investigate whet...

The interpretation of a percentage change often hinges on the base value to which it is attached. The authors identify a tendency among consumers to neglect base values when processing percentage change information and investigate the implications of such base value neglect for how consumers evaluate economically equivalent offers presented in perc...

The American presidential election is one of the largest, most expensive, and most comprehensive marketing efforts. Despite this fact, marketing scholars have largely ignored this campaign, as well as thousands of others for congresspersons, senators, and governors. This article describes the growth of interest in research issues related to politic...

Many consider the President of the United States to be the most powerful person on earth. In order to get this “job,” the President is involved in one of the largest, most expensive and most comprehensive marketing efforts – the political campaign that leads to election day. This campaign, as well as thousands of others (e.g., congresspersons, sena...

Trade-in transactions typically involve an exchange of an old, used version for a new or newer version of the product. When consumers trade in their used model for a new model, the firm faces the choice of paying the consumer a relatively low price for the used model and charging a commensurately low price for the new model or paying a relatively h...

According to a thought experiment described by Aristotle, a person “who, though exceedingly hungry and thirsty, and both equally, yet being equidistant from food and drink, is therefore bound to stay where he is ” might consequently waste away for want of food and drink (Stocks 1922). The problem of choosing between two equally desirable options is...

and the University of Cambridge, on earlier versions of this manuscript. “Pay what you want ” as a profitable pricing strategy: Theory and experimental evidence Prevailing wisdom in the literature suggests that the success of a “pay what you want ” (PWYW) pricing strategy depends on consumers ’ altruistic inclinations, sense of fair play, or consum...

This paper draws on differences between men and women's attitudes about sex, either as an end in itself (men) or as inextricably linked to relationship commitment (women) to understand attitudes towards the gratuitous use of sex in advertising. In line with predictions, four experiments showed that women's spontaneous dislike of sexual ads softened...

People are frequently faced with making a new choice decision after a preferred option becomes unavailable. Prior research on the attraction effect has demonstrated how the introduction of an option into a choice set increases the share of one of the original options. The authors examine the related but previously unaddressed issue of whether the u...

What political candidates say during their campaign and when they say it are critical to their success. In three experiments, we show that abstract, "why"-laden appeals are more persuasive than concrete, "how"-laden appeals when voters' decision is temporally distant; the reverse is true when the decision is imminent, and these results are stronges...

This research reports on a cognitive neuroscientific examination of whether trade-off aversion explains the attraction effect. The principal study involves the neuroimaging of participants engaging in choice tasks while their cerebral activity is recorded. The authors examine whether the presence of a third (normatively irrelevant) alternative yiel...

When evaluating the net impact of a series of percentage changes, we predict that consumers may employ a "whole number" computational strategy that yields a systematic error in their calculation. We report on three studies conducted to examine this issue. In the first study we identify the computational error and demonstrate its consequences. In a...

We examine how prior outcomes can influence expectations about unrelated future events. Consistent with the affect literature, we first predict that prior outcomes will yield more optimistic expectations when the outcomes are positively, rather than negatively, valenced. We then predict that the impact of prior outcomes will depend on not only the...

In this article, the authors examine cross-cultural variations in how people discount the future. Specifically, they predict that people from Western cultures are relatively less patient and therefore discount the future to a greater degree than do people from Eastern cultures, and thus Westerners value immediate consumption relatively more. Furthe...

People are frequently exposed to potentially attractive events that are subsequently and unexpectedly reversed and to potentially painful events, which are also unexpectedly reversed. In the process of being returned to the initial asset position, does the sequence in which the positive and negative events occur matter? This issue of the combined e...

Slotting allowances are a relatively recent trend, particular to the retail food industry. These allowances are lump-sum up-front transfer payments from manufacturer to retailer when the manufacturer launches a new product. The practice has attracted some scrutiny because of uncertainty about its purposes and consequences. We draw from the extant l...

Recent research in information economics has focused on signals as mechanisms to solve problems that arise under asymmetric information. A firm or individual credibly communicates the level of some unobservable element in a transaction by providing an observable signal. When applied to conveying product quality information, this issue is of particu...

The retail practice of charging a fee to stock new products is a relatively new but growing phenomenon. Termed a "slotting allowance", it has attracted considerable scrutiny because of uncertainty about its purposes and consequences. We propose and statistically test several hypotheses to assess the degree of empirical support for each of several e...

In this article, the authors examine the circumstances in which brand names convey information about unobservable quality. They argue that a brand name can convey unobservable quality credibly when false claims will result in intolerable economic losses, These losses can occur for two reasons: (1) losses of reputation or sunk investments and (2) lo...

In this article, the authors examine the circumstances in which brand names convey information about unobservable quality. They argue that a brand name can convey unobservable quality credibly when false claims will result in intolerable economic losses. These losses can occur for two reasons: (1) losses of reputation or sunk investments and (2) lo...

Brand names are being conjoined, commingled and combined with other brand names in record numbers. The ubiquity of this phenomenon has not gone unnoticed amongst academics and managers, who are beginning to study the antecedents and consequences of such ‘alliances’. Managers contemplating a brand alliance should recognise that it is one of several...

Existing literature that argues for the prevalence of price premiums is examined. An evaluation of an extant model identifies several possible boundary conditions that limit the applicability of the model. A set of propositions is developed based on these boundary conditions, linking buyer, seller, and market factors to the magnitude of price premi...

Cooperative advertising arrangements between manufacturers and resellers contain two principal components in their payment schedules: a participation rate and an accrual rate. We analyze 2,156 cooperative advertising plans to see how they vary across consumer and industrial products, as well as between convenience and nonconvenience consumer produc...

A replication and extension of a study performed by Bearden and Etzel are reported in this article. The influence of peers on individuals' products and brand decisions for products that range in their degree of conspicuousness is examined for comparable samples in the United States and in Thailand to assess the validity of the original framework ov...

This article assesses whether differences in prior knowledge result in differences in (1) price acceptability and (2) the extent to which different types of information are examined. Using a personal computer-based methodology, subjects who varied in their prior product knowledge provided price responses, and the time they spent examining various k...

It appears that buyers sometimes knowingly pay a price that is higher than that justified by the relative quality of the product. Such a price premium is argued to be an economically rational attempt by quality-conscious buyers to ensure that the seller does not provide a lower than promised level of quality for experience products. Conversely, for...

The authors integrate previous research that has investigated experimentally the influence of price, brand name, and/or store name on buyers' evaluations of prod¬uct quality. The meta-analysis suggests that, for consumer products, the relation¬ships between price and perceived quality and between brand name and perceived quality are positive and st...

The authors integrate previous research that has investigated experimentally the influence of price, brand name, and/or store name on buyers’ evaluations of product quality. The meta-analysis suggests that, for consumer products, the relationships between price and perceived quality and between brand name and perceived quality are positive and stat...

This article examines the dissimilar use of product information cues in product evaluations by differentially familiar subjects. Specifically, the use of price cues and intrinsic product cues for the assessment of product quality is hypothesized to depend on prior knowledge. For a product with a positive quality-price association in the marketplace...