Eventi del

4 2017 12:45 - 14:00
Meeting room 4.E4.SR01  Via Roentgen, 1

Categorization in Multi-Stage Decision Processes: The Impact of Attribute-Order on How Consumers Construe Their Choice

ROM SCHRIFT, The Wharton School, The University of Pennsylvania

With the ever-increasing number of options from which consumers can choose, many decisions are broken to stages. Whether using decision tools to sort, screen, and eliminate options, or intuitively trying to reduce the complexity of a choice, consumers often reach a decision by making sequential attribute-level choices. The current paper explores how the order in which attribute-level choices are made in such multi-stage decisions impacts how consumers mentally categorize their chosen option. Further, it demonstrates the impact of such shifts in mental representations on subsequent preferences and choice. The authors find that attribute choices made in the initial stage play a dominant role in how the ultimately chosen option is mentally represented, while later attribute choices serve to update and refine the representation of that option. Across eleven studies, the authors find that changing the order of attribute choices in multi-stage decision processes alters how consumers (i) mentally construe and describe the chosen option, (ii) intend to use the chosen option, (iii) perceive similarity of the chosen option to other available options, (iv) group the options in the set, and (v) replace the chosen option (if necessary). Thus, while the extant decision-making literature has mainly explored how mental representations impact choice, the current paper demonstrates that the choice process itself can impact mental representations. The conceptual, methodological, and applied importance of these findings are discussed.