An Experimental Research On The Implicit And Explicit Preference Reversion

Preference reversal was first proposed by psychologist Lichtenstein and Slovic (1971). Their experiments showed that in the risk decision-making, people’s preference was different from the preference in pricing processing which seemed irreversible in economics. In decision-making process, consumers will use their intuition or rational thinking to establish the preference. In other words, different drivers lead to different preference. Stanovich and West (2000) divided thinking system into two parts:the first system and the second system. The first system is based on intuition. Consumers often make decisions through intuition quickly and do not need to make any logical thinking. It is implicit and emotional; while the second system is opposite to the first. Decision-making through the second system is usually very slow; consumers will be awareness of controlling their own choice. It is explicit.The price tends to play a key role in establishing the preference in the evaluation of homogeneous commodities. The preference established early in the decision making process before price is consumer’s true preference. It is the commodity consumer really wants. In this paper it is called "implicit preference": and in contact with price information, consumers will realize that cheap is that they should buy. Thus, after exposure to price information, the preference is also known as "explicit preference."Festinger (1957) first proposed in the decision-making process, when faced with a variety of choices consumers will get new cognitive factors. He suggested that if consumer was exposure to more information after decision, the cognitive factors that influenced the choice before would lead to bias information to support the previous choice. In recent decades, many researches have proved that, the consumers would establish a leading preference early in the decision making process when exposures to a variety of information. After that, they would distort the new information to support the leading preference. Some important models for consumer decision-making process have suggested that consumers would change their preference along with exposure to the new information. Some research indicates that the previous leading preference would have great impact on the later process no matter how the preference was established before.In general, establish the preference early in the decision-making process. This preference did not consider price which is called "implicit preference". In this paper, it is assumed that the consumers who switch to the explicit preference after price would retain their implicit preference. The mechanism of the process is that they would distort the new information to support the implicit preference and the ratio of the latter preference reversal is higher than normal. What’s more, it is found in this paper that consumers would not keep their explicit preference.