The Connected Customer: Essays on Individualistic-Collectivistic Decision-making

Abstract

The traditional approach to the study of consumer behaviour is to regard them as isolated islands of preferences, needs, motives, and goals; however, this approach neglects the impact of ‘others’ on consumers’ judgments and preferences. For this reason, the theme of this thesis is the ‘connected customer’. Chapter 2 and 3 provides a theoretical and empirical treatment of a situation often encountered in households: how do an individual’s private risk preferences translate into preferences over risk when making decisions on behalf of a group of people in which the decision-maker is a member? It is hypothesized that the decision-maker’s degree of altruism and perception of the group members’ risk preferences are the driving forces in the relation between private and social risk preferences. The results suggest that social preferences can be characterized as a mixture of individuals’ private risk preferences and the beliefs-private risk differential. Chapter 4 looks at individuals’ information processing strategy under conditions of low and high cultural salience. Recent findings suggest that consumers in both individualist and collectivist cultures use a dual processing approach—a heuristic versus a systematic processing strategy—when assessing product alternatives. However, collectivist members tend to rely more on consensus information than attribute. This chapter examines whether priming individuals on their cultural identity will make them to switch processing strategy toward consensus information and hence become more similar to collectivist members. The results largely support this prediction.