John G. Lynch

• PhD, Psychology
• University of Colorado Distinguished Professor at University of Colorado Boulder

How does financial education lead to improved financial behavior and higher financial well-being? An influential Consumer Financial Protection Bureau model (CFPB 2015) proposes that the goal of financial education is to improve financial well-being and that financial education does so by increasing financial knowledge, which improves financial beha...

Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is the default approach to statistical analysis and reporting in marketing and the biomedical and social sciences more broadly. Despite its default role, NHST has long been criticized by both statisticians and applied researchers including those within marketing. Therefore, the authors propose a major tra...

We investigate the impact of employer matching contributions on leakage at job termination.

Over the past several decades, scholars have highlighted the obligations and opportunities for marketing as a discipline to play a role in creating a better world-or risk becoming irrelevant for the largest problems facing consumers and society. This paper provides a framework to enhance the relevance and rigor of research in marketing that not onl...

The field of marketing has made significant strides over the past 50 years in understanding how methodological choices affect the validity of conclusions drawn from our research. This paper highlights some of these and is organized as follows: We first summarize essential concepts about measurement and the role of cumulating knowledge, then highlig...

Consumer research often fails to have broad impact on members of the marketing discipline, on adjacent disciplines studying related phenomena, and on relevant stakeholders who stand to benefit from the knowledge created by rigorous research. The authors propose that impact is limited because consumer researchers have adhered to a set of implicit bo...

Consumer research often fails to have broad impact on members of our own discipline, on adjacent disciplines studying related phenomena, and on relevant stakeholders who stand to benefit from the knowledge created by our rigorous research. We propose that impact is limited because consumer researchers have adhered to a set of implicit boundaries or...

Many consumers suffer from low levels of financial literacy, and attempts to increase this dimension of consumer expertise via educational interventions are typically unsuccessful. We argue that many of these apparent deficits are caused by the distribution of responsibility for knowledge and decision-making between relationship partners. Early in...

Individuals plan for the use of their resources daily. We explore how the level of details of one’s budget affects the budget’s predictive power. We find evidence that more detailed budgets predict spending less accurately. This phenomenon is mediated by one’s liking for the products budgeted and perceived financial constraint.

Purpose Intercultural competence has been found to be increasingly important. The purpose of this paper is to understand how intercultural competence impacts service providers’ ability to recognition faces of both black and white consumers. Design/methodology/approach Two experiments were administered to understand how intercultural competence i...

A budget constraint is typically construed as a single fungible resource (money) from which the individual allocates money to goods and services. However, less fungible resources—such as gift cards or allowances—make up a significant fraction of consumers’ budget. This is particularly true in the United States, where 15% of the population receives...

Though perceived financial well-being is viewed as an important topic of consumer research, the literature contains no accepted definition of this construct. Further, there has been little systematic examination of how perceived financial well-being may affect overall well-being. Using consumer financial narratives, several large-scale surveys, and...

Low incomes, limited financial literacy, fraud, and deception are just a few of the many intractable economic and social factors that contribute to the financial difficulties that households face today. Addressing these issues directly is difficult and costly. But poor financial outcomes also result from systematic psychological tendencies, includi...

This paper examines how consumers forecast their future spare money or “financial slack.” While consumers generally think that both their income and expenses will rise in the future, they underweight the extent to which their expected expenses will cut into their spare money, a phenomenon we term “expense neglect.” We test and rule out several poss...

We replicate and extend the work of Degeratu, Rangaswami, and Wu (2000) and Danaher, Wilson, and Davis (2003). Using econometric analyses of purchase behavior, both studies found a larger role of brands in purchases in online versus offline shopping environments. We use two controlled randomized experiments, eliminating certain alternative explanat...

This special issue is devoted to exploring new methods for addressing questions in strategic management. This introduction synthesizes the collective contribution of the articles for strategy research. The articles draw on methods from other fields, extending and adapting them to address strategy questions. The innovations provide new, different, o...

