Recommendations, credits and discounts : essays in behavioral decision making

Essay 1: Translation Errors in the Aggregation of Consumer Recommendations There has been a substantial increase of websites providing consumers with recommendations about products and services. These recommendations are usually presented in the form of verbal reviews and numerical ratings. It is assumed implicitly that consumers can integrate adequately the information across the two presentation modes (verbal and numerical). However, research on the effects of compatibility between stimulus and response formats suggests that preference consistency is higher (lower) in cases of compatible (non-compatible) formats, implying that information aggregation across the two modes may be sub-optimal. The results of three experiments confirm this conjecture. Information aggregation and preference reversals were systematically affected by the compatibility of the stimulus and response format. Decision makers were not aware of this effect. Essay 2: The Researcher as a Consumer of Scientific Publications: How Do Name Ordering Conventions Affect Inferences About Contribution Credits? When researchers from different fields with different norms collaborate, the question arises how name ordering conventions are chosen, and how they affect contribution credits. In this paper we answer these questions by studying two disciplines that exemplify the two cornerstones of name ordering conventions: Lexicographical ordering (i.e., alphabetical ordering, endorsed in economics) and non-lexicographical ordering (i.e., ordering according to individual contributions, endorsed in psychology). Inferences about credits are unambiguous in the latter arrangement, but imperfect in the former, because alphabetical listing can reflect ordering according to individual contributions by chance. We contrast the fields of economics and psychology with marketing, a discipline heavily influenced by both.

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Maciejovsky, Boris

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Dan Ariely.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/47832

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/47832