Joseph W. Alba

Dimensions of Consumer Expertise

The purpose of this article is to review basic empirical results from the psychological literature in a way that provides a useful foundation for research on consumer knowledge. A conceptual organization for this diverse literature is provided by two fundamental distinctions. First, consumer expertise is distinguished from product-related experience. Second, five distinct aspects, or dimensions, of expertise are identified: cognitive effort, cognitive structure, analysis, elaboration, and memory. Improvements in the first two dimensions are shown to have general beneficial effects on the latter three. Analysis, elaboration, and memory are shown to have more specific interrelationships. The empirical findings related to each dimension are reviewed and, on the basis of those findings, specific research hypotheses about the effects of expertise on consumer behavior are suggested.

Is memory schematic

ion Information that has been selected because it is important and/or relevant to the schema is further reduced during the encoding process by abstraction. This process codes the meaning but not the format of a message (e.g., Bobrow, 1970; Bransford, Barclay, & Franks, 1972). Thus, details such as the lexical form of an individual word (e.g., Schank, 1972, 1976) and the syntactic form of a sentence (e.g., Sachs, 1967) will not be preserved in memory. Because memory for syntax appears to be particularly sparce as well as brief (e.g., J. R. Anderson, 1974; Begg & Wickelgren, 1974; Jarvella, 1971; Sachs, 1967, 1974), the abstraction process is thought to operate during encoding. Additional support for the notion that what is stored is an abstracted representation of the original stimulus comes from studies that demonstrate that after a passage is read, it takes subjects the same amount of time to verify information originally presented in a complex linguistic format as it does to verify that same information presented in a simpler format (e.g., King & Greeno, 1974; Kintsch M Bransford, et al., 1972; Brewer, 1975; Frederiksen, 1975a; Kintsch, 1974; Norman & Rumelhart, 1975; Schank, 1972, 1976). One formalized presentation of this idea is Schanks conceptual dependency theory (1972). The theory asserts that all propositions can be expressed by a small set of primitive concepts. All lexical expressions that share an identical meaning will be represented in one way (and so stored economically) regardless of their presentation format. As a result people should often incorrectly recall or misrecognize synonyms of originally presented words, and they do (e.g., Anderson & Bower, 1973; R. C. Anderson, 1974; Anisfeld & Knapp, 1968; Brewer, 1975; Graesser, 1978b; Sachs, 1974). Abstraction and memory theories. Since considerable detail is lost via the abstraction process, this process can easily account for the incompleteness that is characteristic of peoples recall of complex events. In light of the abstraction process, the problem for schema theories becomes one of accounting for accurate recall. Schema theories do this by borrowing a finding from psycholinguistic research, to wit, that speakers of a language share preferred ways of expressing information. If both the creator and perceiver of a message are operating with the same preferences or under the same biases, the perceivers reproduction of the input may appear to be accurate. The accuracy, however, is the product of recalling the semantic content of the message and imposing the preferred structure onto it. Thus, biases operate in a manner that is similar to the probable detail reconstruction process. Biases have been documented for both syntactic information (J. R. Anderson, 1974; Bock, 1977; Bock & Brewer, 1974; Clark & Clark, 1968; James, Thompson, & Baldwin, 1973) and lexical information (Brewer, 1975; Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1974). Distortions may result from the abstraction process if biases are not shared by the person who creates the message and the one who receives it. More importantly, the ab-

The Effect of Discount Frequency and Depth on Consumer Price Judgments

The intensity of price discounting by retailers and manufacturers raises important questions about consumer price judgments. In the extreme, discounting can take the form of frequent but shallow discounts or deep but infrequent discounts. The research reported here explores the effects of these strategies on consumer estimation of price levels for competing stores and brands. In an initial experiment in which subjects made brand choices over time, a depth effect was observed that contrasted with the frequency effect found in previous research. Subsequent experiments identified the conditions under which depth (vs. frequency) characteristics of price data dominate consumers price-estimation judgments. Frequency information is more influential when sets of interstore or interbrand comparative prices exhibit complex and overlapping distributions (hence creating processing difficulty); in contrast, a depth bias occurs when prices have a simpler, dichotomous distribution. These results place pragmatically meaningful limitations on the influence of frequency information and illustrate the importance of context in determining consumer price judgments in a promotional environment. Copyright 1999 by the University of Chicago.

I Knew It All Along: Or, Did I?.

Other studies have reported that when subjects are presented with outcome feedback they are unable to remember their original knowledge state (the “knew-it-all-along effect”). In the present studies, feedback was followed by manipulations which were intended to invalidate it. In the first experiment, we failed to discredit the feedback and so report a knew-it-all-along effect under circumstances different from those reported elsewhere. In the second experiment, the discrediting instructions were successful and the effect was disrupted. Contrary to previous interpretations, the latter results indicate that feedback information is not automatically assimilated and that people can access their prior knowledge state, if the circumstances require.

Is temporal order encoded automatically

The reported experiment tested the suggestion that encoding of temporal order is automatic. Specifically, two of Hasher and Zacks’s (1979) automaticity criteria were examined: (1) that the amount and appropriateness of practice received would not affect acquisition of temporal information, and (2) that reliable individual differences would not be found on a test of memory for temporal order. Contrary to expectations, neither of these criteria was confirmed: Retention of temporal order increased with practice at three (or four) successive lists. And, reliable individual differences were indicated by the findings that subjects’ relative performance levels remained stable across lists, and that groups with higher average academic ability outperformed those with lower ability. Similar results were obtained for a flee-recall task (in which case they were expected). Problems of assessing degrees of nonautomaticity are discussed. Our data are seen to be in general conformity with Tzeng’s (e.g., Tzeng & Cotton, 1980) “study-phase” retrieval theory of temporal coding.

Nature of Inference Representation

Constructive errors accompanying memory for prose have often been attributed to processes of integration operating on inferred ideas and to the resultant schematic nature of prose memory. An alternative explanation stemming from the reality monitoring model (Johnson & Raye, 1981) suggests that intrusions result from an inability to identify the origin of independent memory traces. Support for the model was obtained by demonstrating that misrecognition of inferred information varies as a function of the difficulty associated with generating it. Additionally, it was shown that incorrect inferences remain as stable traces in memory despite being incompatible with later, more accurate information. The latter finding is inconsistent with substitution models of memory.