New Research

Researchers at Haskayne frequently produce relevant new research. Often, our findings have direct results on business and the environment. This page is dedicated to new and innovative research that is currently being put into practice.

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Mehdi Mourali

Mehdi Mourali is currently an Assistant Professor in Marketing at the Haskayne School of Business. His teaching interests include Consumer Behavior, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Research, Services Marketing, and Sports marketing. Recently, Dr. Mourali conducted three studies examining motivational influences behind consumer behavior.

A brief summation of this study:

A robust finding in the consumer behavior literature is that the introduction of a new option to an existing choice set can have a systematic influence on the relative preferences for the original options. One such phenomenon is the attraction effect, which is observed when adding an alternative that is inferior to another alternative in the choice set increases the share of the relatively superior alternative. Another intriguing phenomenon is the compromise effect, which is observed when adding an extreme option to the choice set shifts the choice preferences in favor of the middle option. Attraction and compromise effects have many practical implications in the areas of new product introduction, product deletion, positioning strategy, and product assortments. They are also theoretically important because they violate some fundamental properties of rational choice models.

We conducted three studies to examine the motivational influences behind these decision phenomena. In particular, we looked at how consumers’ goals and the self-regulatory orientations triggered by these goals might influence their sensitivities to the compromise and attraction effects.

Consumer goals can be classified into two broad categories: ideals and thoughts. Ideals denote people’s aspirations and hopes, whereas thoughts stand for people’s responsibilities and obligations. When pursuing their ideals, people adopt a promotion focus, which is a self-regulatory state concerned with advancement and accomplishment. In contrast, when pursuing their thoughts, people adopt a prevention focus, which is a self-regulatory state concerned with protection and safety.

Promotion self-regulation is generally focused on achieving gains and capturing opportunities, which leads to a preference for eager strategies in goal pursuit. In contrast, prevention self-regulation is mainly focused on preventing mistakes and avoiding losses, which leads to a preference for vigilant strategies in goal pursuit.

We reasoned that prevention-focused consumers, who are concerned with avoiding mistakes, would be more likely to avoid extreme options (options that are very attractive on some attributes but very unattractive on other attributes). This is because the choice of an extreme option increases the risk of potentially making a mistake (by betting on the wrong attribute). Instead, these vigilant consumers should favor the “safer” compromise options, which offer intermediate levels of all attributes.

Furthermore, promotion-focused consumers, who use an eager strategy for achieving hits and ensuring advancement, should be more sensitive to the dominance heuristic. That is, they should be more likely to view the presence of a dominant brand as an opportunity to be captured and not to be missed.

Consistent with these predictions, we found that prevention-focused consumers display a greater sensitivity to the compromise effect and a lower sensitivity to the attraction effect than promotion-focused consumers. We also found that the effects of promotion and prevention orientations are amplified when consumers are asked to justify their choices. Finally, we found that different products prompted different regulatory concerns and led to different patterns of sensitivity to context effects. Products associated with a prevention concern (e.g., mouthwash and sunscreen) were more attractive when presented as compromise options, while products associated with a promotion concern (wine and fine dining) were more attractive when presented as dominant options.