質(zhì)量還是價格?折衷產(chǎn)品缺貨情境下的消費者選擇

摘要： 基于情境效應(yīng)和決策沖突理論,通過三個實驗探討折衷產(chǎn)品選項的不可得如何影響消費者對余下可得產(chǎn)品的偏好。研究結(jié)果表明,折衷商品不可得對余下商品的吸引力呈現(xiàn)非對稱性的影響。以質(zhì)量和價格產(chǎn)品屬性的購買情境為例,中等價格中等質(zhì)量商品的不可得將顯著提升低價格商品的吸引力(實驗1),其原因在于折衷方案不可得顯著提高了消費者的決策沖突,高水平的決策沖突導(dǎo)致決策者偏好具有確定性優(yōu)勢的選項,規(guī)避優(yōu)勢存在模糊性的選項。隨著質(zhì)量屬性模糊性的降低(提供專家評價,實驗2;消費者專業(yè)知識較強,實驗3)或提高(質(zhì)量存在波動范圍,實驗2),折衷商品不可得效應(yīng)相應(yīng)減弱或加強。
Consumers in real world sometimes face situations in which information about unavailable products is still present in the decision contexts. For example, consumers may find that certain options are sold out and thus marked by an out-of-stock stamp in such a way that consumers can still examine their attributes information.Traditional models of consumer choices have assumed that the addition of an unavailable alternative to a choice set has no impact on the shares among the original alternatives. However, recent studies on asymmetrical dominance choice sets suggest that adding an alternative that asymmetrically dominates a targeted alternative and is declared to be unavailable increases preference for the target in the original choice set. Three categories of theories, range-weighting, similarity-substitution and relative-advantage, have been used to explain the phenomenon.Despite prior research interest in extending attraction effect in unavailability context, little is understood about how unavailable options influence preferences among available options in other choice settings. Dominant literature have advocate for the preference for the compromised option in a three-option set. Thus, it is typical that the unavailable option is the compromised one. The above three explanations all fail to predict the preference on the remaining options in this situation.We propose that consumers are experiencing increasing decision difficulty or feeling greater conflict deciding in the unavailable compromise set than in the two-option set, and thus are likely to alleviate this negative task-related emotion by engaging in conflict-reducing heuristics. In particular, if choice of the compromise option that is associated with smallest maximum error or likelihood of being criticized is impossible, consumers forced to make difficult trade-offs among extremes are likely to rely more on the unambiguous attribute in the evaluations, because unambiguous outcome is associated with a lower likelihood of criticism. Thus, consumers seek to guarantee(avoid) advantages(disadvantages) of their selected option in precision rather than in ambiguity. Based on findings that attributes in quantitative nature(e.g., price) are easier to trade-off than attributes(e.g., quality) in qualitative nature, we predict that the relative preferences for low-quality, low-price option which has a precise and certain advantage will be stronger in presence than in absence of an unavailable intermediate option.Study 1 establishes that the addition of an unavailable compromise option into a two-option local set can increase the relative share of the cheaper option. In Study 2, we demonstrate that the degree to which the quality advantage(disadvantage) can be ambiguously evaluated moderates this effect. When the value of quality becomes less ambiguous to evaluate(providing experts' quality evaluations, Study 2 A) or more ambiguous to evaluate(describing product quality by a range of performance, Study 2 B), the effect that the cheaper option fares better in the unavailable middle option set attenuates or strengthens. Study 3 further examines the underlying mechanism by testing the moderating effect of consumer product knowledge, and the mediating effect of decision conflict. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and managerial implications.