Informing Consumer Decision-Making

The following dissertation examines consumer decision-making in two important contexts. The first is in the domain of health and nutrition decisions. Both governmental entities and corporations alike have tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to provide consumers with a means of easily judging nutritional content and thus, prompting healthier consumption choices. As such, Essay 1 introduces and empirically tests a new labeling format designed to aid consumers in making better nutritional choices. The second domain in which consumer decision-making is studied is within the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR). While extant research has identified numerous benefits of CSR initiatives, relatively little work offers insight into how the amount of CSR influences the attribution of blame. Therefore, essay 2 addresses this gap in the literature by examining empirically the idea that CSR initiatives do not uniformly repress the attribution of blame, nor the intentions to punish, among consumers following a firm-specific irresponsible event. Essay 1 makes a number of contributions to the transformative consumer research and marketing literatures by introducing a novel concept called integrative nutrition information as a means of encouraging healthier consumption choices. Integrative nutrition information is defined by Essay 1 as the provision of nutrition information that explicitly and simultaneously presents nutritional information in a format that includes both caloric content and required physical activity time to offset consumption. The results of Essay 1 demonstrate that integrative nutrition information leads to lower rates of consumption when compared to current NLEA-mandated labeling standards. In particular, this effect is a byproduct of loss aversion and negativity bias associated with the required physical activity. Additionally, Essay 1 presents boundary conditions on the strength and effectiveness of integrative nutrition information as well as the underlying mechanism—negative affective forecasting—behind these effects. Essay 1 advances the literature on nutritional information (Grunert, Willis, and Fernandez-Celemin 2010; Kiszko, Martinez, Abrams, and Elbel 2014) by providing information so as to motivate healthier choices (Koenigstorfer, Groeppel-Klein, and Kamm 2014; Liu, Roberto, Liu, and Brownell 2012; Vasiljevic, Pechey, and Marteau 2015). Specifically, Essay 1 answers the call of scholars to consider novel, more innovative ways of motivating healthier consumer choices (Kiszko et al. 2014) by presenting a labeling format that bridges diet and physical activity, the two aspects of a healthy lifestyle, so as to allow for easier and more effective ways to make healthful choices. Essay 2 adds to the literature on CSR while also advancing the organizational literature devoted to perceived psychological contracts. Specifically, Essay 2 extends these literature streams by examining when, and the degree to which, a company's CSR stance, that is, the position a company publicly takes on participating in socially responsible initiatives, influences consumer blame subsequent to a socially irresponsible event. The findings of Essay 2 indicate that the attribution of blame and encouragement of punishment following an irresponsible event is moderated by level of CSR stance. Moreover, Essay 2 identifies the underlying process that accounts for this effect. Specifically, when consumers are made aware of a company-specific irresponsible event, they tend to experience feelings of betrayal, which precipitate support for company sanctions. This effect is particularly strong with relatively higher levels of CSR-stances. The insights from Essay 2 make important empirical contributions by establishing a previously undefined effect - that a relatively higher CSR stance leads consumers to appoint harsher punishments following an irresponsible event. Without doubt, CSR initiatives are valuable assets to firms (Du, Bhattacharya, and Sen 2007; Morsing 2006; Torelli, Monga, and Kaikati 2012), but at the same time Essay 2 finds firm managers must recognize the possible negative consequences of a relatively higher CSR stances.