The moderating role of decision task goals in attribute weight convergence

Kwanho Suk and Song-Oh Yoon

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2012, vol. 118, issue 1, 37-45

Abstract: Prior research indicates that various methods for measuring attribute weights show only weak to moderate agreement in the weight assignments. However, there have been few theoretical bases explaining this divergence, and thus we have little knowledge of the conditions under which the weight assignments converge. The current study shows that one determinant of inter-measurement convergence is the comparability of the underlying processing goals evoked to perform the evaluation task. Specifically, evaluation tasks that evoke the goal of differentiation are susceptible to the prominence effect, which reduces the overall convergence with weights measured by tasks based on individual evaluation goals. We show in two studies that the level of convergence improves significantly when the two measures share the same underlying processing goals. Our results have important managerial implications with respect to selecting an appropriate type of direct weighting measurement in consumer studies to better reflect the actual weight assignments in real decision contexts.

Keywords: Attribute importance; Attribute weights; Decision task; Prominence effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597811001531
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jobhdp:v:118:y:2012:i:1:p:37-45

DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2011.12.002

Access Statistics for this article

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes is currently edited by John M. Schaubroeck

More articles in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().