Michelle P. Lee

Money, Time, and the Stability of Consumer Preferences

Consumers often make product choices that involve the consideration of money and time. Building on dual-process models, the authors propose that these two basic resources activate qualitatively different modes of processing: while money is processed analytically, time is processed more affectively. Importantly, this distinction then influences the stability of consumer preferences. An initial set of three experiments demonstrates that, compared with a control condition free of the consideration of either resource, money consideration generates significantly more violations of transitivity in product choice, while time consideration has no such impact. The next three experiments use multiple approaches to demonstrate the role of different processing modes associated with money versus time consideration in this result. Finally, two additional experiments test ways in which the cognitive noise associated with the analytical processing that money consideration triggers could be reduced, resulting in more consistent preferences.

Disambiguating the Role of Ambiguity in Perceptual Assimilation and Contrast Effects

We examine how perceptions of a product are affected by the presence of extreme exemplars and find that ambiguity of the product is an important moderator. When the target is a novel one, perceptions assimilate to the context, whereas when it is highly familiar, perceptions are immune to the influence of context. This is as predicted by the interpretation-comparison model. Contrary to this model, however, we find that effects on perceptions are not always assimilative in nature. When product ambiguity falls between the extremes of novel and highly familiar, a contrast effect in perception can occur. This is consistent with the selective accessibility model, which says that a perceptual contrast effect occurs when conditions orient respondents to dissimilarities rather than to similarities among context and target items. In the experiments conducted, context-induced response language effects were circumvented by employing forced-anchor scales. (c) 2009 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Future scenarios for management education

Purpose – Business schools are facing unprecedented challenges, ranging from financial sustainability in some quarters to waning demand for the MBA to the potentially disruptive impact of massive open online courses. Given these challenges, how might the future of management education unfold? The purpose of this paper is to better understand how leaders in management education perceive these challenges and their likely impact on the evolution of the field. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted in-depth interviews with 39 experts, the majority of who were in leadership positions at business schools. Each of these in-depth interviews was tape-recorded, transcribed and then content-analysed. Findings – The authors asked the panel of experts for their insights on what they perceive to be the most likely, best-case, and worst-case scenarios in the next ten years. The modal response for the most likely scenario was one where intense competition pushes schools to specialise and better differentiate...

Blind spots in African management education: An examination of issues deserving greater attention

There is reason to be optimistic about management education in Africa given the growth in the number of business schools on the continent and continued efforts at raising quality. There remains room for improvement in the field, of course, and the issues and challenges that need to be tackled have been written about elsewhere (e.g. African Management Initiative (AMI), 2013; AMBA, 2015; Thomas et al., 2016). The study reported here has the more nuanced purpose of understanding the blind spots that persist in the field. These are issues that are largely ignored or receive insufficient attention because their significance is underestimated. Through a series of structured in-depth interviews with leading management educators and stakeholders, we uncover three potential blind spots to do with a lack of demand-side orientation, unequal access to management education, and the need for glocalization.