Impact of Mental Representation on Consumer Behaviors : Implications for Mental Budgeting and Prediction Algorithm Preferences

People constantly encode and represent the information around them, and they make various inferences, judgments, and decisions based on their representation. The dissertation aims to connect mental representations to consumer behaviors. Investigating how consumers represent their choices and contexts allows us to generate new predictions about their behaviors and provide novel insights into the cognitive processes under these enriched contexts. In Chapter 1, I explore the relationship between the representation of concepts and spending behaviors. In Chapter 2, I explore how people represent prediction events and consequently how it influences their prediction algorithm choices. Additional norming studies and detailed study stimuli are available in Supplemental Files: Web Appendix.