Under the background of climate change and man-made alterations to the environment, there has been an increase in the frequency of droughts and the range of their impact. Droughts may give rise to a series of resource, environmental and ecological effects, i.e., water shortage, water quality...

Droughts often affect the soil ecosystem directly. To address this question, a series of prototype observation experiments were designed in this study. The objective of this study was to identify changing tendencies of microbial biomass carbon content and the proportion of microbial biomass...

Drawing on construal level theory, this research proposes that consumers’ reliance on price (vs. feature-specific product attributes) for making quality inferences will be enhanced when the judgment is psychologically distant (vs. close). For example, the impact of price (attributes) on...

Affinity marketing collaboration is a growing practice in the marketplace, yet theories to explain its influence are scarce in the literature. This study suggests two complementary cause-related effects stemming from an organization's connection with its members to explain the underlying...

This research examines how consumers use base rate (e.g., disease prevalence in a population) and case information (e.g., an individual’s disease symptoms) to estimate health risks. Drawing on construal level theory, we propose that consumers’ reliance on base rate (case information) will be...

We study search behavior in a generalized "secretary problem" environment in which consumers search sequentially for the best alternative from a known and finite set of multi-attribute alternatives. In contrast to most previous studies, we make no distributional assumptions about the quality of...

This paper investigates situations where a sizeable sub-set of consumers prefer an inferior (dominated) offer made by an established brand to a superior (dominating) offer made by a less-established brand. Established brands are those for which consumers hold more confident beliefs concerning...

Superfluous choices are unnecessary choice steps that could be removed without affecting the final choice context and outcome. They are introduced in this article in order to study the mere effects of consumer participation. Superfluous choices have no immediate impact on the chosen option but...

We propose that ambiguity aversion, as introduced in the literature on decision making under uncertainty, drives a preference for established brands in multiattribute choices among branded alternatives. Established brands are those for which belief in quality is held with greater confidence,...

We study sequential search behavior in a generalized "secretary problem" in which a single object is to be selected from a set ofalternatives. Alternatives are inspected in a random order, one at a time, and only the rank order of the current alternative relative to the ones that have already...