Manoj Thomas

Cornell University | CU · Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Managementn

The authors introduce the Three Moral Motives Framework to explain and predict consumers' moral behaviors in the marketplace. The framework identifies three key motives—moral-beneficence, moral-self, and moral-duty—that shape when, how, and why consumers seek moral utility in their consumption choices. These motives may work together or in oppositi...

Ramos et al. ( Journal of Consumer Psychology , 2024) explain the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and discuss its applicability to explain marketing persuasion, consumer emotions, and prosocial behavior. We concur with Ramos et al. but suggest that the scope for MFT in consumer behavior is much broader – it can be used to investigate heterogeneity i...

We identify three different ways in which affective responses influence consumers’ price evaluations and purchase decisions. First, we look at the affective response to the price itself. It has been shown that relative price magnitude (e.g., whether it is higher than past prices) and mode of payment (e.g., cash versus card) can alter consumers’ aff...

Ramos et al. (2024) explain the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and discuss its applicability to explain marketing persuasion, consumer emotions, and prosocial behavior. We concur with Ramos et al. but suggest that the scope for MFT in consumer behavior is much broader- it can be used to investigate heterogeneity in consumers' moral utility. Specifi...

Analysis of actual transactions in a grocery store show that households enrolled in U.S. government’s Supplementary Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) purchase more unhealthy hedonic food, compared to food secure households. SNAP households purchased more unhealthy hedonic food regardless of whether they used government funds or cash to pay for...

Economic price theory assumes that consumers' responses to prices can be characterized by stable demand curves and price elasticities. The author posits that this assumption lacks descriptive validity because the demand curve is rather unstable; subtle changes in framing and contextual cues can change the demand curve. The article outlines heuristi...

Although humans are hard-wired to pursue sensory pleasure, they show considerable heterogeneity in their moral evaluations of sensory pleasure. In some societies, sensory pleasure is pursued without any moral inhibition, but in other societies, it is considered to be immoral and actively suppressed. This research investigates the moral motives behi...

The authors reflect on what makes the marketing department at Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business distinct from marketing departments in other business schools. They present a brief history of the study of marketing at Cornell, discuss the current structure of the department, the pedagogical approach, and the values and ideals cheri...

Quantity can be described using perceptual units (e.g., bags, pieces) or standardized units (e.g., ounces, grams). Merely making perceptual units more salient in quantity description can increase perceived economic value. Even when the objective information and numerosity are kept constant, merely presenting the perceptual unit first (e.g., Lay’s C...

Research has shown that conservatives tend to oppose the distribution of welfare to other people. However, are conservatives less likely than liberals to accept welfare for themselves? We find that the difference in liberals' and conservatives' welfare enrollment depends on whether the welfare program has a work requirement policy. A natural field...

Past research suggests that conservatives are usually more threat-sensitive than liberals are. Yet during the COVID-19 pandemic, conservatives consistently underestimated the risk from the virus. To reconcile this paradox, we introduce a model of identity-based risk perception (IRP). This model posits that risk perceptions depend not only on object...

Research has shown that conservatives tend to oppose the distribution of welfare to other people. However, are conservatives less likely than liberals to accept welfare for themselves? We find that the difference in liberals’ and conservatives’ welfare enrollment depends on whether the welfare program has a work requirement policy. A natural field...

Consumers’ price evaluations are influenced by the left-digit bias, wherein consumers judge the difference between $4.00 and $2.99 to be larger than that between $4.01 and $3.00, even though the numeric differences are identical. This research examines when and why consumers are more likely to fall prey to the left-digit bias. The authors propose t...

At each stage in customers’ journeys, they encounter different types of numeric information that they process using different judgment strategies. Relevant numbers might include budgets, price, product attributes, product counts, product ratings, numbers in brand names, health and nutrition information, financial information, time-related informati...

Conspicuous consumption has often been decried as immoral by many philosophers and scholars, yet it is ubiquitous and widely embraced. This research sheds light on the apparent paradox by proposing that the perceived morality of conspicuous consumption is malleable, contingent upon how different moral lenses highlight the different characteristics...

Unhealthy consumption, Regret, Emotions

Consumer payments elicited on slider scales can be systematically different from those elicited through text boxes because of the end point assimilation effect. When people use text boxes to make payments, they evaluate monetary values relative to the starting point of the response range. In contrast, when people use slider scales, they evaluate mo...

Driven by the low transaction costs and interactive nature of the internet, customer participation in the price-setting process has increased. Today, platforms such as eBay have popularized online auctions on a global scale, Priceline has made headlines with its name-your-own-price (NYOP) business model, and Humble Bundle has enabled independent mu...

Driven by the low transaction costs and interactive nature of the internet, customer participation in the price-setting process has increased. These changes were first brought about by the rise of online auctions in the early 2000s, followed by the emergence of newer participative mechanisms. Today, platforms such as eBay have popularized online au...

