Wharton-SMU Research Center

In-House Seminar

Guest Speaker:

Mary Frances Luce
Associate Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Topic:

Preference Uncertainty in Multiattribute Judgment and Choice

Chairperson:

Associate Professor of Marketing Seshan Ramaswami
School of Business, Singapore Management University

Venue:

Business Block, Level 2, Seminar Room 4
Singapore Management University
469 Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 259756

Date:

Wednesday, 24 July 2002, at 4.00pm

Reservation:

This seminar is free. Places are limited. Please confirm your attendance by Tuesday, 23 July 2002, 12 noon with Ms. Lim Lih Yeng at lylim@smu.edu.sg or telephone: 6822-0197.

About the Seminar:

Just as people are uncertain about the occurrence of events in the external world, they are also uncertain about the subjective value or utility of decision outcomes. I will discuss two streams of research focusing on some of the consequences of preference uncertainty about how to value outcome attributes and make tradeoffs among them. First, in joint work with Greg Fischer (Duke University) and Jianmin Jia (Chinese University of Hong King), we investigate three manifestations of preference uncertainty in contexts where subjects separately evaluate decision alternatives; these manifestations of uncertainty are longer response times, larger response errors (differences in expressed preferences at times 1 and 2), and wider subjective confidence intervals for judgments. We investigate two hypotheses regarding stimulus-based causes of preference uncertainty. As predicted by our attribute conflict hypothesis, greater within-alternative conflict (discrepancy among the attributes of an evaluative alternative) leads to greater preference uncertainty. As predicted by our attribute extremity hypothesis, greater attribute extremity (very high or low attribute values) leads to less preference uncertainty. I will also present our empirical evidence regarding preference uncertainty when subjects jointly evaluate two alternatives to make a choice. In this context, one major source of preference uncertainty is the difference in the (expected) values of the two alternatives. The smaller this difference, the more preference uncertainty there should be (e.g., longer choice times, less confident choices, less consistent choices). When jointly evaluated alternatives are roughly evenly matched in overall value, there are two sources of conflict that may contribute to greater preference uncertainty: within-alternative conflict among attributes (e.g., Alternative A is good with respect to attribute X but bad with respect to attribute Y); and between-alternative conflict among attributes (e.g., alternative A is better than B on attribute X but worse on attribute Y). I will report some new data investigating the impact of value differences and both types of conflict on behavioral manifestations of preference uncertainty in choice. More recent research joint with Seshan Ramaswami (Singapore Management University) investigates the implications of preference uncertainty for consideration set formation and more generally "shopping" behavior. We argue that the act of shopping itself might influence preferences. Initial empirical evidence in this research stream indicates that self-reported importance weights are influenced by shopping. In particular, when subjects know that between-alternative conflict exists in a choice set, then their self-reported importance weights are more strongly influenced by items encountered during shopping.