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Purpose
Trade-offs that involve secular values of money and sacred human values are often seen as taboo. This paper aims to examine how consumers avoid making taboo trade-offs with anthropomorphized products, by choosing options that ensure the well-being of the humanized products, even at a financial cost to themselves.


Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted five experiments, across different marketplace contexts (i.e. repairing, buying and selling), to test the broad generalizability of the extent to which consumers are willing to incur a financial cost due to concern for the well-being of anthropomorphized products.


Findings
The results reveal that consumers are willing to accept financially inferior options to protect the humanness endowed upon anthropomorphized products. The effect is mediated by consumers' concern for the treatment of the anthropomorphized product. The effect is moderated by consumers' trait empathy level, such that those low in empathy are willing to sacrifice human value for the sake of greater financial gain.


Research limitations/implications
Future research could examine, in the context of anthropomorphized products, if there are types of human values that are less inviolable, leading consumers to be more willing to trade them off for monetary gains.


Practical implications
The findings have direct implications for second-hand markets. For potential buyers of anthropomorphized products, they should signal concern for the product; for sellers, anthropomorphizing their products can reduce haggling behavior. From a sustainability perspective, consumers may be more motivated to repair or recycle their products if it is framed as "infusing new life" into their products.


Originality/value
This work highlights a novel effect of anthropomorphism: when marketplace decisions are involved, anthropomorphizing a product can introduce a tension between secular monetary values and sacred human values. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this work is the first to show that consumers are willing to incur a monetary loss to protect the humanness of anthropomorphized product, driven by their concern for the proper treatment of such humanized products.

AbstractAutonomous vehicles (AVs) are expected to soon replace human drivers and promise substantial benefits to society. Yet, consumers remain skeptical about handing over control to an AV. Partly because there is uncertainty about the appropriate moral norms for such vehicles (e.g., should AVs protect the passenger or the pedestrian if harm is unavoidable?). Building on recent work on AV morality, the current research examined how people resolve the dilemma between protecting self versus a pedestrian, and what they expect an AV to do in a similar situation. Five studies revealed that participants considered harm to a pedestrian more permissible with an AV as compared to self as the decision agent in a regular car. This shift in moral judgments was driven by the attribution of responsibility to the AV and was observed for both severe and moderate harm, and when harm was real or imagined. However, the effect was attenuated when five pedestrians or a child could be harmed. These findings suggest that AVs can change prevailing moral norms and promote an increased self-interest among consumers. This has relevance for the design and policy issues related to AVs. It also highlights the moral implications of autonomous agents replacing human decision-makers.

Abstract
Although past research has shown that anthropomorphism enhances consumers' attraction to a brand when social-connectedness or effectance motives are active, the current research demonstrates that anthropomorphizing a brand becomes a detrimental marketing strategy when consumers' distinctiveness motives are salient. Four studies show that anthropomorphizing a brand positioned to be distinctive diminishes consumers' sense of agency in identity expression. As a result, when distinctiveness goals are salient, consumers are less likely to evaluate anthropomorphized (vs. nonanthropomorphized) brands favorably and are less likely to choose them to express distinctiveness. This negative effect of brand anthropomorphism, however, is contingent on the brand's positioning strategy—brand-as-supporter (supporting consumers' desires to be different) versus brand-as-agent (communicating unique brand features instead of focusing on consumers' needs) versus brand-as-controller (limiting consumers' freedom in expressing distinctiveness). Our results demonstrate that an anthropomorphized brand-as-supporter enhances consumers' sense of agency in identity expression, compared to both an anthropomorphized brand-as-agent and an anthropomorphized brand-as-controller. In turn, enhancing or thwarting consumers' sense of agency in expressing their differences from others drives the differential impact of anthropomorphizing a brand positioned to be distinctive.

AbstractA product's front face (e.g., a watch face or car front) is typically the first point of contact and a key determinant of a consumer's initial impression about the product. Drawing on evolutionary accounts of human face perception suggesting that the face width-to-height ratio (fWHR: bizygomatic width divided by upper-face height) can signal dominance and affect its overall evaluation, this research is based on the premise that product faces are perceived in much the same way as human faces. Five experiments tested this premise. Results suggest that like human faces, product faces with high (vs. low) fWHR are perceived as more dominant. However, while human faces with high fWHR are liked less, product faces with high fWHR are liked more as revealed by consumer preference and willingness-to-pay scores. The greater preference for the high fWHR product faces is motivated by the consumers' desire to enhance and signal their own dominant status as evidenced by the moderating effects of type of goal and of usage context. Brand managers and product designers may be particularly interested in these findings since a simple design feature can have potentially significant marketplace impact, as was also confirmed by the field data obtained from secondary sources.

AbstractNine studies find that people believe their money has greater purchasing power than the same quantity of others' money. Using a variety of products from socks to clocks to chocolates, we found that participants thought the same amount of money could buy more when it belonged to themselves versus others—a pattern that extended to undesirable products. Participants also believed their money—in the form of donations, taxes, fines, and fees—would help charities and governments more than others' money. We tested six mechanisms based on psychological distance, the endowment effect, wishful thinking, better-than-average biases, pain of payment, and beliefs about product preferences. Only a psychological distance mechanism received support. Specifically, we found that the perceived purchasing power of other people's money decreased logarithmically as others' psychological distance from the self increased, consistent with psychological distance's subadditive property. Further supporting a psychological distance mechanism, we found that framing one's own money as distant (vs. near) reduced the self-other difference in perceived purchasing power. Our results suggest that beliefs about the value of money depend on who owns it, and we discuss implications for marketing, management, psychology, and economics.

Abstract
Consumers have an intuitive belief in "karma" which dictates that bad (good) actions lead to bad (good) outcomes. Consequently, consumers perceive a causal connection between their own wrongdoing toward a company and a subsequent service failure that they experience in their interactions with another company. Eight experiments employing different contexts consistently show that consumers who have previously wronged a company (compared to those in a control group) evaluate another unrelated company more positively in response to a service failure by this company. We argue that this more positive evaluation is due to the greater blame consumers assign to themselves as dictated by the "karmic beliefs" held by consumers whereby the subsequent poor service by a different firm is seen as a karmic payback for their own prior transgression. The proposed effect is mitigated when a person's karmic belief is reduced. We also examine a number of alternative explanations (e.g., negative experiences, moral balancing, and immanent justice reasoning) and find that our observed effect is more consistent with a karma-based account.

Abstract
This research seeks to examine, first, whether and why consumers perceive divisible versus indivisible numbers differently and, second, how such divergent perceptions influence consumer preferences for marketer-created entities associated with divisible versus indivisible numbers. Integrating insights from two different literatures—numerical cognition and loneliness—we propose and find that numbers perceived to be divisible (vs. indivisible) are viewed as having more "connections" and are therefore deemed to be less lonely. Building on these findings and the literature on compensatory consumption, we then propose and demonstrate that a temporary feeling of loneliness increases participants' relative preference for various targets—products, attributes, and prices—associated with divisible (vs. indivisible) numbers, which are perceived to be relatively more connected and less lonely. It merits mention that our findings are triangulated across a wide variety of numbers, different product categories, and multiple operationalizations of loneliness.