消费者主观忙碌感对折中选项偏好的影响研究

The Impact of Consumers’ Subjective Busyness on Preference for Compromise Option

《外国经济与管理》2023年45卷第1期 页码：67 - 87 online：2023年1月20日

作者

中：胡矗明1 , 吴梓浩1 , 李欣倩1 , 黄赞1,2

英：Hu Chuming1 , Wu Zihao1 , Li Xinqian1 , Huang Zan1,2

作者单位：1.暨南大学 管理学院, 广东 广州 510632; 2.广州品牌创新发展研究基地, 广东 广州 510632

摘要及关键词

摘要：折中效应是指消费者在面临多个具有多属性的选项时，更倾向于选择一个各属性都处于中等水平的选项。忙碌已成为当代社会的常态，本文主要考察消费者的主观忙碌感对折中选项偏好的影响。不同于由客观时间匮乏或被迫任务引发的忙碌，本文所探讨的主观忙碌感是个体因主动计划在一定时期内完成多项任务而产生的主观状态感知。本文认为：（1）主观忙碌感会增强消费者的自我重要性感知，提升其自我价值感知与能力感知，增强其决策信心，进而使其更少做出折中选择。（2）消费者对“忙碌”的解释水平起调节作用，高解释水平者将“忙碌”抽象化为高自我价值，而低解释水平者则将“忙碌”具体化为“需要做很多事情”，因此主观忙碌感对后者的决策信心没有影响，也不会影响他们对折中选项的偏好。本文通过六项实验验证了假设，有助于增进读者对忙碌在消费领域影响的了解，对于中端与非中端品牌在产品定位、竞争格局等方面制定营销策略也有启示意义。

关键词：主观忙碌感；折中效应；决策信心；解释水平

Summary: The compromise effect means that consumers are more inclined to choose an option with medium attributes when facing multiple options with multiple attributes. Busyness has become an important and common feature and psychological state of individuals in the contemporary society. Balenciaga, Audi and other high-end brands take busyness as the theme of advertising, trying to arouse consumers’ subjective busyness to affect their consumption behavior. However, previous literature focuses on the objective aspect of busyness — the impact of the lack of time resources on consumption decisions, and pays more attention to the negative effect of busyness, such as the lack of self-control. This paper takes decision-making confidence as an explanation mechanism to explore the impact of consumers’ subjective busyness not caused by time constraints or forced tasks on their preference for compromise option. Six experiments were conducted to verify the hypothesis. Experiment 1 was to examine the effect of subjective busyness on compromise preference and the mediating effect of decision-making confidence. Experiments 2 and 3 respectively tested whether the main effect is significant for products unfamiliar to consumers and in the brand context. Experiment 4 tested the moderating effect of construal level for “busyness”. Experiments 5 and 6 tested whether the main effect, mediating effect and moderating effect were still significant in the hedonic situation. Manipulation methods and scales in the authoritative literature and empirical methods were used in all the experiments to verify the hypothesis. The results show that subjective busyness can enhance consumers’ self-importance perception, self-worth perception and ability perception, enhance their decision-making confidence, and then make them less likely to make compromise choices. The construal level for “busyness” plays a moderating role. Consumers with a high construal level will abstract “busyness” as high self-worth, while consumers with a low construal level will concrete “busyness” as “need to do a lot of things”. Therefore, subjective busyness has no effect on the latter’s decision-making confidence, and does not affect their preference for compromise option. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First, it enriches the application research of busyness in the marketing field. Previous studies focus on the impact of the objective factor of busyness on consumption decisions, and pay more attention to the negative effect of busyness; while this paper focuses on subjective busyness, provides a reference for exploring the positive effect of busyness in addition to improving decision-making confidence, and provides a theoretical explanation for the marketing phenomenon of busyness. Second, it provides a new perspective and mediating mechanism for the relationship between busyness and the compromise effect. Previous studies, based on the perspective of cognitive resources, suggest that the objective aspect of busyness reduces consumers’ preference for compromise option; while this paper takes consumers’ decision-making confidence as an explanation mechanism to explore the weakening effect of the subjective aspect of busyness on the compromise effect. Third, it provides practical implications for middle-end/non-middle-end brands or enterprises to apply the busyness factor and compromise effect in product positioning, competitive landscape and other aspects.

Key words: subjective busyness; compromise effect; decision-making confidence; construal level

其他信息

DOI：10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20220914.301

收稿日期：2022-05-14

基金项目：国家自然科学基金青年项目（71602071）；国家社会科学基金一般项目（19BGL102）；中央高校基本科研业务费专项资金资助项目（17JNQN021）；暨南大学管理学院重点学科建设育题基金资助项目（GY21010）

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