Numeric ratings for products can be presented using a bigger-is-better format (1 1/4 bad, 5 1/4 good) or a smaller-is-better format with reversed rating poles (1 1/4 good, 5 1/4 bad). Seven experiments document how implicit memory for the bigger-is-better format-where larger numbers typically connote something is better-can systematically bias cons...

Does explicit recall help or hurt memory-based comparisons? It is often assumed that attempting to recall information from memory should facilitate-or at least not disrupt-memory-based comparisons. Using the domain of price comparisons, the authors demonstrate that memory-based price comparisons are less accurate when consumers first attempt to rec...

Crafting successful marketing strategies requires two skills: The ability to diagnose why consumers are not buying, and the ability to predict how marketing actions will change consumer behavior. Drawing from a rich repertoire of consumer behavior theories which are only found in scientific journals, the authors offer a unique and extensively-teste...

Substitution decisions have been examined from a variety of perspectives. The economics literature measures cross-price elasticity, operations research models optimal assortments, the psychology literature studies goals in conflict, and marketing research has examined substitution-in-use, brand switching, stockouts, and self-control. We integrate t...

Different framing of the same duration (1 year, 12 months, 365 days) can influence consumers’ impressions of subjective duration, and thus affect their judgments and decisions. The authors propose that ironically, self-relevance amplifies this duration framing effect. Consumers for whom a particular self-improvement domain is personally relevant ar...

The authors discuss how painless modes of payments increase unhealthy consumption.

Numerical precision – unusually precise or sharp numbers – can trigger heuristic processing and influence judgments. Numerical precision triggers heuristic processing because it causes computational difficulty or encoding difficulty. The authors propose that the discrepancy attribution model can offer a parsimonious explanation for the effects of n...

The author argues that subjective feelings, both mild cognitive feelings such as processing fluency and the feeling of knowing, as well as more intense emotional responses such as the pain of paying, play important roles in price psychology. Theoretical frameworks or models that do not incorporate the effects of such subjective feelings are likely...

This paper reports subjective ratings of unhealthiness and impulsiveness of 100 food categories that are purchased by a typical American consumer. These ratings are used to identify food items that are considered as vice and virtue products.

Psychological distance can reduce the subjective experience of difficulty caused by task complexity and task anxiety. Four experiments were conducted to test several related hypotheses. Psychological distance was altered by activating a construal mindset and by varying bodily distance from a given task. Activating an abstract mindset reduced the fe...

Drawing on literature on judgment and decision-making, we examine the proposition that price serves two distinct roles in consumers ’ value judgments. First, as a product attribute, price affects the perceived similarity of the target product to the mental prototype of a higher or lower quality product. However, price is not the only attribute used...

It has been widely documented that fluency (ease of information processing) increases positive evaluation. We proposed and demonstrated in three studies that this was not the case when people construed objects abstractly rather than concretely. Specifically, we found that priming people to think abstractly mitigated the effect of fluency on subsequ...

Some food items that are commonly considered unhealthy also tend to elicit impulsive responses. The pain of paying in cash can curb impulsive urges to purchase such unhealthy food products. Credit card payments, in contrast, are relatively painless and weaken impulse control. Consequently, consumers are more likely to buy unhealthy food products wh...

We examine two questions: Does the roundness or precision of prices bias magnitude judgments? If so, do these biased judgments affect buyer behavior? Results from five studies suggest that buyers underestimate the magnitudes of precise prices. We term this the precision effect. The first three studies are laboratory experiments designed to test the...

Consumers' budgets are influenced by the temporal frame used for the budget period. Budgets planned for the next month are much lower than recorded expenses, while those for the next year are closer to recorded expenses (study 1). The difficulty of estimating budgets for the next year imparts low confidence and leads to upward adjustment. When cons...

Consumers' judgments concerning the magnitude of numerical differences are influenced by the ease of mental computations. Results from a set of experiments show that ease of computation can affect judgments of the magnitude of price differences, discount magnitudes, and brand choices. Participants seem to believe that it is easier to judge the size...

In this chapter we review two distinct streams of literature, the numerical cognition literature and the judgment and decision making literature, to understand the psychological mechanisms that underlie consumers' responses to prices. The judgment and decision making literature identifies three heuristics that manifest in many everyday judgments an...

We examine two questions: Does precision or roundedness of prices bias magnitude judgments? If so, do these biased judgments affect buyer behavior? In a laboratory pre-test, we find that people incorrectly judge precise prices (e.g., $325,425) to be lower than round prices of similar magnitudes (e.g., $325,000). Building on evidence of greater prev...

When do internal reference prices differ from articulated price expectations? The authors propose that the internal reference price depends not only on the magnitude of the expected price but also on the confidence associated with this expectation. Four experiments delineate the effects of price expectation and confidence on the internal reference...

Through five experiments, we provide a cognitive account of when and why nine-ending prices are perceived to be smaller than a price one cent higher. First, this occurs only when the leftmost digits of the prices differ (e.g., $2.99 vs. $3.00). Second, the left-digit effect also depends on the numerical and psychological distances between the targe...