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This article examines how consumers forecast their future spare money, or “financial slack.” Although consumers generally think that both their income and expenses will rise in the future, they underweight the extent to which their expected expenses will cut into their spare money, a phenomenon the authors term “expense neglect.” The authors test and rule out several possible explanations for this phenomenon and conclude that expense neglect is due in part to insufficient attention toward expectations about future expenses relative to future income. “Tightwad” consumers, who are chronically attuned to costs, show less severe expense neglect than “spendthrifts,” who are less attuned to costs. The authors further find that expectations regarding changes in income (and not changes in expenses) predict responses to the Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment, a leading macroeconomic indicator. Finally, the authors conduct a meta-analysis of their entire file drawer (27 studies, 8,418 participants) and find that (1) across studies, participants place 2.9 times greater weight on income change than they do on expense change when forecasting changes in their financial slack, and (2) expense neglect is stronger for distant than for near-future forecasts.

It is common for researchers discovering a significant interaction of a measured variable X with a manipulated variable Z to examine simple effects of Z at different levels of X. These “spotlight” tests are often misunderstood even in the simplest cases, and it appears that consumer researchers are unsure how to extend them to more complex designs. The authors explain the general principles of spotlight tests, show that they rely on familiar regression techniques, and provide a tutorial demonstrating how to apply these tests across an array of experimental designs. Rather than following the common practice of reporting spotlight tests at one standard deviation above and below the mean of X, it is recommended that when X has focal values, researchers should report spotlight tests at those focal values. When X does not have focal values, it is recommended that researchers report ranges of significance using a version of Johnson and Neyman's test the authors term a “floodlight.”

International audience; La procédure de Baron et Kenny pour déterminer si une variable indépendante affecte une variable dépendante à travers une médiatrice est si connue qu'elle est utilisée par les auteurs et requise par les relecteurs quasi systématiquement. De nombreux projets de recherche ont été stoppés tôt dans un programme de recherche ou plus tard dans le processus de révision parce que les données n'étaient pas conformes aux critères de Baron et Kenny, empêchant ainsi l'avancement théorique. Bien que la littérature technique ait contesté certains tests de Baron et Kenny, elle n'a pas été diffusée auprès des chercheurs praticiens. Nous présentons un résumé non technique des failles de la logique de Baron et Kenny, parmi lesquelles certaines n'ont pas été évoquées auparavant. Nous proposons un arbre de décision et une procédure pas à pas pour examiner la médiation, classer ses types et interpréter les implications des conclusions dans le cadre de L'élaboration de la théorie et de recherches futures.

Several influential streams of research in marketing, psychology, and economics conclude that when an offer a seller makes to a buyer is held fixed, the buyer will be repelled if he or she learns that some other group of buyers is getting a better price for the same benefits or receiving more benefits for the same price. Prior work has attributed this repulsion to perceptions that the offer is inequitable, that it fits others better, or that it suggests that the core product is of low value. In six experiments, the authors show conditions under which exactly the opposite can occur; that is, consumers judge the same offer to be more attractive when a seller offers a better price or more benefits to another group than when the seller treats everyone equally.

Most consumer decisions involve trade-offs of costs and benefits over time. The research literature on “intertemporal choice” examines behavioral regularities in how people think about such decisions, drawing from marketing, psychology, and behavioral economics. This diverse literature is relevant to the analysis of public policy issues related to consumers’ discounting of future outcomes “too much” compared with sooner outcomes. A stream of outcomes can be viewed as occurring in three temporal regions: the present, the near future, and the more distant future. Somewhat different research streams have developed around the topic of underweighting outcomes in the distant (compared with the near) future and of overweighting outcomes in the present compared with any point in the future. The authors review key concepts from the literature on underweighting the distant future versus the near-term future to analyze policy issues related to consumers’ saving for retirement and their response to rebates. The authors review key concepts from the literature on impulsive behavior and present-biased preferences to analyze the problems of self-control that people have in their consumption of “sin” products that are proximate and that affect rewards in the present. The authors critique current information and incentive remedies that ignore behavioral principles from the literature, focusing their recommendations on policy interventions designed to influence eating habits and obesity and on cooling-off laws that govern return policies for consumers’ big-ticket purchases.

John G. Lynch Jr. is Roy J. Bostock Professor of Marketing, Fuqua School of Business (e-mail: john.lynch@duke.edu), and Wendy Wood is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology, Professor of Marketing, and Codirector of the Social Science Research Institute (e-mail: wendy.wood@duke.edu), Duke University. The authors thank the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, and the Warrington College of Business, University of Florida, for financial support for a conference at Duke in May 2005, in which these articles were originally presented and discussed. They also thank the discussants at the conference who provided thoughtful commentary on the articles appearing in this special issue (including Kathryn Aikin, Pankaj Aggarwal, Tim Buthe, Noel Brewer, Bob Giloth, John Herrera, Loraine LauGesk, Alan Levy, Patrick Malone, Danny McGoldrick, Joseph Mulholland, Mike Munger, Jan Pappalardo, David Pizarro, Daniel Rodriguez, and Kevin Schulman) and Eldar Shafir who commented on a draft of this introduction. They especially appreciate JPP&M editor Joel Cohen, who offered them the opportunity to serve as guest editors of this special issue and provided many instructive comments on this editorial and other articles in the special issue that helped them and the contributing authors better understand the policy environment. This special issue of Journal of Public Policy & Marketing addresses the theme “Helping Consumers Help Themselves: Improving the Quality of Judgments and Choices,” and it is motivated by Editor Joel Cohen’s desire to bring psychological theory to bear on public policy and public policy research. His premise is that public policy in the United States and internationally is dominated by the disciplines of economics and law. In the corridors of power, however, there is little parallel discussion of useful complementary perspectives drawing on psychological theory and research. This special issue is intended to start conversations between policy makers and psychologists, behavioral economists, and consumer behavior scholars whose work challenges key assumptions in standard policy analyses. The articles in this issue center on three key interventions to public policy that are drawn from economics and that are intended to benefit consumers in the marketplace

The authors examine the implications of electronic shopping for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. They assume that near-term technological developments will offer consumers unparalleled opportunities to locate and compare product offerings. They examine these advantages as a function of typical consumer goals and the types of products and services being sought and offer conclusions regarding consumer incentives and disincentives to purchase through interactive home shopping vis-à-vis traditional retail formats. The authors discuss implications for industry structure as they pertain to competition among retailers, competition among manufacturers, and retailer-manufacturer relationships.

The author reviews how methods developed within the information integration paradigm can be used to study consumers’ overall evaluations of choice alternatives. Methods are presented for determining the adequacy of several common model forms used to represent overall evaluations: adding, multiplying, and multilinear. Often, more than one integration model can be reconciled with the data by altering one's assumptions about the subjective values of the independent variables and about the relationship between private, unobservable overall evaluations and the overt numerical ratings that index them. Also, different integration models lead to parameter estimates (e.g., part worths) of varying levels of uniqueness and interattribute comparability. Emphasis is given to pinpointing the sorts of evidence and experimental designs that enable one to distinguish empirically among alternative model forms and psychological interpretations of the data—and, conversely, to what interpretations cannot be distinguished empirically—given only overall evaluations of a set of choice alternatives that vary along two or more attribute dimensions. Finally, the methods described are compared with model diagnosis procedures more commonly used in marketing and consumer research, including compositional correlational techniques and decompositional methods of conjoint measurement.