Hilke Plassmann

INSEAD | INSEAD · Area of Marketing

In modern human cultures where social hierarchies are ubiquitous, people typically signal their hierarchical position through consumption of positional goods—goods that convey one’s social position, such as luxury products. Building on animal research and early correlational human studies linking the sex steroid hormone testosterone with hierarchic...

We welcome Williams and Poehlman’s (forthcoming) effort to better conceptualize consciousness in consumer research. In this comment, our goal is to complement their ideas based on models and methods from cognitive and consumer neuroscience. We extend their suggestions in two important ways. First, we offer an extended framework based on a taxonomy...

In the last few years, work in the nascent field of neuroeconomics has advanced understanding of the brain systems involved in value-based decision making. An important modulator of valuation processes is the specific context a decision maker is facing during choice. Recently, neuroeconomics has made great progress in understanding, on both the bra...

How do individuals consider the price of a good when making purchase decisions? Standard economic theories assume an analytical process: Individuals consider the opportunity cost. Recent behavioral economic theories suggest an additional, hedonic process: Individuals consider the immediate displeasure or “pain of paying” the price.This paper is the...

A wealth of research has explored whether marketing-based expectancies such as price and brand quality beliefs influence the consumption experience and subsequent behavior, but almost no research has examined individual differences in "marketing placebo effects." In this article, the authors suggest three moderators of the effect of marketing-based...

The first decade of consumer neuroscience research has produced groundbreaking work in identifying the basic neural processes underlying human judgment and decision making, with the majority of such studies published in neuroscience journals and influencing models of brain function. Yet for the field of consumer neuroscience to thrive in the next d...

Introduction In 2004, the journal Neuron published a paper titled “ Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preferences for Culturally Familiar Drinks.” But the work was already generating significant buzz under the somewhat less scientific title of “ the Coke-Pepsi study.” Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the authors had examined how va...

A major goal of research in neuroeconomics is to formulate a theory of how we make decisions, grounded in both the psychology and economics of choice behavior and a knowledge of the underlying biology. Consistent decision making requires assigning values to the available options - a process referred to as valuation. Thus, understanding how valuatio...

The application of neuroscience to marketing, and in particular to the consumer psychology of brands, has gained popularity over the past decade in the academic and the corporate world. In this paper, we provide an overview of the current and previous research in this area and explain why researchers and practitioners alike are excited about applyi...

Cognitive regulation is often used to influence behavioral outcomes. However, the computational and neurobiological mechanisms by which it affects behavior remain unknown. We studied this issue using an fMRI task in which human participants used cognitive regulation to upregulate and downregulate their cravings for foods at the time of choice. We f...

This article proposes that neuroscience can shape future theory and models in consumer decision making and suggests ways that neuroscience methods can be used in decision-making research. The article argues that neuroscience facilitates better theory development and empirical testing by considering the physiological context and the role of construc...

The application of neuroscience to marketing, and in particular to the consumer psychology of brands, has gained popularity over the past decade in the academic and the corporate world. In this paper, we provide an overview of the current and previous research in this area and explain why researchers and practitioners alike are excited about applyi...

Neuroimaging allows to estimate brain activity when individuals are doing something. The location and intensity of this estimated activity provides information on the dynamics and processes that guide choice behaviour and associated actions that should be considered a complement to behavioural studies. Decision neuroscience therefore sheds new ligh...

Jährlich werden in globalen Wirtschaftssystemen Güter im Werte von mehreren tausend Billionen von US $ gehandelt (o.V., 2009). Solche makro-ökonomischen Entscheidungsprozesse lassen sich aus einer mikro-ökonomischen Perspektive auf nutzenbasierte Austauschprozesse vereinfachen, bei denen Individuen oder Gruppen von Individuen einem Produkt oder ein...

Consumer neuroscience is a new, burgeoning field comprising academic research at the intersection of neuroscience proper, psychology, economics, decision theory, and marketing. Its main goal is to shed light on basic questions of consumer behavior by coupling traditional, experimental, and statistical research techniques with those developed by neu...

An essential feature of choice is the assignment of goal values (GVs) to the different options under consideration at the time of decision making. This computation is done when choosing among appetitive and aversive items. Several groups have studied the location of GV computations for appetitive stimuli, but the problem of valuation in aversive co...

There is a growing consensus that the brain computes value and saliency-like signals at the time of decision-making. Value signals are essential for making choices. Saliency signals are related to motivation, attention, and arousal. Unfortunately, an unequivocal characterization of the areas involved in these 2 distinct sets of processes is made di...

Several studies have found decision-making-related value signals in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). However, it is unknown whether the DLPFC plays a causal role in decision-making, or whether it implements computations that are correlated with valuations, but that do not participate in the valuation process itself. We addressed this que...

