Study On Consumer Choice Behavior And Application With Reference Points

When people make choices or judgement, they usually compare the options in a choice set with existing reference level, which is named as reference point. Apart from the researches in cognition psychology and behavior desion-making, marketing researchers emphasize particularly on the application of reference point, especially in business. Previous literatures in marketing research recognizes reference price can affect consumer choice, but few study has investigated whether reference point on other attributes can also influence consumer choice.To fill this gap, this work addresses two main issues. The first issue is the empirical research on the consumer behavior with reference points on multi-attribute, and the second one is the analysis on how to deal with consumer behavior with reference point from the enterprise's perspective. The dissertation is organized as follows:In chapter 1, a summarization on the researches in three different fileds: cogition psychology, decision-making and marketing sciences is provided.Then in the second chapter, based on the Prospect Theory(PT) and Reference-Dependence Model(RDM), two experiments on product and service choice is designed to examine the characters of consumer behavior with reference point on the attributes of both price and quality. Furthurmore, a comparartion on the effects of loss aversion between the two attributes is prsented. The results show loss aversion and diminshing sensitivity is prominent. and the effect of loss aversion in quality looms larger than that in price, and the effects of loss aversion in product and service choice are also different: the former is more salient.A choice model on the consumer choice is proposed to investigate the reference effect in the third chapter. With the data collected from two experiments, a logit regression analysis is made. The findings confirm reference effect is prominently existed. Based on the research, an analysis on how the reference point affect the probability of consumer choice is discussed, which shows the closer option to the reference level will be more possibly choosed because of the impact of reference effect.In the chapter 4, from the different perspective, for the enterprises, how to react facing consumer behavior with the impact of reference point is illustrated, and the result shows pricing will be more complex. In fact, based on the findings, price should not always keep stable, but adjust on the initial reference price, reference effect and loss aversion.At last, the paper makes a conclusion on the researches, and also, it makes a discussion on the business and managirial implication of the research on reference point.