Whereas everyone recognizes that increasing obesity rates worldwide are driven by a complex set of interrelated factors, the marketing actions of the food industry are often singled out as one of the main culprits. But how exactly is food marketing making us fat? To answer this question, we...

Findings from behavioral and psychological studies indicate that people regularly and predictably behave in ways that contradict some standard assumptions of economic analysis. Recognizing that consumption choices are determined by factors other than prices, income, and information illuminates a...

When people stockpile products, how do they decide when and how much they will consume? To answer this question, the authors develop a framework that shows how the salience and convenience of products influence postpurchase consumption incidence and quantity. Multiple research methods -...

Nearly every decision a person makes is restricted in some way. While we are painfully aware of some of these restrictions, others go largely undetected. This paper presents a conceptual framework for understanding how restrictions interact with situational and individual characteristics, as...

Rational choice theory commonly assumes that the presence of unselected choices cannot impact which among the remaining choices is selected – often referred to as independence of irrelevant alternatives. We show that such seemingly irrelevant alternatives influence choice in a school lunch...

Labels such as “Large,” or “Super-size” are often used to describe portion sizes. How do these normative labels influence consumer choice and how much they ultimately either consume or waste? While one might believe that firms use normative labels to impact choice behavior through loss...

We first choose what to eat and then we choose how much to eat. Yet as consumer psychologists, we understand food choice much better than food consumption quantity. This review focuses on three powerful drivers of food consumption quantity: 1) Sensory cues (how your senses react), 2) emotional...