Ziv Carmon

INSEAD | INSEAD · Area of Marketing

Although the consumer research field has made great progress over the past 30 years with respect to the scope, quality, and quantity of research, there are still significant disagreements about what consumer research is, what its objectives are, and how it should differ from related disciplines. As a result, the field appears to be rather fragmente...

The authors thank Himanshu Mishra, Chris Tay-lor (parts of this research formed the basis of his honors thesis), and Mon-ica Wadhwa for their help in administering the experiments and coding participants' responses. They also thank Eric Johnson, participants of the Distinguished Scholars Retreat at the University of Alberta, and the three anonymous...

Public awareness and concern about climate and environmental issues have grown dramatically in the United States and around the world. Yet this shift in attitudes has not been accompanied by similar increases in eco-friendly behaviors. We propose that this attitude–behavior gap is partly driven by the difficulty of changing unsustainable habits. Go...

COVID-19 remains a leading cause of mortality in the U.S., despite widespread availability of vaccines. Conventional wisdom ties failure to vaccinate primarily to vaccine-skeptic beliefs (e.g., conspiracy theories, partisanship). Yet in this research, we find that vaccination is also hindered by travel distance to vaccine sites (a form of friction,...

This research examines a perplexing but all too common phenomenon in which people actively forego nearly costless opportunities to switch from less-preferred tasks to preferred alternatives. The authors investigate such failures to change and identify a novel underlying cause—entrenchment, a state of heightened tedious task-set accessibility. A ser...

Whether or not someone turns out to vote depends on their beliefs (such as partisanship or sense of civic duty) and on friction—external barriers such as long travel distance to the polls. In this exploratory study, we tested whether people underestimate the effect of friction on turnout and overestimate the effect of beliefs. We surveyed a represe...

Whether or not someone turns out to vote depends on their beliefs (such as partisanship or sense of civic duty) and on friction-external barriers such as long travel distance to the polls. In this exploratory study, we tested whether people underestimate the effect of friction on turnout and overestimate the effect of beliefs. We surveyed a represe...

COVID-19 remains a leading cause of death in the United States, despite wide availability of vaccines. Distance may pose an overlooked barrier to vaccine uptake. We analyzed the association between distance to vaccine sites and vaccination rates. Zip codes farther away from vaccine sites had consistently lower vaccine uptake. This effect persisted...

Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is based on the notion that consumers and transport providers access a centralized platform for the planning, payment, and management of trips and combines multiple modes of transportation designed to increase the efficiency of the system. MaaS offers substantial societal benefits, including the reduction of emissions,...

People invest much time and money in consuming knowledge. We argue that people systematically vary in the types of knowledge they prefer to know and that such preferences can have broad implications for consumer behavior. We illustrate this in the context of the preference for practical versus theoretical knowledge. Specifically, we propose and sho...

Privacy concerns get most of the attention from tech skeptics, but powerful predictive algorithms can generate serious resistance by threatening consumer autonomy. Three safeguards can help. Article URL: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/designing-ai-systems-that-customers-wont-hate/

How do consumers assess their mastery of knowledge they have learned? We explore this question by investigating a common knowledge consumption situation: encountering opportunities for further learning. We argue and show that such opportunities can trigger a feeling‐of‐not‐knowing‐it‐all (FONKIA), which lowers consumers’ confidence in their mastery...

Recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence and data analytics are facilitating the automation of some consumer chores (e.g., in smart homes and in self-driving cars) and allow the emergence of big-data-driven, micro-targeting marketing practices (e.g., personalized content recommendation algorithms). We contend that those developme...

We argue that moral disgust towards counterfeiting can degrade both the efficacy of products perceived to be counterfeits and that of genuine products resembling them. Five studies support our propositions and highlight the infectious nature of counterfeiting: Perceiving a product as a counterfeit made disgust more mentally accessible, and led part...

Warnings that a promoted product can have adverse side effects (e.g., smoking cigarettes can cause cancer) should dampen the product's allure. We predicted that with temporal distance (e.g., when an ad relates to future consumption or was viewed some time earlier), this common type of warning can have a worrisome alternative consequence: It can iro...

Warning that a promoted product can have adverse-side-effects (e.g., smoking the advertised cigarettes can cause cancer), should dampen its allure. We predict that with temporal-distance (e.g., the promotional-message relates to future-consumption, or was viewed some-time-earlier), this common type of warning can have a worrisome alternative conseq...

People often behave in ways that are clearly detrimental to their health. We review representative research on unhealthy behaviors within a parsimonious frame-work, the Hot-Cold Decision Triangle. Through this framework, we describe how when people embrace colder state reasoning—instead of risking the pitfalls of heuristics and visceral reactions—t...

In a selective review of what is known about consumer decision making, we highlight ways in which consumers deviate from the classical economic model of homo economicus. We first consider how consumer preferences are influenced by characteristics of the decision task and context, such as choice set size, attribute quantity, option similarity and ju...

People often behave in ways that are clearly detrimental to their health. We review representative research on unhealthy behaviors within a parsimonious framework, the Hot-Cold Decision Triangle. Through this framework, we describe how when people embrace colder state reasoning—instead of risking the pitfalls of heuristics and visceral reactions—th...

This research illustrates the power of reputation, such as that embodied in brand names, demonstrating that names can enhance objective product efficacy. Study participants facing a glaring light were asked to read printed words as accurately and as quickly as they could, receiving compensation proportional to their performance. Those wearing sungl...

The endowment effect--the tendency for owners (potential sellers) to value objects more than potential buyers do--is among the most widely studied judgment and decision-making phenomena. However, the current research is the first to explore whether the effect varies across cultures. Given previously demonstrated cultural differences in self-constru...

