ABSTRACT
Consumer research has long been influenced by the assumptions of microeconomics and its notion of revealed preference (Samuelson, 1938; Savage, 1954). From this perspective, consumers know what they like and want, and their preferences are revealed in the choices they make. As Daniel McFadden (1999), a Nobel laureate in economics, put it, “The standard model in economics is that consumers behave as if (…) preferences are primitive, consistent and immutable (preference-rationality), and the cognitive process is simply preference maximization, given market constraints (process-rationality)” (p. 75). In contrast, a large body of psychological research indicates that consumers’ preferences are highly malleable and often constructed on the spot (e.g., Bettman, Luce, & Payne, 1998; see Griffin, Liu, & Kahn, 2005, for a recent review). From this perspective, preferences are driven by the information that happens to be most accessible at the time of judgment or choice. Consistent with psychology’s general emphasis on the role of declarative information in judgment and decision making, most of this work has focused on declarative information about the target product and its competitors. Presumably, consumers consider the attributes of a product, elaborate on them, and compare them with the attributes of competing products to arrive at an informed judgment. This emphasis on declarative information
is true to economists’ assumption that only “relevant” attributes of the choice alternatives matter.
