Entries from September 2007 ↓

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Hoffman, Donna L. and Thomas P. Novak, “Flow Online:  Lessons Learned and Future Prospects” (September 14, 2007). 

Abstract.  Although the flow construct has been widely studied over the past decade in marketing and related fields, it has proven to be an elusive construct to measure and model.  In this paper, we first examine two of the most important themes in flow research in the last decade: the conceptualization and measurement of flow in online environments and the marketing outcomes of flow.  Second, while the unique characteristics of the Internet contributed to our belief that flow was an important construct for understanding consumer use of the Web in 1996, the environment of the Web itself has changed radically over the past decade.  Thus, we consider the current context of the Internet for the role and application of the flow construct, as well as important related constructs that will be useful for understanding compelling experiences in the contemporary online environment.   Download pdf.

White, Tiffany B., Thomas P. Novak and Donna L. Hoffman, “Evidence and Consequences of Egocentric Accounting Biases in Customer-Seller Relationships” (September 9, 2007).

We investigate egocentric biases in mental accounting within the context of information-driven consumer seller relationships. Our research suggests that consumers keep “loose mental accounts” of exchange benefits and costs that are balanced when resource exchanges are either contingent or temporally integrated (i.e., exchanged in the same transaction). However, when non-contingent resource exchange is temporally separated (specifically when exchange benefits precede exchange costs), or when bias correction is impeded in the same transaction, consumers keep two mental accounts, assigning differential value to marketers’ versus their own resources. Consequently, consumers egocentrically devalue- and therefore feeling less obligated to reciprocate- firms’ benefit offerings.   Download pdf.

Novak, Thomas P. and Donna L. Hoffman, “The Fit of Thinking Style and Situation:  New Measures of Situation-Specific Experiential and Rational Cognition” (August 27, 2007).

Abstract:  Decades of theoretical and empirical research in social and cognitive psychology provide strong evidence that consumers process information in two distinct and qualitatively different ways:   rational and experiential.  However, there has been surprisingly little research attention devoted to explicitly measuring how situational influences directly impact thinking style.  Further, attempts to simultaneously measure the two dimensions of thinking style as either situation-specific or as an enduring state are even fewer and lack validation in a broad context.  In five studies, we develop and validate a new instrument for measuring experiential and rational situation-specific thinking style in the context of a range of performance tasks designed to induce primarily rational or experiential cognition, as well as in the context of differing motivations toward the same task.  We establish congruence effects related to the fit of situation-specific thinking style and the nature of the task on performance outcomes; also, we show that the prediction of task performance and related outcomes from dispositional thinking style is completely mediated by situation-specific thinking style.  Download pdf