BYOB: How Bringing Your Own Shopping Bags Leads to Treating Yourself, and the Environment

Uma R. Karmarkar; Bryan  Bollinger

Article | Journal of Marketing | July 2015

BYOB: How Bringing Your Own Shopping Bags Leads to Treating Yourself, and the Environment

by Uma R. Karmarkar and Bryan Bollinger

Abstract

As concerns about pollution and climate change have become more central in public discourse, shopping with reusable grocery bags has been strongly promoted as environmentally and socially conscious. In parallel, firms have joined policy makers in using a variety of initiatives to reduce the use of plastic bags. However, little is known about how these initiatives might alter consumers' in-store behavior. Using scanner panel data from a single California location of a major grocery chain, and completely controlling for consumer heterogeneity, we demonstrate that bringing your own bags simultaneously increases purchases of environmentally friendly as well as indulgent (hedonic) items. We use experimental methods to further demonstrate causality and to consider the effects of potential moderators. These findings have implications for decisions related to product pricing, placement and assortment, store layout, and the choice of strategies to increase the use of reusable bags.

Keywords: grocery shopping; reusable bags; licensing; priming; goals; hedonic; Marketing Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Environmental Sustainability; Retail Industry;

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Citation:

Karmarkar, Uma R., and Bryan Bollinger. "BYOB: How Bringing Your Own Shopping Bags Leads to Treating Yourself, and the Environment." Journal of Marketing 79, no. 4 (July 2015): 1–15.

The way a choice set is constructed can have a significant influence on how individuals perceive and evaluate their options and make decisions between them. Here, I examine whether a “display set” of visible but unavailable options can exert these same types of influences on whether or not to choose a single (target) item. Across a series of experiments, purchase intent is increased when the display set and target are drawn from the same category but decreased when the display and target items are mismatched. This effect is shown to depend on perceived similarity, such that increasing display-target similarity increases purchase intent towards the target. Furthermore, contrary to the predictions made by previous neural and behavioral research on choice sets, the relative value and/or number of display-only items have no significant impact on these decisions. These findings reveal a novel choice behavior in commonly encountered settings such as online marketplaces.

Article | Scientific Reports | 2017

Blunted Ambiguity Aversion During Cost-Benefit Decisions in Antisocial Individuals

Joshua W. Buckholtz, Uma R. Karmarkar, Shengxuan Ye, Grace M. Brennan and Arielle Baskin-Sommers

Antisocial behavior is often assumed to reflect aberrant risk processing. However, many of the most significant forms of antisocial behavior, including crime, reflect the outcomes of decisions made under conditions of ambiguity rather than risk. While risk and ambiguity are formally distinct and experimentally dissociable, little is known about ambiguity sensitivity in individuals who engage in chronic antisocial behavior. We used a financial decision-making task in a high-risk community-based sample to test for associations between sensitivity to ambiguity, antisocial behavior, and arrest history. Sensitivity to ambiguity was lower in individuals who met diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder. Lower ambiguity sensitivity was also associated with higher externalizing (but not psychopathy) scores and with higher levels of aggression (but not rule breaking). Finally, blunted sensitivity to ambiguity also predicted a greater frequency of arrests. Together, these data suggest that alterations in cost-benefit decision-making under conditions of ambiguity may promote antisocial behavior.

Keywords: ambiguity; neuroscience; Neuroeconomics; choice; psychology; Decision choice and uncertainty; Behavior; Decision Choices and Conditions; Cost vs Benefits; Health Disorders;

Citation:

Buckholtz, Joshua W., Uma R. Karmarkar, Shengxuan Ye, Grace M. Brennan, and Arielle Baskin-Sommers. "Blunted Ambiguity Aversion During Cost-Benefit Decisions in Antisocial Individuals." Art. 2030. Scientific Reports 7 (2017). View Details

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Scientists have spent decades creating powerful and detailed descriptions of how people make decisions. Unfortunately, many of these theories make contradictory predictions and are difficult to understand and implement. We introduce the 4 Minds framework as a practical tool for understanding and applying the science of decision-making in the marketplace. We synthesize previous research on decision-making into four broad approaches customers can take to making choices. These four decision-making “Minds”—Ideal Point Mind, Market Comparison Mind, Local Comparison Mind, and Image Mind—lead to very different outcomes and behaviors. We have developed the 4 Minds framework to serve as a diagnostic tool to help identify which clusters of decision-making research are most likely to apply in any given situation. By learning how these decision-making Minds differ, and the factors and environments that precipitate each one, marketers can better anticipate and serve their intended customers.

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BYOB: How Bringing Your Own Shopping Bags Leads to Treating Yourself, and the Environment

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