ABSTRACT
Consumers make dozens of food decisions each and every day, involving trade-offs between taste, healthiness, convenience, price, serving sizes, variety, cultural norms, social acceptance, and many other factors. Consumers have frequently been exposed to "supersized" pricing in which larger sizes of food products and beverages are accompanied by prices that are cheaper per unit. And most supersized pricing seems to apply to less healthy alternatives. Specifically, the increasing presence of calorie labels on restaurant menus has spurred research about the effects of this health information. However, when the pricing instead reflected a supersized pricing scheme, calorie information no longer influenced ordering, rather pricing dominated. One of the intuitions that consumers often utilize in making decisions in ambiguous food environments is that healthier products are more expensive. Overall, understanding how consumers navigate the complexities of food decision making day in and day out is critical to understanding long-term patterns of consumption.
