Hedonic expectations, memories, and consumption -related experiences: Three essays.

Abstract

My dissertation focuses on discrepancies in consumers' consumption-related expectations, memories and actual experiences, and the role of these variables in consumer decision making. The first essay, <italic>'How do you feel while driving you car? - Depends on how you think about it,'</italic> investigates discrepancies in consumers' expectations, global memories, and episodic reports pertaining to their driving experiences. I find that the economic value of a car predicts the reported hedonic experience of driving under prospective (How would it feel?) and global retrospective (How does it usually feel?) conditions, but not under episodic conditions (How did it feel last time?), unless the car was the focal object in the specific episode (e.g., driving just for fun). The second essay, <italic>'Do we really need a reason to indulge?'</italic> investigates consumers' naive theories about indulgence experience and how that deviates from real experience. Consumers expect more negative and less positive feelings when they indulge themselves without rather than with a reason or as a consolation rather than a reward. However, episodic reports pertaining to the last indulgence episode show no influence of having versus not having a reason, nor do concurrent reports show a difference between indulging as a consolation versus a reward. When asked how they usually feel when indulging with versus without a reason, consumers' global memories are consistent with their expectations rather than their actual experience. My third essay studies consumers' beliefs about interpersonal experiences in social settings. People in general believe they would be happier chatting with family and friends to celebrate Thanksgiving dinner, but episodic reports nevertheless showed that people who slept and relaxed enjoyed the Thanksgiving dinner the most. Likewise, while college students expect to have a more enjoyable dinner date at a fancy restaurant than at a campus diner, the momentary experience shows that their dinner date at a campus diner was as enjoyable as at a fancy restaurant. In sum, my research builds on a general model of emotion reports proposed by Robison and Clore (2002) and recent methodological advances in episodic measurement (Kahneman et al., 2004) and raises new questions about consumer judgment and decision making.