The endowment effect--the tendency for owners (potential sellers) to value objects more than potential buyers do--is among the most widely studied judgment and decision-making phenomena. However, the current research is the first to explore whether the effect varies across cultures. Given previously demonstrated cultural differences in self-constru...

Decision-making researchers have largely focused on showing errors and biases in consumers' decision-making processes without paying much attention to the social welfare and policy implications of these systematic behaviors. In this paper, we explore how findings and methods in behavioral decision research can be used to help consumers improve thei...

We study the dissociation between two common measures of value—monetary assessment of purchase options versus the predicted utility associated with owning or consuming those options, a disparity that is reflected in well-known judgment anomalies and that is important for interpreting market research data. We propose that a significant cause of this...

Martin Schneider is Professor of Economics at Stanford University. His research interests lie in Financial and Monetary Economics.

We study the dissociation between two common measures of value - monetary assessment of purchase options versus the predicted utility associated with owning or consuming those options, a disparity that is reflected in well-known judgment anomalies and is important for interpreting market research data. We propose that a significant cause of this di...

Why would consumers prefer live television, even when tape-delayed broadcasts provide the same sensory experience? We propose that indeterminacy is a key reason. Indeterminate consumption experiences (such as watching sports competitions live on television) unfold in ways that are not decided ex ante. This makes them more exciting than equivalent d...

In Shiv, Carmon, and Ariely (2005), the authors demonstrate that mar-keting actions such as price promotions and advertising evoke consumer expectations, which can alter the actual efficacy of the marketed product, a phenomenon they call "placebo effects of marketing actions." In this rejoinder, they build on the preceding commentaries and refine t...

Common sense suggests that consumers make more satisfying decisions as they consider their options more closely. Yet we argue that such close consideration can have undesirable consequences because it may induce attachment to the options--a sense of prefactual ownership of the choice options. When consumers then select one option, they effectively...

this article we seek further insight into the difference between buying and selling prices. We begin with the basic notion that consumers, be they buyers or sellers, tend to focus attention on what is forgone in the potential exchange. Based on this notion we predict that buyers emphasize their sentiment toward the expenditure, whereas sellers stre...

This paper introduces consumer empowerment as a promising research area. Going beyond lay wisdom that more control is always better, we outline several hypotheses concerning (a) the factors that influence the perception of empowerment, and (b) the consequences of greater control and the subjective experience of empowerment on consumer satisfaction...

This paper introduces consumer empowerment as a promising research area. Going beyond lay wisdom that more control is always better, we outline several hypotheses concerning (a) the factors that influence the perception of empowerment, and (b) the consequences of greater control and the subjective experience of empowerment on consumer satisfaction...

Offers a critical overview of and presents accepted findings on the past decade of extensive research activity investigating the relationship between how events are experienced as they occur and how they are retrospectively summarized. In particular, the authors describe central features of experiences (gestalt characteristics) that seem to govern...

In this paper we take stock of recent research on how people summarize and evaluate extended experiences. Summary assessments do not simply integrate all the components of the evaluated events, but tend to focus on only a few features (gestalt characteristics). Examples of these de®ning features include the rate at which the transient state compone...

We propose that buying- and selling-price estimates reflect a focus on what the consumer forgoes in the potential exchange and that this notion offers insight into the well-known difference between those two types of value assessment. Buyers and sellers differ not simply in their valuation of the same item but also in how they assess the value. Buy...

this article, we propose a new task-goal hypothesis regarding the prominence effect: The prominent attribute receives more weight in tasks whose goal is to differentiate among options than in tasks whose goal is to equate options. We use this hypothesis to generalize the prominence effect beyond choice and matching to several additional tasks, incl...

In many business sectors such as airlines, hotels, trucking, and media advertising, customers' arrivals and willingness to pay are uncertain. Managers must decide whether to quote a price low enough to guarantee early sales, or to quote a higher price and risk that some units remain unsold. In allocating capacity, they face a trade-off between two...

Combining parallel multiple recursive sequences provides an efficient way of implementing random number generators with long periods and good structural properties. Such generators are statistically more robust than simple linear congruential generators that fit into a computer word. We made extensive computer searches for good parameter sets, with...

Seemingly equivalent preference assessment procedures (e.g., choose between a 40¢ Safeway brand cola and a 55¢ Coke) and matching (e.g., a Safeway brand cola costs 40¢; at what price would a Coke be equally attractive to you?) generate systematically different estimates of consumers’ price–quality trade-offs. This result appears consistent with the...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Business Administration)--University of California, Berkeley, May 1993. Includes bibliographical references.

We compiled this special issue of Marketing Letters on The Dynamics of Consumer Preferences from contributions to this Forum and some related work. The articles in this special issue of Marketing Letters discuss a variety of behavioral regularities relating time and preference, including how consumers form and change preferences over time and how t...

Consumers' choices and evaluations can sometimes be interpreted as goal-driven attempts to manage some of the internal and external resources and constraints that affect subsequent purchase and consumption choices. For example, delaying gratification involves limiting immediate benefits in favor of better future ones. We refer to this self-manageme...

We examine how service should be divided and scheduled when it can be provided in multiple separate segments. We analyze variants of this problem using a model with a conventional function describing the waiting cost, that is modified to account for some aspects of the psychological cost of waiting in line. We show that consideration of the psychol...

Sales promotions and product enhancements are commonly expected to increase a brand's sales, when they do not negatively impact its utility and cost. That is, the purchase probability of consumers who find the promotion or additional feature attractive will increase, whereas the purchase likelihood of other consumers will not be affected. In contra...

Tliis paper summarizes the special session "Nev Directions in Time Research in Consumer Behivior." Four papers were presented in the session: '' "The Effects The session reviewed recent developments in time research, focusing on three interrelated topics: percjption of time (Homik), consumers' preferences and attitudes towards queues (Cannon, and S...