The experience of fun plays a major role in the consumer society. Drawing on a grounded theory approach, we advance a psychological theory of consumer fun. Through an integration of in-depth interviews, narrative analyses, controlled experiments, structural equation modeling, and a...

Uncertainty is an unavoidable part of human life. How do states of uncertainty influence the way people make decisions? We advance the proposition that states of uncertainty increase the reliance on affective inputs in judgments and decisions. In accord with this proposition, results from six...

Is the perceived value of things an absolute measurable quantity, as in economists’ notion of ‘‘cardinal utility,” or a relative assessment of the various objects being evaluated, as in economists’ notion of ‘‘ordinal utility”? We believe that the answer depends in part upon...

We offer a constructive critique of Regulatory Engagement Theory (Higgins, 2006; Higgins & Scholer, 2009). After highlighting the major tenets of the theory and its main contributions, we identify some of its conceptual ambiguities. We then argue that the hedonic and intensity components of value...

This chapter examines how the original tenets of the affect-as-information hypothesis can be extended to explain a wide range of judgment phenomena, especially with respect to consumer decision making. To this end, research within social psychology as well as research from other fields such as...

Previous research has shown that processing fluency leads to higher aesthetic pleasure. We propose that the effect of fluency on aesthetic pleasure relates to fluency’s role in reducing uncertainty. In other words, uncertainty is a drive state that produces pleasure only once it is resolved....

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how regulatory focus theory, a theory of motivation and self-regulation, can be drawn upon to explain a variety of consumer decision making phenomena. We briefly review the major tenets of the theory, which proposes a fundamental distinction between two...