{"id":3588,"date":"2015-03-27T06:13:58","date_gmt":"2015-03-27T06:13:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=3588"},"modified":"2015-03-27T06:13:58","modified_gmt":"2015-03-27T06:13:58","slug":"the-brain-in-the-supermarket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/the-brain-in-the-supermarket\/","title":{"rendered":"The brain in the supermarket"},"content":{"rendered":"

Simple \u201cindex strategy\u201d helps consumers make choices.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"images\"<\/a>CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —\u00a0Say you\u2019re out shopping for basic household goods \u2014 perhaps orange juice and soup. Or light bulbs. Or diapers for your young child. How do you choose the products you buy? Is it a complicated decision, or a simple one?<\/span><\/p>\n

It could be complex: Factors like price, quality, and brand loyalty may run through your mind. Indeed, some scholars have developed complicated models of consumer decision-making, in which people accumulate substantial product knowledge, then weigh that knowledge against the opportunity to explore less-known products.<\/span><\/p>\n

But in a new paper, MIT researchers suggest that your brain is making a simpler calculation when you shop: You are most likely deploying an \u201cindex strategy,\u201d a straightforward ranking of products. It may not be an absolutely perfect calculation, given all the available information, but the study suggests that an index strategy comes very close to being optimal, and is a far easier way for consumers to make their choices.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe advantage of making a slightly better decision wouldn\u2019t be worth it,\u201d says John Hauser, the Kirin Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a co-author of the new study. Rather, he asserts, a simple index strategy \u201cis going to get you really pretty close to an optimal decision at a much lower cost \u2014 both search cost and cognitive cost.\u201d Basic rankings help you make quick decisions, and leave room to think about things other than your weekend shopping choices.<\/span><\/p>\n

Typical models of consumer thought often treat the brain like an always-running computer, and hold that consumers constantly worry about the ways in which their choices interact. For instance: When considering one diaper brand, these models posit that consumers are worried they will lose opportunities to learn more about other brands. The MIT team also believes that consumers accumulate information, but in a simpler, more intuitive way.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we look at our options, we normally evaluate them one by one,\u201d says Juanjuan Zhang, an associate professor of marketing at MIT Sloan and another co-author of the study. \u201cWe would argue that that is the way we think, and that is different from how other models in marketing work.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

No space for PSPACE<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The paper \u2014 titled \u201cLearning from Experience, Simply\u201d \u2014 is published in the journal\u00a0Marketing Science<\/em>. The co-authors are MIT doctoral candidate Song Lin, Zhang, and Hauser.<\/span><\/p>\n

The study described in the paper is explicitly intended to bridge the gap between empirical studies of consumer decision-making and mathematical models in the field. Hauser, Lin, and Zhang suggest that some models of consumer thought are \u201cPSPACE-hard\u201d \u2014\u00a0that is, so mathematically difficult as to be virtually unsolvable even with the fastest computer, where the number of steps needed to find a solution is a direct function of the problem\u2019s size.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re assuming consumers can make decisions that computers can\u2019t solve,\u201d Hauser says. \u201cAnd they\u2019re assuming consumers make these in seconds as they walk down the aisle in the supermarket.\u201d Besides, he notes, \u201cEven a computer uses simple heuristics to solve these problems.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

To test whether an index strategy reasonably describes how consumers think, Lin, Zhang, and Hauser conducted an empirical study of consumers who purchase diapers, using a commercial data set of 262 households and almost 3,400 purchases, which turned up several relevant patterns, such as the fact that consumers are more likely to change diaper brands within their first 13 purchases.<\/span><\/p>\n

To the researchers, this suggests that consumers are learning, and valuing the opportunity to switch \u2014 while the data fits the concept of the index strategy. It explains product choices as well as other models, while showing how consumers may be inclined to reduce their thinking costs in terms of time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf we assume consumers are using this heuristic, it explains the data just as well as the optimal [models] do,\u201d Hauser says.<\/span><\/p>\n

A place where you\u2019d expect learning<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

At the same time, the idea of the index strategy does not rule out consumer reassessment of brands. Studying a product like diapers, the researchers note, shows that people do learn some new information about products, and sometimes flip their index rankings as a consequence.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus the results of index strategies resemble those of complex models, but arrive there in a much more direct way.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTwo things about diapers make it a good category,\u201d Hauser says. \u201cOne is that we can identify people who are new, or haven\u2019t been in the category for a while. \u2026 It\u2019s a place where you\u2019d expect learning. The other thing is, learning about diapers is probably pretty important to new parents. There are incentives to learn.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

For their part, the researchers say they are open to further studies, and hope to get empiricists and theorists of consumer cognition to \u201ctalk to one another\u201d to an increasing extent. The supermarket aisle, after all, is not the only spot where we can expect learning to take place.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Simple \u201cindex strategy\u201d helps consumers make choices. CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —\u00a0Say you\u2019re out shopping for basic household goods \u2014 perhaps orange juice and soup. Or light bulbs. Or diapers for your young child. How do you choose the products you buy? Is it a complicated decision, or a simple one? It could be complex: Factors like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":3589,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",259,194,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",259,194,false],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",259,194,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",259,194,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",259,194,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",259,194,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",259,194,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",259,194,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",259,194,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",259,194,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",259,194,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",259,194,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",87,65,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",259,194,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",96,72,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/images2.jpg",150,112,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Research<\/a>","tag_info":"Research","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}