Simona Botti

The Dark Side of Choice: When Choice Impairs Social Welfare

The provision of choice in terms of how people use goods and services has been proposed as a vehicle of improvement of social welfare. This article highlights some of the costs and benefits of creating choice, and it discusses how much choice policy makers and other agents (e.g., employers, retailers) should ideally grant and in what form they should grant it.

The Locus of Choice: Personal Causality and Satisfaction with Hedonic and Utilitarian Decisions

Consumers may consume the same products or services with different goals, for example, for their own pleasure--a hedonic goal--or to achieve some higher level purpose--a utilitarian goal. This article investigates whether this difference in goals influences satisfaction with an outcome that was either self-chosen or externally determined. In four experiments we manipulate consumption goals, controlling for the outcomes, the option valence, and whether the externally made choice was determined by an expert or at random. Results show that the outcome of a self-made choice is more satisfying than the outcome of an externally made choice when the goal is hedonic but not when it is utilitarian. We hypothesize that this effect results from the greater perceived personal causality associated with terminally motivated activities, such as hedonic choices, relative to instrumentally motivated activities, such as utilitarian choices, and provide evidence that supports this explanation over alternative accounts.

Power and Choice Their Dynamic Interplay in Quenching the Thirst for Personal Control

Power and choice represent two fundamental forces that govern human behavior. Scholars have largely treated power as an interpersonal construct involving control over other individuals, whereas choice has largely been treated as an intrapersonal construct that concerns the ability to select a preferred course of action. Although these constructs have historically been studied separately, we propose that they share a common foundation—that both are rooted in an individual’s sense of personal control. Because of this common underlying basis, we hypothesized that power and choice are substitutable; that is, we predicted that the absence of one would increase the desire for the other, which, when acquired, would serve to satisfy the broader need for control. We also predicted that choice and power would exhibit a threshold effect, such that once one source of control had been provided (e.g., power), the addition of the other (e.g., choice) would yield diminishing returns. Six experiments provide evidence supporting these predictions.

The Charity Beauty Premium: Satisfying Donors’ “Want” Versus “Should” Desires

Despite widespread conviction that neediness should be a top priority for charitable giving, this research documents a “charity beauty premium” in which donors often choose beautiful, but less needy, charity recipients instead. The authors propose that donors hold simultaneous yet incongruent preferences of wanting to support beautiful recipients (who tend to be judged as less needy), but believing they should support needy recipients. The authors also posit that preferences for beautiful recipients are most likely to emerge when decisions are intuitive, whereas preferences for needy recipients are most likely to emerge when decisions are deliberative. These propositions are tested in several ways. First, when a beautiful recipient is included in basic choice sets, this recipient becomes the most popular option and increases donor satisfaction. Second, heightening deliberation steers choices away from beautiful recipients and toward needier ones. Third, donors explicitly state that they “want” to give to beautiful recipients but “should” give to less beautiful, needier ones. Taken together, these findings reconcile and extend previous and sometimes conflicting results about beauty and generosity.

The Influence of Future Income on Present Spending: Self-Continuity Facilitates Consumption Smoothing

According to economic theory, consumers should boost present consumption when anticipating an income increase and reduce consumption when anticipating a decrease. Yet, many studies have observed a lack of such consumption smoothing. We investigate a psychological factor that can predict when consumers will adjust their current consumption to future income changes: self-continuity, or a sense of identification with and connection to the circumstances of the future self. We propose that consumers tend to perceive lower self-continuity when anticipating an income increase compared to a decrease. Consistent with this notion, we show that consumers are less likely to adjust present discretionary spending upward when anticipating an income increase than to adjust spending downward when anticipating an income decrease. Further, manipulations of self-continuity mitigate the asymmetry: when we induced high self-continuity, consumers adjusted spending to both future income increases and decreases, and when we induced low self-continuity, consumers adjusted present spending neither to future income increases nor to decreases. This demonstrates the role of self-continuity above and beyond other factors potentially contributing to the asymmetry, such as loss aversion and diminishing marginal utility. Six studies involving scenarios as well as real income expectations and behavior support the notion that consumers are more likely to smooth consumption when they perceive a higher sense of self-continuity.

BEING CHOOSY ABOUT CHOICE

Often assumed to be good for business and customers, choice can be bewildering and destructive when handled wrongly. We get picky with Simona Botti