June Cotte

• Western University

Strange things happen to incoming editors. First a vague uneasiness about the state of our field. Then a suspicion that there might be something to the jibes about the navel-gazing nature of consumer research. We sometimes struggle to translate Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) findings to practitioners or to explain manuscript titles and abstract...

This research investigates reviewing experts on online review platforms. The main hypothesis is that greater expertise in generating reviews leads to greater restraint from extreme summary evaluations. The authors argue that greater experience generating reviews facilitates processing and elaboration, and enhances the number of attributes implicitl...

In the marketing and consumer behavior literature, there has been a growing attention on upward intergenerational influences, or reverse socialization, which is largely because of children's increasing influences on family decisions. This paper hypothesizes different patterns of upward intergenerational influences in single versus multiple‐child fa...

Prior research on object valuation ignores the effect of non-ownership physical possession types such as renting and borrowing. Evidence from four experiments demonstrates that the valuation (i.e., willingness-to-pay) for rented objects is greater than the valuation for non-possessed or borrowed objects. Borrowed objects are not valued any differen...

Consumption cues (e.g., brands, money, and advertisements) can have powerful effects on cognition, perception, and behavior, yet how people regulate responses to such cues is not well understood. This is surprising given that consumption cues are increasingly present in nontraditional consumer contexts, such as healthcare, education, and politics....

Purpose A growing stream of consumer research has examined the intersection of family dynamics, consumption practices and the marketplace. The purpose of this paper is to make sense of the complex nature of family for senior families (adult children and their elderly parents) who employ the use of elder care services and facilities. Design/methodo...

There exists considerable controversy over what voter rationality assumptions underlie political marketing. Some of this controversy derives from the lack of clear definitions of rationality. An examination of seven common assumptions that underlie the concept of rationality shows that only a modest level of information, freedom from errors, and co...

This article reviews forty years of the Journal of Consumer Research. Using text-mining, the authors uncover the key phrases associated with consumer research. The authors use a topic modeling procedure to uncover 16 topics that have featured in the journal since its inception, and to show the trends in topics over time. For example, the authors hi...

We explore the construction of family in contemporary families that employ professional providers of childcare and elder care. We find that families and caregivers at times construct family together, including the caregiver as a family member, while at other times, consumers construct family in ways that exclude the caregiver. Through our explorati...

The interactive nature of the Internet has boosted online communication for both social and business purposes. However, individual consumers differ in their predisposition to interact online with others. Whereas an impressive stream of research has investigated media interactivity, the existence of individual differences in the use of different onl...

On penny auction websites, consumers participate in a game where the winner receives the opportunity to purchase a product for pennies on the dollar and discounts of over 90% are often advertised and recorded. Losers, on the other hand, may easily spend hundreds of dollars and walk away with nothing. For penny auction websites, profit margins over...

Mothers face many challenges in choosing a caregiver for a child when it is time to return to work. In North America, this choice is often made in a context of limited supply with several significant factors constraining choice. Indeed, many mothers have very little effective choice at all. Using in-depth interviews with mothers who have recently c...

This paper examines the effect of regulatory focus on consumer satisfaction. In contrast to the disconfirmation of expectations model of satisfaction, we find that, although regulatory focus does affect consumers' expectations, the effect on satisfaction cannot be explained by differences in those expectations. Instead, our results reveal a direct...

Evidence from three experiments shows that due to superior visuo-spatial elaboration, females (relative to males) have a heightened ability to identify visually incongruent products that are promoted among competing products. Females discriminate relational information among competing advertisements and use this information to identify incongruent...

The authors find that a consumer's position in a social network is related to both opinion leadership and susceptibility to influence. Using two field network studies, the authors show that people see themselves as opinion leaders when they perceive that they are popular (i.e., central) in the network. However, these self-assessments are sometimes...

In two studies, the authors provide evidence that ad context can be used to alter the elaboration threshold for both males and females. The findings suggest that in a competing ad context (a series of ads for similar goods), females were better able to resolvean extremely incongruent product (an extremely odd-looking camera), and males, counter to...

That is a question that has long puzzled marketers who have heard from customers that they want to do business with ethically based firms - defined as companies that produce products under conditions of progressive stakeholder relations, advanced environmental practices and respect for human rights. Marketers had no reason to doubt that sentiment,...

About $10 billion a year is spent by consumers worldwide on online gambling, and that number continues to grow. We present a qualitative, image-based study of 30 Las Vegas online and casino gamblers. By examining online gambling as a consumption experience, we examine what happens to consumption meaning as gambling moves away from a regulated physi...

We conceptualize and operationalize a new definition of postpurchase consumer regret. Consumers can regret both the outcome and the process of their purchase. While previous researchers have identified the existence of these two components, there has been a lack of exploration of how outcome regret and process regret are experienced in a consumer c...

The present research focuses on time planning style, an individual's habitual-approach to time management, in relation to the use of the Web. We theorize and provide empirical evidence that highly analytic versus spontaneous planners are more likely to seek utilitarian rather than hedonic benefits from Web use. This pattern is associated with downs...

Viewing the consumer as an active, skeptical reader of the persuasion attempt is an emerging perspective in advertising research. This perspective suggests that a consumer's recognition of an emotional “tactic” in an ad can have a significant impact on an ad's intended effect. Adopting this approach, we examine whether consumers' evaluations of an...

Timestyles are the customary ways in which people perceive and use time. We propose that individuals' timestyles can be categorized in terms of social, temporal, planning, and polychronic orientations. We examine timestyle in a phenomenological investigation of a sample of American women and identify five emergent symbolic metaphors for time ( pres...

Although family socialization is a rich field in consumer behavior, to date no research has been done to disaggregate family influences on behavior into separate parent and sibling components. Here we use triadic analysis (parent and two siblings) to explore the influence of family on consumer innovativeness. We develop hypotheses that postulate pa...

As the leisure industry matures, it is important for marketers to have a clear understanding of why people choose to consume specific leisure services. The paper proposes that “timestyle”, or how a person customarily perceives and uses time, influences the choice of leisure goals and resultant leisure services. Individuals’ timestyles can be charac...

In this paper, we explore the relationship between consumers’ perceptions of time and their particular shopping styles. We consider four timestyle constructs: behavioral, planning, social, and temporal orientations, and six shopping style constructs: pre-purchase planning, variety-seeking, impulse buying, price search, market mavenism, and frequenc...

This article examines conceptually the relationship between timestyle—the customary manner in which one perceives and thinks about time—and leisure decisions. The authors suggest that individuals’ timestyles can be described via four key dimensions, namely, social, temporal, planning, and polychronic orientations. Further, it is posited that these...

Presents a conceptual framework for understanding the meanings of polychronic behavior for individuals. A “created” meaning perspective, arguing that cultural, social, and personality differences influence how the meaning of polychronic behavior is interpreted at the individual level is presented. These meanings through a phenomenological study of...

We propose here a conceptual framework that incorporates a model of individual consumer behaviour into a theory of dynamic market behaviour. We first formalize a set of propositions about consumer behaviour wherein the key concept of an affordance is introduced and conceptual links between product, person and purpose are explicated. These behaviour...

In this dissertation I study what people do in leisure, and why; what motivates individuals to prefer certain leisure-time pursuits over others, and what factors might influence leisure consumption. I propose that leisure consumption and consumer decisions regarding leisure time are fundamentally connected to an individual's tempocognitive style, i...

Why do gamblers spend their leisure time and money on gambling? The motives of gamblers are explored using data collected in a casino via ethnographic participant observation. The interpretation presented here combines data with insights from prior research and theories of gambling and experiential consumption. Gambling motives are presented in a t...