Time: 13:30-16:30 December20th, 2017 (Wednesday)

Venue: Room 1102

Host:Xinyue Zhou, Professor of Marketing, Zhejiang  University

Schedule:

13:30-13:35 Xinyue Zhou,Openning Speech

13:35-14:15 IRIS W.Hung Lecture Time;

14:20-15:00 CaniceKwan Lecture Time;

15:05-15:45 Xu Qian Lecture Time;

15:50-16:30 Sun Yixia Lecture Time;

Speaker&Abstract:

1、Iris W. Hung

Professor of Marketing & Special-appointment Professor,Fudan University

Mirror, Mirror on the Retail Wall: Self-focused Attention Promotes Reliance on Feelings in Consumer Decisions

The authors propose that increased attention that consumers pay to themselves promotes relative reliance on affective feelings in making decisions. This hypothesis was tested in a variety of consumption domains and decision tasks, including real-life, consequential charitable donations. Consistent support from five experiments with 1,778 participants shows that greater attention to the self (a) increases evaluations of products that are affectively superior but (b) decreases evaluations of products that are affectively inferior, and (c) exerts little influence on evaluations of products that are less affective in nature (i.e., utilitarian products). The hypothesized effect is moderated by self-construal. Further, valuations of the decision outcome increase when consumers with high (low) self-focus adopt a feeling-based (reason-based) strategy. Finally, self-focused attention amplifies a decision bias typically attributed to feeling-based judgments, known as scope-insensitivity bias, in a hypothetical laboratory study and in real-life, consequential charitable donation. Theoretical and marketing implications are discussed.

2、Qian Xu

Assistant Professor of Marketing, Fudan University

Sense of Control Promotes Charitable Intentions and Behaviors

Distressful appeals have been used widely as a means to enhance charitable giving. While distressful appeals sometimes motivate helping behaviors, they sometimes backfire for inducing too much avoidance. To understand the effectiveness of distressful appeals in soliciting helping behaviors, this paper demonstrates that a sense of control sourced from irrelevant causes functions as a coping resource to address an encounter with others’ distress. By virtue of its capacity to restore people’s coping resources, a sense of control facilitates helping.

3、Canice Kwan

Assistant Professor, Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou

The Effect of Empty Space on Choice Deferral

Empty space is an elemental component on all visual communications. Literature has found mixed findings of its impact on judgments and decision making. Adding to this growing body of research, the present research provides evidence in a series of experiments that empty space can increase the extent to which consumers defer their decisions. When the space surrounding a choice set (such as information on a food and drink menu) is substantial, consumers would choose to decide laterin hope of searching for new alternatives from a different selection rather than getting more information about available alternatives. Our findings confirm that this space effect is explained by the extent to which consumers deliberate on unavailable alternatives and not by processing difficulty and fluency. The present research contributes to the understanding about how people make use of various space dimensions in processing information.

4、Yixia Sun

ZJU100 Young Professor, School of Management, Zhejiang University

Dehumanization: Coping with Embarrassment in Consumer Purchase

Two field studies and three online studies investigate dehumanization as a strategy of coping embarrassment in the context of shopping and medical care. The results indicate that when consumers are buying embarrassing products or receiving embarrassing service, they dehumanize the service provider to reduce negative feelings of embarrassment. Moreover, consumers in such embarrassing situations are more willing to choose a service provider who behaves robotically a priori (vs. behaves warmly), and to reveal more personal information to a robotic service provider than a warm one. These findings extend dehumanization literature by providing an example of daily-based, subtle form of mechanistic dehumanization, and demonstrate a coping strategy with embarrassment that directly reduce the mental state inference of the other.