There is a growing consensus that the brain computes value and saliency-like signals at the time of decision-making. Value signals are essential for making choices. Saliency signals are related to motivation, attention, and arousal. Unfortunately, an unequivocal characterization of the areas involved in these 2 distinct sets of processes is made di...

Recently, a rapidly growing approach within consumer research has developed under the label of "consumer neuroscience." Its goal is to use insights and methods from neuroscience to enhance the understanding of consumer behavior. In this paper we aim to provide an overview of questions of interest to consumer researchers, to present initial research...

In the present paper we investigate whether choice ambiguity modulates activity in brain areas that represent brand preference and decision utility, as identified in previous studies. Our findings reveal that brain areas involved in the interaction of brand information and ambiguity information are the (predominantly left) ventromedial prefrontal c...

Despite the importance and pervasiveness of marketing, almost nothing is known about the neural mechanisms through which it affects decisions made by individuals. We propose that marketing actions, such as changes in the price of a product, can affect neural representations of experienced pleasantness. We tested this hypothesis by scanning human su...

An essential component of every economic transaction is a willingness-to-pay (WTP) computation in which buyers calculate the maximum amount of financial resources that they are willing to give up in exchange for the object being sold. Despite its pervasiveness, little is known about how the brain makes this computation. We investigated the neural b...

Human cognitive decisions can be strongly susceptible to the manner in which options are presented ('framing effect'). Here we investigated the neural basis of response adjustments induced by changing frames during intuitive decisions. Evidence exists that the anterior cingulate cortex plays a general role in behavioral adjustments. We hypothesized...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief overview of the methodology of several brain imaging techniques and in particular, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and its potential implications for market research. The aim is to enable the reader both to understand this emerging methodology and to conduct independent research i...

The insights of neuroscience are only just becoming available for the study of advertising. This paper seeks to consolidate the contribution so far. Advertising works in two ways: it may trigger some immediate response and/or change the respondent's brand memories in some way that influences later behaviour. This paper addresses the latter process....

The first decade of consumer neuroscience research has produced groundbreaking work in identifying the basic neural processes underlying human judgment and decision making, with the majority of such studies published in neuroscience journals and influencing models of brain function. Yet for the field of consumer neuroscience to thrive in the next d...

Extant research has widely investigated linear functional forms in satisfaction and loyalty models. Though complex nonlinear nature of satisfaction loyalty link is suggested by several researchers, few attempts have been made to empirically examine nonlinearity. Moreover, researchers have used divergent functional forms to model nonlinearity and th...

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (“fMRI”) to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying home–biased, financial decision-making. Twenty-eight subjects were instructed to make binary investment decisions between a foreign and a domestic mutual fund. Differential brain activity was detected between decisions involving funds of different...

The measurement of emotional responses to advertising stimuli is a central field of advertising research. Although the role of feelings at a verbal and therefore conscious level has been investigated extensively in the marketing literature, little is known about how the human brain is involved in advertising perception processes. The methodological...

Until now, economic theory has not systematically integrated the influence of emotions on decision-making. Since evidence from neuroscience suggests that decision-making as hypothesized in economic theory depends on prior emotional processing, interdisciplinary research under the label of "neuroeconomics" arose. The key idea of this approach is to...

Neural processes within the medial prefrontal cortex play a crucial role in assessing and integrating emotional and other implicit information during decision-making. Phylogenetically, it was important for the individual to assess the relevance of all kinds of environmental stimuli in order to adapt behavior in a flexible manner. Consequently, we c...

In this working paper it is investigated how affect and cognition interact in consumer decision making. The research framework is multidisciplinary by applying a neuroscientific method to answer the question which information is processed during brand choice immediately when the decision is computed in the test person’s brain. In a neuroscientific...

The authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how individual economic decisions are influenced by implicit memory contributions. Twenty-two participants were asked to make binary decisions between different brands of sensorily nearly undistinguishable consumer goods. Changes of brain activity comparing decisions in th...

Over the last two years a research field has developed under the banner of 'neuroeconomics' in which recent neuroscientific methods are deploid to analyze economically relevant processes. This paper aims to provide an overview of the methodology and current state of neuroeconomic research by giving a brief definition of the concept of neuroeconomic...

Vertrieb kann als „Kundenmanagement mit dem Ziel des Verkaufs“ verstanden werden. Es herrscht breiter Konsens, dass, im Rahmen der Marken- und Vertriebspolitik, der Konsument in den Fokus des unternehmerischen Handelns zu rücken ist.

Abstract An essential component,of goal-directed choice is the assignment,of values to the different options under consideration. This computation,needs,to be done both when choosing among appetitive options (e.g., two meals), and when choosing among aversive items (e.g., two undesirable risks). Although much is known about the neural basis of valu...