Conventional wisdom suggests that more concrete and detailed information is helpful in evaluating new products. The current research, however, demonstrates that when consumers use visualization to evaluate new products, the value of concrete versus abstract visualization is dependent on the...

We present five studies supporting our strategic memory protection theory. When people make decisions about experiences to consume over time, they treat their memories of previous experiences as assets to be protected. The first two studies demonstrate that people tend to avoid situations that...

Consumers often search for and choose from ordered sets, commonly from options listed from best to worst. Normatively, such declining orderings maximize expected value from search and should lead to more positive evaluations of the experience compared to searching improving orderings. We...

This article examines how dynamic changes in information cost structure and time preferences affect consumers' search and switching behavior over time and lead to lock-in. The information cost structure is conceptualized as a trade-off of initial setup costs and ongoing usage costs. Lock-in is...

Although subjective judgment of future time plays an important role in a variety of decisions, little is known about the factors that influence such judgments and their implications. Based on a time as distance metaphor and its associated conceptual mapping between space and time, this article...

Construal level theory indicates that consumers tend to prefer products high in desirability (greater functionality) for distant-future decisions but switch their preferences toward products high in feasibility (greater usage convenience) for near-future decisions. The current research...

Contrary to the lay theory that predicts duration knowledge of affective episodes to ameliorate negative experiences and weaken positive ones, we demonstrate that duration knowledge increases the extremity of affective experience. In experiments 1 and 2, participants either know the exact...

How much time do consumers predict they will spend on using a product or service when they have control over the usage time? We propose that their predicted consumption time is systematically influenced by the valence and the representation of the target event. In three studies, we show that...