Wharton-SMU Research Center

In-House Seminar

Guest Speaker:

Barbara E. KAHN
Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Date & Venue:
Date: 30 July 2004, Friday
Time: 4.00pm-5.00pm
Venue: Eu Tong Sen, Level 1, Seminar Room 1,
Singapore Management University
469 Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 259756
(Location Map)

Topic:
Variety for the Sake of Variety? Diversification Motives in Consumer Choice

About the Seminar:
We focus on the quest for variety, in and of itself, as a motivation for consumption. We begin with an examination of the need for variety in a normative sense – where the variety actually increases the overall utility of the consumption set. We then consider the situations in which consumers may choose too much variety – a bias which has been labeled the diversification bias (Read and Loewenstein 1995). We define “too much variety” as a set of choices in which consumers include items that they like less than other items they could have chosen. However, we discuss possible motivations and moderators for this kind of decision-making and note a range of goals that individuals may be trying to satisfy by straying from the highest-rated options. We conclude with a discussion of avenues for future research that will address several key underresearched questions pertaining to variety seeking behavior.

Registration:
This seminar is free. Please register early. (Admission on a first-come-first-served basis.)
For registration, please click here (Registration closes on 29 July 2004, Thursday)

Enquiries:
Ms. Lim Lih Yeng
Email: lylim@smu.edu.sg, Tel: 6822-0197
Ms. Priscilla Cheng
Email: priscillacheng@smu.edu.sg, Tel: 6822-0383