Rebecca Walker Reczek

The Squander Sequence: Understanding Food Waste at Each Stage of the Consumer Decision-Making Process

Food waste presents a complex global problem that involves multiple actors and institutions within the aggregate food marketing system. Food waste occurs across food production and distribution, as well as at the hands of the consumer. In this research, the authors focus on waste that occurs across what is termed the “squander sequence,” which describes waste that occurs from consumer behaviors at the preacquisition, acquisition, consumption, and disposition stages. The authors set forth a behavioral theory–based agenda to explain food waste in the squander sequence with the ultimate goals of encouraging future research to uncover the psychological underpinnings of consumer-level food waste and of deriving transformative consumer solutions to this substantive issue.

Models of Sequential Evaluation in Best-Worst Choice Tasks

We examine the nature of best-worst data for modeling consumer preferences and predicting their choices. We show that contrary to the assumption of widely used models, the best and worst responses do not originate from the same data generating process. We propose a sequential evaluation model and show that people are likely to engage in a two-step evaluation process and are more likely to select the worst alternative first before selecting the best. We find that later choices have systematically larger coefficients as compared to earlier choices. We also find the presence of an elicitation effect that leads to larger coefficients when respondents are asked to select the worst alternative, meaning that respondents are surer about what they like least than what they like most. Finally, we investigate global inference retrieval in choice tasks, which can be represented by the central limit theorem and normally distributed errors, versus episodic retrieval represented by extreme value errors. We find that both specifications of the error term are plausible and advise using the proposed sequential logit model for practical reasons. We apply our model to data from a national survey investigating the concerns associated with hair care. We find that accounting for the sequential evaluation in the best-worst tasks and the presence of the scaling effects leads to different managerial implications compared to the results from currently used models.

Social Recycling Transforms Unwanted Goods into Happiness

Consumers are often surrounded by resources that once offered meaning or happiness but that have lost this subjective value over time—even as they retain their objective utility. We explore the potential for social recycling—disposing of used goods by allowing other consumers to acquire them at no cost—to transform unused physical resources into increased consumer happiness. Six studies suggest that social recycling increases positive affect relative to trash, recycling, and donations of goods to nonprofit organizations. Both perceptions of helping the environment and helping other people drive this increase in positive affect. We conclude that social recycling offers a scalable means for reengineering the end of the consumption cycle to transform unused resources into happiness. We suggest that further research should continue to enrich a general theory of disposition, such that we are able to maximize the ecological, interpersonal, and community utility of partially depleted resources.

The Wisdom of Some: Do We Always Need High Consensus to Shape Consumer Behavior?

From the Food and Drug Administrations efforts to prompt healthier eating to the Environmental Protection Agencys desire to prompt people to engage in environmentally friendly behaviors, a wide range of policy makers aim to persuade consumers. To do so, they must decide how and whether to use information about the behavior of other consumers as part of their persuasive message. In four experimental studies, the authors demonstrate that the persuasive advantage of high- versus low-consensus information depends on the target consumers trait level of susceptibility to interpersonal influence (SII). Low-SII consumers differentiate between low- and high-consensus information, such that they are more persuaded by high-consensus information. In contrast, high-SII consumers find any cue about the behavior of others persuasive, regardless of whether it is high or low consensus. Importantly, this finding suggests that policy makers may find success motivating behavioral change even in low-consensus situations. The authors close by reporting data from two broadscale correlational surveys that identify behavioral, psychographic, and demographic characteristics related to consumer SII as well as domains in which low consensus currently exists, so that policy makers can identify and target these individuals and related issues.

The Intersection of Sustainability, Marketing, and Public Policy: Introduction to the Special Section on Sustainability

In this introduction to the special section on sustainability, the authors propose two primary factors that can help characterize past research in marketing on sustainability. The first of these factors, the research objective, has two dimensions: mitigate versus create and short-term versus long-term focus. To mitigate (vs. create) implies that the objective of the research is to understand factors whose reduction (enhancement) would have a positive impact on sustainability. Short- versus long-term focus describes the fact that the research objective can be to impact an immediate behavior related to sustainability or can be focused on longer-term drivers or consequences of such behaviors. The second factor, research context, can have multiple dimensions, although much of the past and current research on sustainability has been conducted in four contexts: environmental, nonenvironmental, business-to-consumer, and business-to-business. The authors first review past literature in light of this framework and then discuss the articles in the special section. They close with a discussion of where researchers interested in studying the intersection of sustainability, marketing, and public policy can go from here.

Keeping the Memory but Not the Possession: Memory Preservation Mitigates Identity Loss from Product Disposition

Nonprofit firms’ reliance on donations to build inventory distinguishes them from traditional retailers. This reliance on consumer donations means that these organizations face an inherently more volatile supply chain than retailers that source inventory from manufacturers. The authors propose that consumer reluctance to part with possessions with sentimental value causes a bottleneck in the donation process. The goal of this research is therefore to provide nonprofits with tools to increase donations of used goods and provide a theoretical link between the literature streams on prosocial behavior, disposition, memory, and identity. As such, the authors explore the effectiveness of memory preservation strategies (e.g., taking a photo of a good before donating it) in increasing donations to nonprofits. A field study using a donation drive demonstrates that encouraging consumers to take photos of sentimental possessions before donating them increases donations, and five laboratory experiments explicate this result by mapping the proposed psychological process behind the success of memory preservation techniques. Specifically, these techniques operate by ameliorating consumers’ perceived identity loss when considering donation of sentimental goods.