Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Consumer choices concerning the selection, consumption, and disposal of products and services can often be difficult and are important to the consumer, to marketers, and to policy makers. As a result, the study of consumer decision processes has been a focal interest in consumer behavior for over 30 years (e.g., Bettman, 1979; Hansen, 1972; Howard & Sheth, 1969; Nicosia, 1966). One can infer from recent trends in the nature and structure of the marketplace that the importance of understanding consumer decision making is likely to continue. Rapid technological change, for instance, has led to multitudes of new products and decreased product lifetimes. In addition, new communications media, such as the World Wide Web, have made enormous amounts of information on options potentially available (Alba et al., 1997). Further, consumers are often asked to make difficult value tradeoffs, such as price versus safety in purchasing an automobile, environmental protection versus convenience in a variety of goods, and quality of life versus longevity in complex health care decisions.
How do consumers cope with the decisions they must make, some of which involve difficult tradeoffs and uncertainties? One approach to studying consumer decisions has been to assume a rational decision maker with well-defined preferences that do not depend on particular descriptions of the options or on the specific methods used to elicit those preferences. Each option in a choice set is assumed to have a utility, or subjective value, that depends only on the option.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.