We contrast the philosophy guiding the Replication Corner at IJRM with replication efforts in psychology. Psychology has promoted "exact" or "direct" replications, reflecting an interest in statistical conclusion validity of the original findings. Implicitly, this philosophy treats non-replication as evidence that the original finding is not "real"...

Considerable prior statistical work has criticized replacing a continuously measured variable in a general linear model with a dichotomy based on a median split of that variable. Iacobucci, Posovac, Kardes, Schneider, and Popovich (this issue) defend the practice of “median splits” using both conceptual arguments and simulations. We dispute their c...

Simonson (2015a) addresses marketing scholars trained in psychology who focus on behavioral decision theory. He encourages those scholars to shift some attention from traditional BDT topics to analyze substantive issues such as how the Internet changes consumer decision making. I agree with and I expand upon his call to action. I analyze sociology...

There is no worse time to be interrupted than right now. Being close to attaining a goal to complete a focal task increases the attractiveness of that task compared to an interrupting task (study 1), makes people less willing to take on some otherwise attractive interruption than if they were farther away from completion (studies 2, 3, and 4), and...

Considerable prior statistical work has criticized replacing a continuously measured variable in a general linear model with a dichotomy based on a median split of that variable. Iacobucci, Posovac, Kardes, Schneider, and Popovich (2015-in this issue) defend the practice of “median splits” using both conceptual arguments and simulations. We dispute...

Many consumers suffer from low levels of financial literacy, and attempts to increase this dimension of consumer expertise via educational interventions are typically unsuccessful. We propose that many of these apparent deficits in literacy and learning may be caused by a cognitively efficient distribution of responsibility for knowledge and decisi...

When consumers perceive that a resource is limited and may be insufficient to accomplish goals, they recruit and enact plans to cope with the shortage. We distinguish two common strategies: efficiency planning yields savings by stretching the resource, whereas priority planning does so by sacrificing less important goals. Using a variety of methods...

Policy makers have embraced financial education as a necessary antidote to the increasing complexity of consumers' financial decisions over the last generation. We conduct a meta-analysis of the relationship of financial literacy and of financial education to financial behaviors in 168 papers covering 201 prior studies. We find that interventions t...

It is common for authors discovering a significant interaction of a measured variable X with a manipulated variable Z to examine simple effects of Z at different levels of X. These “spotlight” tests are often misunderstood even in the simplest cases, and it appears that consumer researchers are unsure how to extend them to more complex designs. We...

The modal scientific approach in consumer research is to deduce hypotheses from existing theory about relationships between theoretic constructs, test those relationships experimentally, and then show “process” evidence via moderation and mediation. This approach has its advantages, but other styles of research also have much to offer. We distingui...

A larger role for substantively motivated research can help our field in three ways. Substantively motivated consumer research can remove our paradigmatic blinders to help us see new topics for research that later scholars will recognize as truly central topics for consumer research. It can increase our influence in the public domain and among othe...

La procedure de Baron et Kenny pour determiner si une variable independante affecte une variable dependante a travers une mediatrice est si connue qu'elle est utilisee par les auteurs et requise par les relecteurs quasi systematiquement. De nombreux projets de recherche ont ete stoppes tot dans un programme de recherche ou plus tard dans le process...

Baron and Kenny's procedure for determining if an independent variable affects a dependent variable through some mediator is so well known that it is used by authors and requested by reviewers almost reflexively. Many research projects have been terminated early in a research program or later in the review process because the data did not conform t...

People underestimate how long it takes to complete various projects. Researchers have proposed that this planning fallacy extends to underestimation of money expenditures as well, though empirical work has focused on the planning fallacy for time. In three studies, we find that participants acknowledge smaller, less frequent planning fallacies for...

Baron and Kenny's procedure for determining if an independent variable affects a dependent variable through some mediator is so well known that it is used by authors and requested by reviewers almost reflexively. Many research projects have been terminated early in a research program or later in the review process because the data did not conform t...

Planning has pronounced effects on consumer behavior and intertemporal choice. We develop a six-item scale measuring individual differences in propensity to plan that can be adapted to different domains and used to compare planning across domains and time horizons. Adaptations tailored to planning time and money in the short run and long run each s...

