TY - JOUR
AU - Ratneshwar,, S.
AB - Abstract We examined the issues of when, and how, consumers' prior beliefs or “theories” might bias their judgments of the association between price and quality using a task that involved taste testing orange juices. When the task was manipulated so that subjects had difficulty in comparing and contrasting the taste quality of the juices, their covariation judgments tended to be theory driven: while these judgments were somewhat sensitive to the actual price-quality relationship in the “data,” they were biased by individuals' prior beliefs about the covariation. Follow-up studies indicated that this effect was not due to an encoding bias in that subjects' prior beliefs about price and quality did not significantly distort their taste perceptions per se. Instead, when subjects found it difficult to discriminate among the stimuli with regard to taste quality, they appeared to have formed their covariation judgments by making heuristic use of their prior beliefs. Implications are discussed for the covariation judgment process and consumer learning. This content is only available as a PDF. Author notes * Cornelia (Connie) Pechmann is an assistant professor of marketing at the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Irvine, CA 92717. S. Ratneshwar is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Florida, Bryan Hall, Gainesville, FL 32611. The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the U.C.I. Senate Academic Committee on Research and the College of Business Administration, University of Florida. They thank Joe Alba, Barb Bickart, Lauranne Buchanan, Shelly Chaiken, Rich Lutz, John Lynch, John Payne, Kalyan Raman, and Alan Sawyer for their helpful comments. They also thank Lisa Tukloff and Gabriel Esteban for their assistance in conducting the empirical studies, and Prakash Loungani for suggestions regarding the statistical analyses. Order of authorship is alphabetical, and both authors contributed equally to the research. © 1992 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc.
TI - Consumer Covariation Judgments: Theory or Data Driven?
JF - Journal of Consumer Research
DO - 10.1086/209308
DA - 1992-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/consumer-covariation-judgments-theory-or-data-driven-dGtabcyRQW
SP - 373
VL - 19
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -