The Accuracy-Enhancing Effect of Biasing Cues

Wouter Vanhouche, Stijn M. J. van Osselaer

Journal of Consumer Research · 2009 · Volume 36 · Issue 2

Abstract

Extrinsic cues such as price and irrelevant attributes have been shown to bias consumers’ product judgments. Results in this article replicate those findings in pretrial judgments but show that such biasing cues can improve quality judgments at a later point in time. Initially biasing cues can even yield more accurate judgments than cues that do not bias pretrial judgments and can help consumers after a delay (e.g., at the time of repeat purchase) to determine how much they had liked a product when they tried it before. These results suggest that trying to deceive consumers with the use of biasing cues may induce trial in the short term but may come back to haunt the deceiver at the time of repeat purchase.

Keywords

Beliefs, Experimental Design and Analysis (ANOVA), Inference Making, Learning, Memory

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