Tobacman (2009) is that of a psychologist who has spent the last thirty years studying the psychology of consumer decision making. For the past several years, I have focused on the psychology and behavioral economics of intertemporal choice. Cole et al. (2009) study the spending behaviors of H&R Block customers who choose more or less "impatient" f...

The scales used to describe the attributes of different choice options are usually open to alternative expressions, such as inches versus feet or minutes versus hours. More generally, a ratio scale can be multiplied by an arbitrary factor (e.g., 12) while preserving all of the information it conveys about different choice alternatives. We propose t...

Combining prior theory about really-new products with temporal construal theory, the authors show in four field studies that consumers follow-through less often on positive purchase intentions to buy really-new products relative to intentions to buy incrementally-new products, with the decrement growing with time. Compared to consumers of increment...

Understanding how consumers represent outcomes and weigh different decision criteria is critical to consumer behavior research. Construal-level theory articulates how psychological distance alters the mental representation of inputs and the effective weight given to "high-level" and "low-level" criteria. Trope, Liberman, and Wakslak (2007) provide...

Understanding how consumers represent outcomes and weigh different decision criteria is critical to consumer behavior research. Construal‐level theory articulates how psychological distance alters the mental representation of inputs and the effective weight given to “high‐level” and “low‐level” criteria. Trope, Liberman, and Wakslak (2007) provide...

I discuss how the Multiple Pathway Anchoring and Adjustment model is similar to and different from the Feldman and Lynch accessibility-diagnosticity model, elaborated as an anchoring and adjustment model by Lynch, Marmorstein, and Weigold. Cohen and Reed's concept of representational sufficiency embraces both attitude coherence and retrieval fluenc...

Most consumer decisions involve trade-offs of costs and benefits over time. The research literature on "intertemporal choice" examines behavioral regularities in how people think about such decisions, drawing from marketing, psychology, and behavioral economics. This diverse literature is relevant to the analysis of public policy issues related to...

who commented on a draft of this introduction. They especially appreciate JPPM Editor Joel Cohen offering them the opportunity to serve as guest editors of this special issue and providing many instructive comments on this paper and other papers in the special issue to help them and the authors better understand the policy environment. 2 This speci...

Research in intertemporal choice has been done in a variety of contexts, yet there is a remarkable consensus that future outcomes are discounted (or undervalued) relative to immediate outcomes. In this paper, we (a) review some of the key findings in the literature, (b) critically examine and articulate implicit assumptions, (c) distinguish between...

Several influential streams of research in marketing, psychology, and economics conclude that, holding constant the offer a seller makes to a buyer, the buyer will be repelled by learning that some other group of buyers is getting a better price for the same benefits or receiving more benefits for the same price. Past work has attributed this repul...

The authors demonstrate that people discount delayed outcomes as a result of perceived changes over time in supplies of slack. Slack is the perceived surplus of a given resource available to complete a focal task. The present research shows that, in general, people expect slack for time to be greater in the future than in the present. Typically, th...

Intelligent recommendation systems can be based on 2 basic principles: collaborative filters and individual-based agents. In this work we examine the learning function that results from these 2 general types of learning-smart agents. There has been significant work on the predictive properties of each type, but no work has examined the patterns in...

We demonstrate that people discount delayed task outcomes due to perceived changes over time in supplies of slack. Slack is the perceived surplus of a given resource available to complete a focal task. For temporally near events, investing a resource for one purpose may cause one to fail to attain other short-term goals requiring the same resource,...

Recent consumer research suggests that lowering search costs for quality information reduces consumer price sensitivity by creating greater perceived differentiation among brands (e.g., Kaul and Wittink 1995; Lynch and Ariely 2000). We argue that lowering quality search costs by smart agents can have the opposite effect on differentiation and price...

Our research examines the role of prior knowledge in learning new product information. Three studies demonstrate that, compared to consumers with lower prior knowledge, those with higher prior knowledge learn less about a new product. Further, higher knowledge consumers are able to learn more but learn less due to motivational deficits; inferior le...

