Bart de Langhe

• University of Colorado Boulder

Digital advertising platforms have emerged as a widely utilized data source in consumer research; yet, the interpretation of such data remains a source of confusion for many researchers. This article aims to address this issue by offering a comprehensive and accessible review of four prominent data collection methods proposed in the marketing liter...

André and de Langhe (2021) pointed out that Walasek and Stewart (2015) estimated loss aversion on different lotteries in different conditions. Because of this flaw in the experimental design, their results should not be taken as evidence that loss aversion can disappear and reverse, or that decision by sampling is the origin of loss aversion. In th...

Loss aversion-the idea that losses loom larger than equivalent gains-is one of the most important ideas in Behavioral Economics. In an influential article published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Walasek and Stewart (2015) test an implication of decision by sampling theory: Loss aversion can disappear, and even reverse, dependi...

Price knowledge is a key antecedent of many consumer judgments and decisions. This paper examines consumers’ ability to form accurate beliefs about the minimum, the maximum, and the overall variability of prices for multiple product categories. Eight experiments provide evidence for a novel phenomenon we call dispersion spillover: Consumers tend to...

André and de Langhe (2021) pointed out that Walasek and Stewart (2015) estimated loss aversion on different lotteries in different conditions. Because of this flaw in the experimental design, their results should not be taken as evidence that loss aversion can disappear and reverse, or that decision by sampling is the origin of loss aversion. In th...

Diversification—investing in imperfectly correlated assets—reduces volatility without sacrificing expected returns. Although the expected return of a diversified portfolio is the weighted average return of its constituent parts, the variance of the portfolio is less than the weighted average variance of its constituent parts. Our results suggest th...

Loss aversion—the idea that losses loom larger than equivalent gains—is one of the most important ideas in Behavioral Economics. In an influential article published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Walasek and Stewart (2015) test an implication of decision by sampling theory: Loss aversion can disappear, and even reverse, dependi...

Companies can create value by differentiating their products and services along quantitative attributes. Existing research suggests that consumers’ tendency to rely on relatively effortless and affect-based processes reduces their sensitivity to the scope of quantitative attributes and that this explains why increments along quantitative attributes...

Consumers incorrectly rely on their sense of understanding of what a company does to evaluate investment risk. In three correlational studies, greater sense of understanding was associated with lower risk ratings (Study 1) and with prediction distributions of future stock performance that had lower standard deviations and higher means (Studies 2 an...

To make educated decisions, individuals often need to possess various summary statistics of numerical outcomes. For example, to assess the likelihood of finding a better price for an iPhone, a consumer must know the average price for this product, and possess some information about the variance of those prices on the market for iPhones. If past res...

For more than 50 years, researchers have been studying the intuitive statistical capabilities of humans (Peterson and Beach 1967). While some consensus has emerged, many unresolved questions remain. In this project, we address one of these questions, which has important marketing implications: Can consumers accurately encode and represent the distr...

In de Langhe, Fernbach, and Lichtenstein (2016) we argue that consumers trust average user ratings as indicators of objective product performance much more than they should. This simple idea has provoked passionate commentaries from eminent researchers across three sub-disciplines of marketing: experimental consumer research, modeling, and qualitat...

Diversification — investing in imperfectly correlated assets — reduces expected volatility without sacrificing expected returns. While the expected return from a diversified portfolio is just the weighted average mean of its constituent parts, the expected variance is less than the weighted average variance of its constituent parts. We demonstrate...

This research documents a substantial disconnect between the objective quality information that online user ratings actually convey and the extent to which consumers trust them as indicators of objective quality. Analyses of a dataset covering 1,272 products across 120 vertically-differentiated product categories reveal that average user ratings (1...

The marketplace is replete with productivity metrics that put units of output in the numerator and one unit of time in the denominator (e.g., megabits per second [Mbps] to measure download speed). In this article, three studies examine how productivity metrics influence consumer decision making. Many consumers have incorrect intuitions about the im...

Prominent decision-making theories propose that individuals (should) evaluate alternatives by combining gains and losses in an additive way. Instead, we suggest that individuals seek to maximize the rate of exchange between positive and negative outcomes and thus combine gains and losses in a multiplicative way. Sensitivity to gain-loss ratio provi...

In some product categories, low-priced brands are consistently of low quality, but high-priced brands can be anything from terrible to excellent. In other product categories, high-priced brands are consistently of high quality, but quality of low-priced brands varies widely. Three experiments demonstrate that such heteroscedasticity leads to more e...

This article challenges the view that it is always better to hold decision makers accountable for their decision process rather than their decision outcomes. In three multiple-cue judgment studies, the authors show that process accountability, relative to outcome accountability, consistently improves judgment quality in relatively simple elemental...

In an increasingly globalized marketplace, it is common for marketing researchers to collect data from respondents who are not native speakers of the language in which the questions are formulated. Examples include online customer ratings and internal marketing initiatives in multinational corporations. This raises the issue of whether providing re...

The ability to learn about the relation or covariation between events happening in the world is probably the most critical aspect of human cognition. This dissertation examines how the human mind learns numerical and emotional relations and explores consequences for managerial and consumer decision making. First, we study how uncertainty in the e...

This research contributes to the current understanding of language effects in advertising by uncovering a previously ignored mechanism shaping consumer response to an increasingly globalized marketplace. We propose a language-specific episodic trace theory of language emotionality to explain how language influences the perceived emotionality of mar...

Two experiments show that a shortage of self-regulatory resources results in more risk aversion in mixed-gamble (gain/loss) situations. The findings support a dual process view that distinguishes between a rational and an affective information processing system, in which self-regulatory resources are the necessary fuel for the rational system. Depe...