Featuring Mistakes: The Persuasive Impact of Purchase Mistakes in Online Reviews

Companies often feature positive consumer reviews on their websites and in their promotional materials in an attempt to increase sales. However, little is known about which particular positive reviews companies should leverage to optimize sales. Across four lab studies involving both hypothetical and real choices as well as field data from a retailer’s website (Sephora), the authors find that consumers are more likely to purchase a product if it is recommended by a reviewer who has (vs. has not) made a prior purchase mistake. The authors define a purchase mistake as a self-identified suboptimal decision whereby people purchase a product that subsequently fails to meet a threshold level of expected performance. This persuasive advantage emerges because consumers perceive reviewers who admit a purchase mistake as having more expertise than even reviewers whose purchase experience has not been marred by mistakes. As a result, in marketers’ attempts to increase the persuasive influence of reviews featured in their promotional materials, they may inadvertently decrease it by omitting the very information that would lead consumers to be more likely to purchase recommended products.

Loss of Hierarchical Control by Occasion Setters Following Lesions of the Prelimbic and Infralimbic Medial Prefrontal Cortex in Rats

Recent work suggests complementary roles of the prelimbic and infralimbic regions of the rat medial prefrontal cortex in cognitive control processes, with the prelimbic cortex implicated in top-down modulation of associations and the infralimbic cortex playing a role in the inhibition of inappropriate responses. Following selective lesions made to prelimbic or infralimbic regions (or control sham-surgery) rats received simultaneous training on Pavlovian feature negative (A+, XA−) and feature positive (B−, YB+) discriminations designed to lead to hierarchical occasion-setting control by the features (X, Y) over their respective targets (A, B). Evidence for hierarchical control was assessed in a transfer test in which features and targets were swapped (YA, XB). All groups were able to learn the feature negative and feature positive discriminations. Whilst sham-lesioned animals showed no transfer of control by features to novel targets (a hallmark of hierarchical control), rats with lesions of prelimbic or infralimbic regions showed evidence of transfer from the positive feature (Y) to the negative target (A), and from the negative feature (X) to the positive target (B; although this only achieved significance in infralimbic-lesioned animals). These data indicate that damage to either of these regions disrupts hierarchical occasion-setting control, extending our knowledge of their role in cognitive control to encompass flexible behaviours dictated by discrete cues.

Thermal properties of products based on ABS / PC

Polymer blends are capable of providing materials with extended useful properties beyond the range that can be obtained from single polymers. Acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene and polycarbonate blends are important industrial materials, especially, in the machine building industry, as ABS improves the processing properties of parts and their toughness, and they also feature positive thermodynamic interaction between PC and styrene-acrylonitrile (SAN) copolymer as a part of ABS. DSC method was used to study the thermal properties of ABS and ABS/PC blends with various ratios. The result from this work shows that abnormal endothermic effect in the ABS glass transition region implies an inadequate manufacturing process for automotive components. The paper studied the influence of ABS/PC blend ratios on the value of glass transition temperature and delta Cp, and it was found that the Tg value for SAN/PC increased with decreasing ABS for ABS/PC blends with mass ratio of 75/25, 60/40, 50/50.

Biased evaluation of incriminating and exonerating (non)evidence

Recent evidence suggests that convictions in criminal procedures are susceptible to biased decision making. In this study, the potential detrimental effects of confirmation bias and the feature positive effect (FPE) were explored. The former states that decision-makers will be more impressed by incriminating than by exonerating evidence. The latter states that they assign more weight to finding evidence than to the failure to secure it, even though the absence of evidence can be as diagnostic as its presence. Law students read a case file about a fistfight. The evidence was manipulated such that the effect of confirmation bias and FPE on guilt estimation and conviction rate could be assessed. Findings partly confirmed the presence of both a confirmation bias and an FPE.

Market Reactions to Corporate Sponsorships of European Football Kits: The Moderating Effects of Firm Congruence

Although sports sponsorships build brand awareness, they also can highlight concerns about the congruence between a fan’s identity and the sponsor. While sponsoring venues (e.g., Clark, Cornwell, & Pruitt, 2002) feature positive market reactions, we find negative market reactions for sponsors of European football team kits. We suggest that the negative findings are related to concerns for rival fan backlash, as well as a perceived lack of congruence between the sponsor identity and the team identity. In addition, market reactions are more severe for sponsors that are both North American and technology-based firms.