Katherine A. Burson

More for the Many: The Influence of Entitativity on Charitable Giving

Donations to large numbers of victims are typically muted relative to donations to a single identified victim. This article shows that people can donate more to large numbers of victims if these victims are perceived as entitative--comprising a single, coherent unit. For example, donations to help children in need are higher when the children comprise a family than when they have no explicit group membership. The same effect is observed on donations for endangered animals that are depicted as moving in unison. Perceived entitativity results in more extreme judgments of victims. Victims with positive traits are therefore viewed more favorably when entitative, triggering greater feelings of concern and higher donations. Entitativity has the opposite effect for victims sharing negative traits.

Six of One, Half Dozen of the Other Expanding and Contracting Numerical Dimensions Produces Preference Reversals

The scales used to describe the attributes of different choice options are usually open to alternative expressions, such as inches versus feet or minutes versus hours. More generally, a ratio scale can be multiplied by an arbitrary factor (e.g., 12) while preserving all of the information it conveys about different choice alternatives. We propose that expanded scales (e.g., price per year) lead decision makers to discriminate between choice options more than do contracted scales (e.g., price per month) because they exaggerate the difference between options on the expanded attribute. Two studies show that simply increasing the size of an attributes scale systematically changes its weight in both multiattribute preferences and willingness to pay: Expanding scales for one attribute shifts preferences to alternatives favored on that attribute.

The Benefits of Retail Therapy: Making Purchase Decisions Reduces Residual Sadness

People often shop when feeling sad, but whether and why shopping reduces residual (lingering) sadness remains an open question. Sadness is strongly associated with a sense that situational forces control the outcomes in one’s life, and thus we theorized that the choices inherent in shopping may restore personal control over one’s environment and reduce residual sadness. Three experiments provided support for our hypothesis. Making shopping choices helped to alleviate sadness whether they were hypothetical (Experiment 1) or real (Experiment 2). In addition, all experiments found support for the underlying mechanism of personal control restoration. Notably, the benefits of restored personal control over one’s environment do not generalize to anger (Experiments 2 and 3), because anger is associated with a sense that other people (rather than situational forces) are likely to cause negative outcomes, and these appraisals are not ameliorated by restoring personal control over one’s environment.

Multiple-Unit Holdings Yield Attenuated Endowment Effects

Previous endowment effect experiments have examined circumstances in which people encounter a single unit of a good e.g., one chocolate. We contrast single-unit treatments with multiple-unit treatments in which participants encounter several units of a good e.g., five chocolates. We observe endowment effects of typical magnitude for singleton holdings but attenuated endowment effects for multiple-unit holdings. Moreover, endowment effects consistently arise for singletons even as the definition of a unit is altered. For instance, participants holding one piece of chocolate show an endowment effect of standard size, but so do participants holding one box of chocolates. Yet the box contains about 20 individual pieces of chocolate, and participants given that many separate pieces show a substantially attenuated endowment effect. We thus propose the property of “unit dependence”: the definition of a unit can change, but contingent on any given definition, a pronounced endowment effect may emerge for singletons but not multiples. This paper was accepted by Teck Ho, decision analysis.

Knowing Where They Stand: The Role of Inferred Distributions of Others in Misestimates of Relative Standing

People often estimate how they compare to other consumers when they make purchase decisions. Unfortunately, they tend to err in this task, and this can lead to negative consequences in their choices. Previous literature has largely argued that these errors in estimates of relative standing are due to underweighting or ignoring the reference group. Using a novel measure of people’s perception of the reference group, we show that consumers do attend to that information but err in their estimates of relative standing because they tend to overestimate the dispersion of others’ performances and attributes. Three studies support this argument and provide insights that enable marketers to alter consumers’ relative assessment process in formerly discounted ways. We demonstrate straightforward tools that can change consumers’ impressions of others and thus change relative assessments and purchase decisions.

Tipping the Scale: The Role of Discriminability in Conjoint Analysis

Conjoint analysis is a widely used method for determining how much certain attributes matter to consumers by observing a series of their choices. However, how those attributes are expressed has important consequences for their choices and thus for conclusions drawn by market researchers about attribute importance. Expanded attribute scales (e.g., expressing exercise time in minutes) leads consumers to perceive greater differences between scale levels than contracted scales (e.g., expressing exercise time in hours). The authors show in two domains that simply expanding an attributes scale can shift choice toward alternatives that perform well on a scale that is expanded and thus can impact conjoint results such as attribute importance and screening. Thus, practitioners should take care when they choose precisely how to elicit preferences or how to describe their products: the extent of the scales expansion will determine researchers’ inferences about the importance of the attribute it describes. By illustrating the curvilinear relationship between scale expansion and multiple measures, the authors also offer practitioners some insight into the limits of scale expansion.

Income Tax and the Motivation to Work

Does income tax influence the motivation to work? We propose that the degree of effort exertion in the presence of income tax depends on people’s attitudes toward two key components of taxation: redistribution and government intervention. For people favorable toward both, working while taxed is aligned with personal identity and may actually enhance motivation. All others, however, may find taxes demotivating. In two incentive-compatible labor experiments, framing wages as subject to an income tax reduced participants’ productivity unless they were chronically favorable toward both redistribution and government intervention. This latter group was significantly more productive when taxed. An objectively equivalent intervention that did not redistribute a portion of participants’ wages (framed as a wage “match�? rather than a “tax�?) did not motivate anyone to work harder. Our findings suggest that the net effect of income tax on productivity partly depends on the distribution of attitudes toward redistribution and government intervention.