Effects Of Anticipated Regret And Involvement On Consumer Decision-making Processing

Since the 1980s, the effects of emotions on decision-making have been valued by reseaches and become a focused area in decision-making research. Regret has received most attention. The reseach of regret began in 1980s, and prosperous in 1990s. Reseaches did great effort on the definition of regret, the reason of regret and the effects of regret on different decision-making situations.However, there is few empirical research of the relationship between regret and decision-making, especially the effects of regret on information processing. Therefore, according to the theory of information processing, followed the thought of process traceing, used information display board to imitate the consumer decision-making in real life,we examined whether the two regret conditions had different effects on decision-making processing and explored interactive effects of anticipated regret and involvement on decision-making processing, especially the time of information processing,the amount of information processing and the information searching strategy. For the rearch goal, we conducted two studies below:Study 1, we compared whether the no regret condition and the two regret conditions had different effects on information processing. The results show that no regret condition ahd the two regret conditions had different effects on the time of information processing and the amount of information processing, but on the information searching strategy,only the second regret condition had different effects with no regret condition.Study2, based on Study 1, we choosed the second regret condition to explore interactive effects of anticipated regret and involvement on decision-making processing. The results show that on the time of information processing and the amount of information processing, the interactive effects were significant, but on the information searching strategy, there was no significant differences. Compare to the low involvement condition, high involved subjects were influenced much in regret condition.Finally, the limitations of the present research and the future directions were also discussed.