Why Is the Trivial Important? A Reasons-Based Account for the Effects of Trivial Attributes on Choice

By Christina L. Brown, Gregory S. Carpenter. 2000

206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2862cdcbc776226a0c5379713e064610d763cab9

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Citations in the corpus

Puffery in Advertisements: The Effects of Media Context, Communication Norms, and Consumer Knowledge (2010, background): “Although puffery could have an influence for many reasons (Broniarczyk and Gershoff 2003; Brown and Carpenter 2000; for a review, see Kardes, Posavac, and Cronley [2004]), its impact can often be traced to consumers’ tendency to interpret product information in a manner that is consistent with…”
The Role of Market Efficiency Intuitions in Consumer Choice: A Case of Compensatory Inferences (2001, background): “(Brown and Carpenter 2000; Huber and McCann 1982; Jaccard and Wood 1988; Kivetz and Simonson 2000; Lim, Olshavsky, and Kim 1988; Meyer 1981; Simmons and Lynch 1991); How does a brand’s performance on observable attributes affect consumer inferences about the missing attribute?”
Consumers' Beliefs about Product Benefits: The Effect of Obviously Irrelevant Product Information (2002, background): “Finally, Brown and Carpenter (2000) replicated the findings of Carpenter et al. (1994) and Simonson et al. (1994) and demonstrated that the direction of the influence of the irrelevant information partially depends on the size of the choice set.”
Segmenting consumers’ reasons for and against ethical consumption (2014, background): “Both prior to and following decisions, consumers tend to focus on a chosen option’s advantages and distort information about alternatives (Russo et al, 1996; Festinger, 1957), such that even trivial attributes can be used to justify choices (e.g., Brown and Carpenter, 2000).”
Experience Marketing: Concepts, Frameworks and Consumer Insights (2011, background): “We know a lot about how consumers process functional attributes: deliberately, reason-based, step-by-step, goal-directed and as trade-offs (Broniarczyk and Alba, 1994; Brown and Carpenter, 2000; Shafir et al., 1993; Simonson, 1989; Chernev, 2001; Fischer et al., 1999).”
The Endowed Progress Effect: How Artificial Advancement Increases Effort (2006, background): “And the reason can either be realistic or specious, as it has been shown that consumers often base choices on easily justified, cognitively available, yet trivial reasons (Brown and Carpenter 2000).”
“I Eat Organic for My Benefit and Yours”: Egoistic and Altruistic Considerations for Purchasing Organic Food and Their Implications for Advertising Strategists (2014, background): “Brown and Carpenter (2000) posit that consumers make these valuations by using an “instrumental reasoning process,” whereby additional features are viewed as instrumental in achieving goals related to the purchase task at hand.”
When Mental Simulation Hinders Behavior: The Effects of Process-Oriented Thinking on Decision Difficulty and Performance (2009, unknown): “Specifically, we predicted that the detrimental effect of process-oriented thinking would be reversed when the choice alternatives were similar in terms of end benefits (i.e., trivial differentiation; Brown and Carpenter 2000) and the decisive advantage emerged from a meansrelated attribute.”