To improve audit effectiveness, public accounting firms have organized their practices to include hierarchical review by teams organized along industry lines. We examine how industry specialized auditor teams detect errors, using a sophisticated experimental design. Our analysis of nominal teams created from seniors and managers working individuall...

Title from cover. "October 2001."

this article. They also thank Jonathan Levav for assistance in data collection

A fundamental dilemma confronts retailers with stand-alone sites on the World Wide Web and those attempting to build electronic malls for delivery via the Internet, online services, or interactive television (Alba et al. 1997). For consumers, the main potential advantage of electronic shopping over other channels is a reduction in search costs for...

Behavioral researchers use analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests of differences between treatment means or chi-square tests of differences between proportions to provide support for empirical hypotheses about consumer behavior. These tests are typically conducted on data from "between-subjects" experiments in which participants were randomly assigned...

Interactive Home Shopping: Effects of Search Cost for Price and Quality Information on Consumer Price Sensitivity, Satisfaction with Merchandise, And Retention A fundamental dilemma confronts retailers with stand-alone sites on the World Wide Web and those attempting to build electronic malls for delivery via the Internet, on-line services, or inte...

Winer (1999 [this issue]) proposes that external validity concerns require more attention in theoretical research. The author argues that one cannot “enhance” external validity by choosing one method over another. External validity can only be “assessed” by better understanding how the focal variables in one’s theory interact with moderator variabl...

Les auteurs examinent les conséquences du commerce électronique pour les consommateurs, les distributeurs et les producteurs. Ils prennent pour l'hypothèse qu'à court terme les développements technologiques offriront des opportunités incomparables concernant la localisation et la comparaison des offres de produits. Ils étudient ces avantages comme...

This is a slightly expanded version of my Association for Consumer Research Presidential Address for the 1997 North American Conference of the Association for Consumer Research in Denver. I first note an extensive literature on how reviewers disagree in their evaluations of manuscripts. I review the "Seven Deadly Sins of Reviewing", including the "...

Decision-makers often do not or cannot predict at the time of choice howtheir tastes may change by the time the outcomes are experienced. This paperexplores the implications of making decisions by maximizing experiencedutility ex post rather than ex ante. Focusing on being satisfied with choicein retrospect results in quite different kinds of probl...

The authors examine the implications of electronic shopping for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. They assume that near-term technological developments will offer consumers unparalleled opportunities to locate and compare product offerings. They examine these advantages as a function of typical consumer goals and the types of products and se...

The authors examine the implications of electronic shopping for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. They assume that near-term technological developments will offer consumers unparalleled opportunities to locate and compare product offerings. They examine these advantages as a function of typical consumer goals and the types of products and se...

The authors examine the implications of electronic shopping for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. They assume that near-term technological developments will offer consumers unparalleled opportunities to locate and compare product offerings. They examine these advantages as a function of typical consumer goals and the types of products and se...

The effect of advertising on consumer welfare has been the subject of dispute among economists, arising largely from disagreement among scholars regarding the persuasive versus the informative role of advertising. This paper reports two experiments that explore the welfare implications of advertising effects. Experiment 1 shows that the same advert...

Past discussions of manipulation checks and related measures have produced disagreement about their role in tests of theoretical explanations of consumer behavior. We use a Bayesian analysis to examine what such measures contribute to researchers' beliefs about competing theories and suggest when and why manipulation and confounding checks add to t...

Prior work on the economic effects of advertising has presented conflicting views. Some authors have suggested that advertising creates market power by artificially differentiating brands and thereby lowering price elasticity. Others have viewed advertising as an efficient source of information about the existence of substitutes, arguing that adver...

Previous research has predicted that direct product experience will be superior to advertising in communicating information about products. In experiment 1 of the present study, claims about search attributes were better recognized and beliefs about search attributes were more accessible and more confidently held after exposure to ads in comparison...

Regulators of utilities that operate as local monopolies would like to set prices or allow rates of return based upon the quality of a utility's service. However, quality is highly multidimensional. Traditionally, regulators have collected measures of quality on many separate dimensions, and compared performance on these dimensions to explicit pass...

