How do consumers reconcile conflicting motives for social group identification and individual uniqueness? Four studies demonstrate that consumers simultaneously pursue assimilation and differentiation goals on different dimensions of a single choice: they assimilate to their group on one...

Mental accounting posits that people track their expenditures using cognitive categories or “mental accounts.” The authors propose that this cognitive process can be complemented by an approach that examines how feelings about a sum of money, or the money's “affective tag,” influence its...

Humor is a common goal of marketing communications, yet humorous advertisements do not always improve consumer attitudes towards the advertised brand. By investigating a potential downside of attempting to be humorous, our inquiry helps explain why humorous ads can fail to improve, and...