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User-generated content has become ubiquitous and very influential in the marketplace. Increasingly, this content is generated on smartphones rather than personal computers (PCs). This article argues that because of its physically constrained nature, smartphone (vs. PC) use leads consumers to generate briefer content, which encourages them to focus on the overall gist of their experiences. This focus on gist, in turn, tends to manifest as reviews that emphasize the emotional aspects of an experience in lieu of more specific details. Across five studies—two field studies and three controlled experiments—the authors use natural language processing tools and human assessments to analyze the linguistic characteristics of user-generated content. The findings support the thesis that smartphone use results in the creation of content that is less specific and privileges affect—especially positive affect—relative to PC-generated content. The findings also show that differences in emotional content are driven by the tendency to generate briefer content on smartphones rather than user self-selection, differences in topical content, or timing of writing. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Grocery retailers are joining the fray against obesity by offering a wide range of health and Wellness programs at the point of sale. However, the success of such programs in promoting healthy choices remains an open question. The authors examine the effectiveness of a growing health and Wellness initiative: a simplified nutrition scoring system. They present a conceptual framework that predicts the effect of such a scoring system on shoppers' food decisions and their sensitivity to price and promotion, as well as the moderating influence of category-level factors. Using a large-scale quasi experiment and panel data across eight product categories for more than 535,000 members of a grocery chain's frequent shopper program, the authors demonstrate that the point-of-sale nutrition scoring system helped consumers make healthier food choices, such that they switched to higher-scoring products in the postrollout period. The results also reveal that shoppers became less price sensitive and more promotion sensitive following the introduction of the food scoring system. The authors discuss implications for research and practice.

Four studies investigate the interactive influence of the presence of an accompanying friend and a consumer's agency—communion orientation on the consumer's spending behaviors. In general, the authors find that shopping with a friend can be expensive for agency-oriented consumers (e.g., males) but not for communion-oriented consumers (e.g., females). That is, consumers who are agency oriented spend significantly more when they shop with a friend (vs. when they shop alone), whereas this effect is attenuated for consumers who are communion oriented. The results also show that this interactive effect is moderated by individual differences in self-monitoring such that friends are especially influential for consumers who are high in self-monitoring, but the effects occur in opposite directions for agency- and communion-oriented consumers (i.e., agentic consumers spend more with a friend, while communal consumers spend less when accompanied by a friend). Finally, the authors test the underlying process and document that the interaction of agency—communion orientation, the presence of a friend, and self-monitoring is reversed when the focal context is changed from \"spending for the self\" to \"donating to a charity.\" They conclude with a discussion of implications for research and practice.

Retailers and manufacturers are keenly interested in understanding unplanned consideration and purchase conversion, but data that capture in-store product consideration have been unavailable in the past. In the current research, the authors use in-store video tracking to collect a novel data set that records shopping behavior at the point of purchase, including product consideration. In conjunction with an entrance survey of purchase intentions, they conduct several descriptive analyses that focus on the incidence, category propensity, behavioral characteristics, and outcome of unplanned consideration. The results reveal several new empirical insights. First, the authors find significant category-level complementarities between planned items and unplanned considerations, which they capture using a latent category map. Second, planned consideration and unplanned consideration differ in key behavioral characteristics (e.g., likelihood of purchase, time of occurrence, number of product touches). Third, greater likelihood of purchase conversion is significantly associated with dynamic factors (e.g., remaining in-store slack, outcome of the previous consideration) and behavioral characteristics (e.g., number of displays viewed, distance to shelf, references to a shopping list). The authors conclude with a discussion of implications of these findings for research and shopper marketing.

We propose that consumers have mental budgets for grocery trips that are typically composed of both an itemized portion and in‐store slack. We conceptualize the itemized portion as the amount that the consumer has allocated to spend on items planned to the brand or product level and the in‐store slack as the portion of the mental budget that is not assigned to be spent on any particular product but remains available for in‐store decisions. Using a secondary data set and a field study, we find incidence of in‐store slack. Moreover, we find support for our framework predicting that the relationship between in‐store slack and budget deviation (the amount by which actual spending deviates from the mental trip budget) depends on factors related to desire and willpower.