Although consumer researchers often assume that survey responses reflect true beliefs, attitudes, and intentions, most recent research in social judgment and behavioral decision making suggests that people often construct answers to survey questions on the basis of their responses to earlier items. A framework proposed by Feldman and Lynch suggests...

Traditional views of research methodology hold that little, if any, useful information can be obtained from one or more confounded studies, unless the results from one study rule out or falsify an alternative explanation from a previous study. We present a Bayesian analysis of hypothesis testing to model knowledge accumulation from a series of conf...

Telephone service quality is an important but understudied aspect of industry performance in response to industry performance in response to new technological opportunities and a new regulatory environment, we must be able to measure quality over time (and across firms), evaluate the many dimensions of service quality in terms of some objective fun...

Contrast effects in consumers' judgments of products can stem from changes in how consumers mentally represent the stimuli or in how they anchor rating scales when mapping context-invariant mental representations onto those scales. We present a framework for distinguishing between these types of contrast effects on the basis of whether changes in m...

Subjects evaluated a focal set of single-attribute product descriptions along with descriptions of competing brands that systematically altered what attributes subjects perceived as missing from the product descriptions. This manipulation selectively increased thoughts about undescribed attributes and led to (1) reduced effects of described-attribu...

In two experiments using "Bayesian" probability judgment tasks, we examined the effects of numerical values of base rates and case cues, the degree of consistency in these values, and the narrowness of the populations to which these cues are pertained. Both experiments showed that the "base-rate fallacy" is observed only when (a) one combines base...

In this paper, we consider a three-stage game in the context of a competing exporters model to compare and contrast the effects of discriminatory and uniform (Most Favored Nation, MFN) tariffs on countries' choice over environmental standards for varying degrees of pollution spillovers. Because of the presence of punishment effects and stronger own...

Drawing from recent developments in social cognition, cognitive psychology, and behavioral decision theory, we analyzed when and how the act of measuring beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors affects observed correlations among them. Belief, attitude, or intention can be created by measurement if the measured constructs do not already exist...

The author reviews how methods developed within the information integration paradigm can be used to study consumers' overall evaluations of choice alternatives. Methods are presented for determining the adequacy of several common model forms used to represent overall evaluations: adding, multiplying, and multilinear. Often, more than one integratio...

The author reviews how methods developed within the information integration paradigm can be used to study consumers’ overall evaluations of choice alternatives. Methods are presented for determining the adequacy of several common model forms used to represent overall evaluations: adding, multiplying, and multilinear. Often, more than one integratio...

This research investigated contextual effects on consumer cue-utilization policies in making judgments under uncertainty. Two studies suggested that the utilization of base and case information varied as a function of the numerical values of the cues and covaried with the changes in the perceived relevance of each cue. The second study showed that...

While consumer researchers have evinced considerable interest in cognitive processes in decision making, work has centered on the conscious mental manipulation of product information. This paper addresses memory and attentional processes that may occur below the level of consciousness. Methods developed within the field of cognitive psychology are...

This paper is concerned with generalizability issues in experimental consumer research. In particular, it discusses how the usefulness of experimental results is affected by a consumer researcher's treatment of unmanipulated “background” factors in designing and analyzing the experiment.

This experiment sought to determine whether previously found metric violations of additive expectancy-value models C.F. J. C. Shanteau, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1974, 103, 680–691; J. G. Lynch and J. L. Cohen, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1978, 36, 1138–1151) were attributable to the inappropriateness of these models or...

Reports an error in the original article by John G. Lynch, Jr., and Jerry L. Cohen (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1978[Oct], Vol 36[10], pp. 1138-1151). Published here are three corrections to symbols, equations, and/or sentences appearing on pages 1140, 1143, and 1146. Proposes a modified subjective expected utility formulation as...

Proposes a modified subjective expected utility formulation as a model for better understanding helping behavior. Two experiments designed to test the usefulness of the proposed formulation are reported: In Exp I, 11 male and 14 female undergraduates had to react to variations of 3 scenarios of helping situations, reporting the likelihood of their...