On 6 August at 10:30, there will be a 3rd year PhD presentation by Roopali Bhatnagar entitled:

Metacognition in consumer decision-making

Supervisors: Jacob Lund Orquin & Marija Banovic
Discussants: John Thøgersen & Anne Peschel

Abstract
Decision-making is based not just on the objective information content, but also on subjective feelings experienced during the decision process. This thesis investigates how processing fluency guides consumer decisions and the role, visual attention plays in the fluency - choice relationship. While the first paper gives us an overview of the literature, the second and third papers follow up by focusing on different aspects of this relationship. 

The first paper is titled “Meta-analytic explanation of the mechanisms underlying attention-driven consumer choices”. In this study, we conduct a systematic review and meta-analyze existing research evidence to understand i) whether visual attention has a significant effect on choices, considering the different study designs employed in the literature and ii) the mechanisms underlying these various attention manipulations used by studies. The second paper is titled “Easier is better: disfluency effects on online consumer behavior”. This study is based on two eye-tracking experiments examining the influence of perceptual fluency on consumer information search patterns and choice outcomes in an online shopping context. We also test the role of visual attention as a mediator to the fluency - choice equation. The third paper is titled “Positive gender congruency effects on shopper responses: field evidence from a gender egalitarian culture”. For this study, we venture into field settings to examine how conceptual fluency arising from congruence between employee’s gender and perceived gender image of the consumption context has an effect on consumer decisions. Taken together, these three studies demonstrate the role of metacognitive strategies in influencing consumer decisions in lab and field settings.