Research On Decision Making Behavior Of Consumers Based On Context Effect

The popular viewpoint about consumer purchase behavior today is base on the normative decision theory, which regards customer’s preference as constant, believes that if a product can provide customer delivered value, then it must be successful. One of core bases of normative decision theory is expected utility theory, which supposed that individual decision has the trait of normalization, and will abide by a series preference axiom, include completeness, transitivity, continuity, independence and dominance. Recent years, along with the popular of behavioral decision theory, more and more researchers found there are some phenomenons violate the traditional normative decision theory and preference axiom, and context effect is one branch of them. Context effect considers customer’s choice behaviors are highly contextual-based, the relative position and dominance relationship can influence customer’s choice behaviors. Context effect mainly explore how an alternative add in or remove from a consider set will influence individual’s preference and behaviors, it can be classified into attract effect, substitution effect, compromise effect and phantom effect, according to its performance. In fact, context effect is a very common phenomenon in customer decision field; so, it’s very valuable to research context effect and gave some advices for companies to select their new product positioning strategy and communication strategy. This paper has three main research goals, one is to probe the embedded mechanism of attract effect by contrasting consumers’attribute evaluation change, the second is to explore the impact of context effect on consumers’willingness to pay, the last goal is to discuss the performance of attract effect and compromise effect under reject decision rules instead of choice decision rules. This paper will divide into six chapters:The first chapter is an introduction of this work; the author introduced theory background and application background firstly, then discussed main goals of the research and its value, finally, presented the research methodology, technical route, main content and paper structure. The second chapter is literature review part, through classifying and summarizes the past literature, this part point out some insufficient aspect of past researches, and this will be helpful for put forward research hypothesis. The third chapter presented the research design, including experiment design, research respondent choicing and sampling method.Chapter four, five and six are the core part of this research. Chapter four mainly explores context effect’s internal mechanism, and found some evidences that context effect still exist in Chinese culture background. By contrasting the difference of consumer’s valuation to alternatives’ under F tactics and R tactics of attract effect, this paper verified that a asymmetrical dominance alternative will increase both negative and positive attributes’evaluation of consumer’s, which made the target alternative look attractive relative to competition alternative. Though establishing a regression model, this paper found that both range-frequency theory and perceptual focus effect explain attract effect sufficiently.Chapter five is to probe how attract effect will influence customer’s willingness to pay and decision-making satisfaction, this research found that add a asymmetrical dominance alternative to a choice set can increase customers’ WTP for the target alternative, but have no significant influence to target alternative. This research also verified that this result is highly context-dependent, unstable and evanescence, after choice, this effect will weaken or disappear. In this chapter, the research found the asymmetrical dominance alternative can reduce consumers’choice difficulty and release their trade-off pressure, and then increased consumer’s choice satisfaction. But contrast to consumer choose competition alternative, the consumer choose target alternative will get a higher choice satisfaction.The main goal of chapter six is to contrast the difference of context effect under select decision rules and reject decision rules, research result indicated that different choice rules will stimulate consumers’different think mode. Under reject decision rules, consumer will pay more attention to alternatives negative attributes, and both attract effect and compromise effect will weaken when ask consumer reject alternative that can’t accept rather than choice the most favorable one they like.