Chris Janiszewski

Nutritional labels are mandatory on virtually all packaged food items sold in the United States. The nutritional information on these labels is reported on a “per-serving-size” basis. However, unbeknownst to many consumers, current Food and Drug Administration regulations allow manufacturers some discretion in setting serving sizes—a factor that the authors hypothesize has implications for consumer behavior. For example, adopting a smaller serving size allows marketers to reduce the reported calories, fat, sugar, and carbohydrates in a product serving, which in turn can influence the anticipated consequences of consumption. Three studies show that manipulating the serving size, and thus calories per serving, for equivalent consumption amounts influences the anticipated guilt of consumption, purchase intentions, and choice behavior. However, the results also show that individual difference and context variables, which heighten consumer attention to nutritional information in general, often focus attention on calorie information but not serving size. This leads to the counterintuitive finding that more nutritionally vigilant consumers are more heavily influenced by serving size manipulations. The authors discuss the managerial and public policy implications.

Consumers often like fluently processed stimuli. The authors find that one source of fluency for numerical stimuli is the generation of a number through common addition (e.g., 1 + 1 through 10 + 10) and common multiplication (2 × 2 through 10 × 10) problems (study 1). Common addition and multiplication problems (arithmetic), or their operands, can be used to prime a number and increase its fluency (study 3). The benefits of arithmetic and operand primes are limited to single primes (i.e., more primes are not necessarily better) (Study 5). Number fluency is relevant to creating numeric brand names (Study 2), enhancing the liking of numeric brand names through advertising (Study 4), and executing price promotions (Study 6).

The anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic has been used to account for a wide variety of numerical judgments. Five studies show that adjustment away from a numerical anchor is smaller if the anchor is precise than if it is rounded. Evidence suggests that precise anchors, compared with rounded anchors, are represented on a subjective scale with a finer resolution. If adjustment consists of a series of iterative mental movements along a subjective scale, then an adjustment from a precise anchor should result in a smaller overall correction than an adjustment from a rounded anchor.

There are many contexts in which people make judgments about prior judgments. For example, Internet shopping bots (e.g., NexTag.com) allow consumers to search for products and, if the price is too high, list a price at which they would consider making the purchase (i.e., base judgment). If the price drops to this level, the vendor generates an e-mail inviting the consumer to execute the transaction at the reduced price (i.e., contingent judgment). The authors show that the consideration price depends on the content of retrieved information, whereas the willingness to execute the transaction at the consideration price depends on the ease-of-retrieving the information. The authors use different offer prices to encourage the consumer to retrieve information consistent with different product quality levels. The authors also select offer prices so that information retrieval is more difficult at moderate offer prices than at high or low offer prices. Accordingly, the authors show that the consideration price increases as the offer price increases, but the willingness to execute the transaction at the consideration price is greater when there are high and low, as opposed to moderate, offer prices.

The mere measurement of a person's intention to behave has been shown to influence his or her likelihood of engaging in the behavior. The mere measurement effect has been attributed to an increased accessibility of the attitude toward the behavior. Another source of the mere measurement effect may be the redundancy in the cognitive processes used to generate the mere measurement response and the cognitive processes used to decide whether to engage in the behavior. Process redundancy creates a fluency that can be interpreted as supportive of the behavioral tendency. Across eight studies, the authors show that processing fluency also contributes to the mere measurement effect.

Several studies show that information used to screen alternatives becomes less important than information acquired later in the search process simply because it was used to screen. Experiment 1 shows that the tendency to deemphasize prescreening information leads to systematically different choices for decision makers who screen alternatives compared with decision makers who do not screen alternatives. Additional studies show that screening encourages decision makers to shift their emphasis from prescreening information to postscreening information (Experiment 2). Prescreening information is deemphasized because of the categorization that occurs when people create a consideration set of retained alternatives (Experiments 3 and 4). Together, the results show that a brand's strength of consideration (i.e., how highly an option ranks on screening criteria) may have little influence on the likelihood of it being chosen in a postscreening choice process.

An impediment to Web-based retail sales is the impersonal nature of Web-based shopping. A solution to this problem is to use an avatar to deliver product information. An avatar is a graphic representation that can be animated by means of computer technology. Study 1 shows that using an avatar sales agent leads to more satisfaction with the retailer, a more positive attitude toward the product, and a greater purchase intention. Study 2 shows that an attractive avatar is a more effective sales agent at moderate levels of product involvement, but an expert avatar is a more effective sales agent at high levels of product involvement.