Inferential Beliefs in Consumer Evaluations: An Assessment of Alternative Processing Strategies

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to investigate the processing strategies consumers use to form inferences about missing product information. We evaluate the relative effect of attribute information about a partially described brand and about other fully described brands, the effect of attribute intercorrelations, and the effect of prompting inferences. We find that attribute information about a partially described brand has a greater influence than that about fully described competitive brands, that highly correlated attributes more consistently influence inferences, and that prompting inferences produces substantially different results than less intrusive measures.