Eric A. Greenleaf

Play as a Consumption Experience: The Roles of Emotions, Performance, and Personality in the Enjoyment of Games

Consumer researchers have recently begun to focus on the experiential aspects of consumption in general and on intrinsically motivated hedonic enjoyment in particular. Within this broad class of consumer behavior, play (as in sports, games, and other leisure activities) constitutes a particularly familiar and important type of consumption experience. This study investigates some phenomena involved in playful consumption. The results suggest that performance, perceived complexity, and personality-game congruity determine emotional responses and that performance itself depends both on previous performance and on various ability-related individual characteristics. Though still tentative, such findings indicate an important role for the competence motive in the enjoyment of games.

Reasons for Substantial Delay in Consumer Decision Making

This study proposes a typology of reasons why people substantially delay important consumer decisions. The delay reasons we study are drawn from delay typologies identified in other contexts as well as from the product diffusion literature. Two studies reported here examine why subjects delay consumer decisions. These support most of the reasons in the proposed typology, while some unanticipated delay reasons also emerge. We find that the delay reasons are related to the reasons consumers stop delaying, a process that we call delay closure, and are also related to the amount of time that consumers spend in different stages of the decision-making process. A final study supports a conceptual framework to classify these delay reasons based on the two dimensions of internal versus external locus of causation, and whether the purpose of delay is related to the decision or to unrelated activities. Copyright 1995 by the University of Chicago.

Auctions: Research Opportunities in Marketing

Despite growing interest in traditional and Internet auctions, the marketing literature on auctions is sparse. This paper outlines selected aspects of the research opportunity. We provide a brief description of the major auction mechanisms, outline key concepts and results from the economic analysis of auctions, and summarize the key findings in empirical tests of auction theory. We then identify areas for future research on auction markets, particularly those of interest to marketers in the new contexts created by the Internet.

Using connoisseurs to predict mass tastes

This study provides evidence that the evaluations of expert connoisseurs can validly predict how the esthetic judgments of untrained novices will change over the course of repeated exposures. These results suggest that such expert opinion should be considered in strategic planning for new products whose success depends on their long-run esthetic appeal.

Examining Medical Decision Making from a Marketing Perspective

This paper explores how consideration of the medical context can add newelements to marketing thought. Differences between the medical context andother consumer contexts are reviewed. The effects that the medical contexthas on the way traditional constructs such as involvement, affect andstress, uncertainty and satisfaction affect choice are discussed. Finally,emerging research in medical contexts where future discoveries could enhanceconsumer choice theory are presented.

Using Single-Neuron Recording in Marketing: Opportunities, Challenges, and an Application to Fear Enhancement in Communications

This article introduces the method of single-neuron recording in humans to marketing and consumer researchers. First, the authors provide a general description of this methodology, discuss its advantages and disadvantages, and describe findings from previous single-neuron human research. Second, they discuss the relevance of this method for marketing and consumer behavior and, more specifically, how it can be used to gain insights into the areas of categorization, sensory discrimination, reactions to novel versus familiar stimuli, and recall of experiences. Third, they present a study designed to illustrate how single-neuron studies are conducted and how data from them are processed and analyzed. This study examines peoples ability to up-regulate (i.e., enhance) the emotion of fear, which has implications for designing effective fear appeals. The study shows that the firing rates of neurons previously shown to respond selectively to fearful content increased with emotion enhancement instructions, but only for a video that did not automatically evoke substantial fear. The authors discuss how the findings help illustrate which conclusions can and cannot be drawn from single-neuron research.

The Impact of Anticipated Regret on the Auction Seller's Optimal Reserve and Decision Making Task

We examine how optimal reserve prices, and the market information that sellers need to collect, change when sellers in open English auctions anticipate regret from setting the reserve so high that their property does not sell. We find that this regret can create reserves that have multiple optima, depend on the number of bidders, and equal the sellers own valuation. Regret can also make the sellers payoff less sensitive to the reserve. These results do not occur for regretless sellers. These results complicate decision-making and information gathering for regretful sellers, who need to obtain more market information to set the optimal reserve compared to regretless sellers. We find that regrets impact depends on how the seller forms regret, and compare three types - constant, best possible outcome, and close miss regret. The extent of polarization in bidder valuations affects regrets impact on reserves for some regret forms but not for others. Vickrey auctions create additional opportunities for anticipated regret that raise optimal reserves compared to open English auctions, and cause reserves to depend on the number of bidders.

Competition Between Auctions

Even though auctions are capturing an increasing share of commerce, they are typically treated in the theoretical economics literature as isolated. That is, an auction is typically treated as a single seller facing multiple buyers or as a single buyer facing multiple sellers. In this paper, we review the state of the art of competition between auctions. We consider three different types of competition: competition between auctions, competition between formats, and competition between auctioneers vying for auction traffic. We highlight the newest experimental, statistical and analytical methods in the analysis of competition between auctions.