Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Management

First Advisor

Zauberman, Gal

Abstract

Consumers infer from what they know to impute what they wish to know. For example, to estimate the quality of a new product, one may infer that a product’s price reflects its quality. This dissertation is composed of three essays investigating factors that affect consumers’ inferences. The first essay examines how inferences of positive information differ from inferences of negative information, and shows that positive information is generalized to new objects more than negative information, all else equal. For instance, a good restaurant affects judgments of similar restaurants more than a bad restaurant does. The second essay investigates inferences about how information is collected. Consumers follow recommendations from a source that actually used a product (e.g., “I listened to that podcast and liked it”) more than recommendations which aggregate multiple such sources (e.g., “I have heard people like that podcast”) because the former delivers information inferred to be more credible and personalized. The third essay looks at divergent inferences about profitmaking. Consumers largely infer a company’s profits to be the result of its sales, and thus like more profitable companies. But in contexts where price changes are salient, such as during bouts of inflation, infer profits to be the result of higher prices, leading them to like profitable companies less.

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