We test for consumption smoothing using bankruptcy data on players in the National Football League (NFL), who typically earn several million dollars during an income spike that lasts a few years. The life-cycle hypothesis predicts that players should save substantially while playing and then have little risk of bankruptcy post-NFL. However, players in our sample begin to file for bankruptcy soon after they stop playing...

Neuroscientific studies demonstrate that erotic stimuli activate the reward circuitry processing monetary and drug rewards. Theoretically, a general reward system may give rise to nonspecific effects: exposure to “hot stimuli” from one domain may thus affect decisions in a different domain. We show that exposure to sexy cues leads to more impatience in intertemporal choice between monetary rewards. Highlighting the role of a general reward...

Despite the social importance of decisions taken in the “heat of the moment,” very little research has examined the effect of sexual arousal on judgment and decision making. Here we examine the effect of sexual arousal, induced by self‐stimulation, on judgments and hypothetical decisions made by male college students. Students were assigned to be in either a state of sexual arousal or a neutral state...

Patrons of a pub evaluated regular beer and “MIT brew” (regular beer plus a few drops of balsamic vinegar) in one of three conditions. One group tasted the samples blind (the secret ingredient was never disclosed). A second group was informed of the contents before tasting. A third group learned of the secret ingredient immediately after tasting, but prior to indicating their preference. Not surprisingly,...

The present research provides the first evidence that temporarily giving up something pleasurable may provide an effective route to happiness. Participants were asked to eat a piece of chocolate during two lab sessions, held 1week apart. During the intervening week, we randomly assigned them to abstain from chocolate or to eat as much of it as possible, while a control group received no special instructions...

The research presented in this article provides evidence that add-on features sold to enhance a product can be more than just discretionary benefits. We argue that consumers draw inferences from the mere availability of add-ons, which in turn lead to significant changes in the perceived utility of the base good itself. Specifically, we propose that the improvements supplied by add-ons can be classified as either...

The authors demonstrate that marketing actions, such as pricing, can alter the actual efficacy of products to which they are applied. These placebo effects stem from activation of expectancies about the efficacy of the product, a process that appears not to be conscious. In three experiments, the authors show that consumers who pay a discounted price for a product (e.g., an energy drink thought to...

As a company tries to find the factors accounting for strong and weak markets, typical consumer explanations for both tend to be in terms of the physical attributes of the product. Carling Brewing Company used a relatively inexpensive experiment to help dichotomize contributing influences as being either product or marketing oriented and, also, to indicate the magnitude of the marketing influence for various brands. The...

Differentiation of homogeneous agricultural products through branding is a difficult and costly undertaking for a firm. How successful has this been, and what are the possibilities for additional brand promotion?  Makens, J. C. (1964). The pluses and minuses of branding agricultural products. Journal of Marketing, 28(4), 10-16.https://doi.org/10.1177/002224296402800403    

Recent studies have documented that performance in a domain is hindered when individuals feel that a sociocultural group to which they belong is negatively stereotyped in that domain. We report that implicit activation of a social identity can facilitate as well as impede performance on a quantitative task. When a particular social identity was made salient at an implicit level, performance was altered in the...