2002 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Modeling of the Consumers' Multi-stage Decision Process and Controlling Persuasive Information : -Searching for the Effective Presentation Schemes in Electronic Commerce-
| Project/Area Number |
13630122
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Commerce
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| Research Institution | Osaka University |
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Principal Investigator |
NAKAJIMA Nozomi Graduate School of Economics, Professor, 大学院・経済学研究科, 教授 (00095936)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2001 – 2002
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| Keywords | multi-stage decision / consumer behavior / persuasion / decision framing / information presentation / online shopping / price presentation scheme |
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| Research Abstract |
The author proposes a formal model of utility judgments and choice that incorporates the notion of a multi-stage decision process and uses a set of thresholds that reflect the minimum-acceptable levels of utility at each stage. The model is innovative in that it integrates a number of important consumer decision making phenomena into a unified framework. These phenomena include preference heterogeneity across individuals, variability in the degree of product differentiation in the market, inferences about missing information, a penalty for ambiguity due to incomplete information, the possibility of differential weighing of information presented at different stages, and utility adjustments due to expectancy disconfirmation.
A simulation study was conducted in order to obtain a better understanding of the intertemporal allocation of persuasive information. The results of the study suggest that the withholding and deferred presentation of some persuasive information may be the most effecti
… More
ve intertemporal information allocation pattern in a broad variety of circumstances.
Decision framing is one of the most important factors to be considered when designing the schemes of presenting information because consumers are always exposed to some kind of decision frames in e-commerce environments. We use online experiments to examine how the decision framing affects the consumers' option choice decisions in a simulated shopping website. The results of our experiments show that consumers tend to choose higher-priced options when they have high- versus low-priced reference points. Then, a probabilistic choice model is constructed to explain the experiments' results based on the prospect theory, incorporating the extreme-aversion effects which would shift the reference point toward the neutral direction. The estimation results suggest that the downgrading scheme would produce a profitable method of information presentation, which is now employed by several online shopping websites with a great success. Less
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