Dante M. Pirouz

Michigan State University | MSU · Department of Marketing

An accepted view of consumption assumes that consumers progress along three orderly stages—from acquisition to consumption, culminating with disposal of a given consumption product. When this process of consumption is disrupted, the consequences can be destabilizing, disturbing, and potentially risky to both individual consumers and the wider socie...

Campaigns advocating behavioural changes often employ social norms as a motivating technique, favouring injunctive norms (what is typically approved or disapproved) over descriptive norms (what is typically done). Here, we investigate an upside to including descriptive norms in health and safety appeals. Because descriptive norms are easy to proces...

This research investigates a frequently encountered and important decision faced by advertisers: how to face profile images of products in advertisements. Three empirical studies find support for a profile-fluency effect: profile images of products facing inward (versus outward) toward the center (versus edge) of an ad are easier for consumers to p...

Decision making is a consequential and ineradicable part of human behavior. We all make decisions everyday that influence our health, well-being, finances, and future prospects among other things. Researchers have become increasingly interested in why we make the decisions we do, especially when in many cases these decisions do not make rational se...

Research on discrepancies between the actual self and ideal self has examined self-discrepancies in knowledge, skills and stature but age-based self-discrepancies have only recently received attention and so we studied this phenomenon in young adolescents. In three studies we identified a product-category contextual cue that apparently caused adole...

Families represent an important context for understanding and addressing the various forms of risk experienced by consumers. This article defines and discusses the concept of risk as it applies to the familial unit, with a particular focus on the liminal transitions that occur within families and the resiliency required for families to identify and...

This research broadens the focus on the addiction process by examining the role of marketing cues in the “pre-addiction” phase of the consumption continuum that is broadly conceptualized to include behavior that may or may not result in addiction. If addictive behavior is to occur then dependence on that behavior occurs leading to negative or harmf...

Addiction does not begin with the harmful effects of being dependent on a particular consumption behaviour such as smoking, alcohol, or illegal drugs. Instead it starts with everyday seemingly benign behaviours that, through psychological, biophysical, and/or environmental triggers, can become harmful and morph into an addiction. We develop a frame...

A perennial problem in social marketing and public policy is the plight of at-risk consumers. The authors define at-risk consumers as marketplace participants who, because of historical or personal circumstances or disabilities, may be harmed by marketers' practices or may be unable or unwilling to take full advantage of marketplace opportunities....

Advertising is a ubiquitous and pervasive environmental cue. The average consumer, for example, is exposed on average to three thousand ads per day (Schwartz 2004). Under normal circumstances, consumers choose which advertising messages to attend to both consciously and non-consciously (Bargh 2002; Grunert 1996). However for consumers, environmenta...

The primary purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of culture on stock price volatility. The focal causal chain links dimensions of culture (i.e., linguistic structure and values) to globalization to the volatility of prices in 50 stock markets around the world. Other explanatory variables included in the model are characteristics of indivi...

Reviews the book, Neuroeconomics: A Guide to the New Science of Making Choices by Peter Politser (see record 2008-02138-000). Beyond merely trying to explain neuroeconomics and providing a review of recent studies, Politser’s book aims to establish a neuroepidemiological framework, which identifies neurobiological levels of analysis for the decis...

Partial least squares analysis is a multivariate statistical technique that allows comparison between multiple response variables and multiple explanatory variables. Partial least squares is one of a number of covariance-based statistical methods which are often referred to as structural equation modeling or SEM. It was designed to deal with multip...

This paper shows that increases in the minimum wage rate can have ambiguous effects on the working hours and welfare of employed workers in competitive labor markets. The reason is that employers may not comply with the minimum wage legislation and instead pay a lower subminimum wage rate. If workers are risk neutral, we prove that working hours an...