Evaluating Ambiguous Offerings

Romain Boulongne and Rodolphe Durand
Additional contact information
Romain Boulongne: IESE Business School
Rodolphe Durand: HEC Paris

No 1420, HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris

Abstract: This paper studies how audience members categorize and evaluate ambiguous offerings. Depending on whether audience members categorize ambiguous offerings based on prototypes or goals, they activate two distinct cognitive mechanisms and evaluate differently ambiguous offerings. We expect that when audiences engage in goal-based vs. prototype-based categorization, their evaluation of ambiguous products increases. We theorize that under goal-based categorization, the perceived utility of unclear attributes increases for audiences, which leads them to evaluate more positively ambiguous product offerings. We test and find support for these direct and mediated relationships through a series of lab, on-line and field experiments. Overall, this study offers important implications for research on product and market categories, optimal distinctiveness, and market agents’ cognitive ascription of value.

Keywords: social evaluation; categories and categorization; ambiguity; experimental methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2021-03-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3709884 Full text (text/html)

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:ebg:heccah:1420

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3709884

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris HEC Paris, 78351 Jouy-en-Josas cedex, France. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Antoine Haldemann ().