Essay Database

Decision making is a focal interest in consumer-behavior research; consumers constantly make decisions about the selection, consumption, and disposal of products. Many of the most important decisions consumers face involve making difficult trade-offs such as price versus safety in purchasing an automobile, quality of life versus longevity in some health care choices, or risk versus return in selecting investments for a child's educational expenses or for retirement. This monograph focuses on what makes some trade-offs …

…believe that self-reports of experienced negative emotion provide a useful, conservative measure of trade-off difficulty. These measures are conservative because we usually wish to compare high versus low trade-off difficulty situations in our research. Coping efforts are generally more likely and more extensive in high trade-off difficulty as opposed to low trade-off difficulty situations, and thus any mitigation of experienced emotion by coping will tend to understate the effects of high versus low trade-off difficulty.