We examine a new construct dealing with individuals’ tendency to elaborate on potential outcomes, that is, to generate and evaluate potential positive and negative consequences of their behaviors. We develop the elaboration on potential outcomes (EPO) scale and then investigate its relationships with conceptually related traits and its association with consumer behaviors such as exercise of self‐control, procrastination, compulsive buying, credit card debt, retirement investing, and healthy lifestyle. Finally, we show that consumers with high EPO levels exhibit more effective self‐regulation when faced with a choice and that EPO can be primed, temporarily improving self‐regulation for consumers with low EPO levels.

This article examines the joint effect of issue capability and gender on risk taking. Across three studies, the authors show that the effect of issue capability is moderated by gender, depending on the compatibility between the goal orientation of the decision maker and the nature of the decision task. For decisions that are mainly driven by achievement of gains (e.g., investment decisions), men's risk-taking propensity is more influenced by their levels of issue capability than women's because the nature of the decision task is consistent with men's agentic orientation focused on the self. Conversely, for decisions that are mainly driven by avoidance of losses (e.g., insurance decisions), women's risk taking is more sensitive to issue capability than men's because the nature of such decisions is consistent with women's communion orientation. The authors analyze the betting data from the Daily Double in the Jeopardy! game show (Study 1). The results show that gender moderates the effect of issue capability on the actual betting behavior in Jeopardy! In Study 2, the authors test the underlying mechanism through mediation analyses of the focus of attention. In Study 3, the authors manipulate the task nature and demonstrate that men's risk taking is more sensitive to issue capability in investment decisions, whereas women's risk taking is more sensitive to issue capability in insurance decisions.

The variety seeking theoretical paradigm offers little guidance regarding the attributes of a stimulus that are most likely to drive the desire to switch. We review 25 years of research in physiobehavior, arguing that it can be extended in a natural way to predict that consumers are more likely to switch between sensory attributes (e.g., flavor) than nonsensory attributes (e.g., brand). Specifically, we examine the work on sensory‐specific satiety, a term used to describe the phenomenon whereby the pleasantness of a food just eaten drops significantly while the pleasantness of uneaten foods remains unchanged. These findings lead to the thesis explored in this research that consumers are more likely to seek variety on sensory attributes, which is then tested across three studies comparing flavor switching to brand switching. Study 1 uses ACNielsen wand panel data for purchases of tortilla chips and cake mixes from almost 2,000 consumers over a three‐year period. Study 2 examines actual consumption behavior using a six‐week consumption diary panel from over 850 consumers in two cities. Heterogeneity across the samples in terms of the observed effects is examined in both studies. Study 3 employs a survey methodology to ascertain whether the differential role of flavor‐based versus brand‐based variety seeking is mediated by factors other than sensory‐specific satiety. The findings strongly support the relevance of sensory‐specific satiety to attribute‐level variety seeking. Across the three studies, consumers switched more intensively on flavor than brand in 14 of the 15 categories examined and other factors such as preference heterogeneity and perceived risk fail to explain this difference.

The decision‐making literature has consistently reported that decisions to maintain the status quo tend to be regretted less than decisions to change it. We examine the consequences of repeat purchasing (maintaining the status quo) versus switching in the context of information regarding the reason for the decision (e.g., prior consumption episode, brand history), and we argue that there are situations in which repeat purchasing may cause as much or even more regret than switching. We contend that this effect depends on whether or not there is a justifiable basis for the decision. In a series of four studies, we show that if there is sufficient motivation to warrant a switch, consumers will feel less regret in the face of a subsequent negative outcome realized via a switch than in one realized via a repeat purchase. Our results imply that feelings of regret are mitigated when the consumer reflects and concludes that the decision was appropriate under the circumstances.

Based on literatures in cognitive resource conservation and contextual cue consistency, we study two types of habits—carryover and baseline—in the consumption of food nutrients. Carryover habit obtains when the level of a nutrient consumed in preceding meals influences its consumption in the current meal. Baseline habit obtains when a nutrient’s consumption systematically differs across meals. We test our hypotheses via a hierarchical linear model using a food consumption diary panel. Findings support our carryover habit and baseline habit dichotomy, as well as our predictions that carryover habit is stronger at breakfast and that within‐meal carryover effects are stronger than across‐meal carryover effects.