Consumer Psychology, Judgment and Decision Making with Kurt A. Carlson and Yimin Cheng
Invitation: Joint Research Session with Kurt A. Carlson and Yimin Cheng
Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to invite you to a joint consumer research session with Professor Kurt A. Carlson from William & Mary and Associate Professor Yimin Cheng from Monash University. The session will bring together conversations on consumer psychology, judgment and decision making, and behavioral research.
- Date: Tuesday, 16 June 2026
- Time: 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM
- Optional coffee chat: 4:30 PM – 5:00 PM
- Venue: Room 4.36, Trinity Business School
- Online Teams Link: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/318896514131554?p=BivArrSrUMbb3R9mI4
※ Please note that the venue may change depending on the number of registered attendees. If there is any change, we will notify registered participants by email.
The session will include presentations followed by discussion and Q&A. To help us plan the room and follow-up details, please complete this RSVP to let us know whether you would like to attend and whether you would prefer to join in person or online.
This session is co-hosted by Radu Dimitriu and Ilyung Cheong. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Radu Dimitriu at radu.dimitriu@tcd.ie or Ilyung Cheong at cheongi@tcd.ie.
All are very welcome to join.
Best wishes, Radu and Ilyung
Yimin Cheng is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His primary research interests include consumer decision making and marketing communication. Prof. Cheng has published in leading journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Retailing, among others. Prof. Cheng currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Business Research and a regular grant reviewer for the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. He has received the Monash Business School Dean’s Award for Research Excellence by an Early Career Researcher in 2024 and Monash University “Purple Letter” for Outstanding Teaching Performance for seven consecutive years (2019–2025). Previously, he has held visiting positions at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Renmin University of China, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Title: Unpacking Ritual: How and Why Gift Givers and Recipients Respond Differently to Minimal Packaging
Abstract: Minimal packaging—a sustainable packaging style that uses fewer materials—has emerged as a prominent trend in product packaging. However, consumer responses to this innovation in gift-giving contexts remain underexplored. Across five studies, we find that gift givers respond to minimally packaged (vs. regularly packaged) gifts less favorably, whereas recipients’ responses remain largely unaffected. This discrepancy arises because minimal packaging diminishes the opportunity for an unpacking ritual, to which givers are more sensitive than receivers. The discrepancy is reduced when alternative consumption rituals are introduced to compensate for the lack of unpacking ritual, or when the gifting occasion is special. These findings highlight the important yet overlooked role of unpacking rituals in gift giving and offer practical insights for overcoming barriers to the adoption of environmentally friendly, minimally packaged gifts.
Kurt A. Carlson is the Fields Professor of Marketing at William & Mary and an Associate Editor at the Journal of Consumer Research. His research focuses on consumer decision-making, including judgment biases, information distortion, goal-setting, preference formation, persuasion, and budget contraction effects. His work has appeared in leading journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Psychological Science, Management Science, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Title: Coping with Less: How Purchasing Power Shapes Consumer Preferences
Talk Abstract: This research investigates how changes in purchasing power (PP) affect consumer preferences, with particular attention to whether the effects of PP declines are symmetric with PP increases and whether the mechanism of the decline matters for how consumers respond. Evidence is drawn from three papers.
The first paper (Carlson, Wolfe, Blanchard, Huber, & Ariely, 2015) used between-participant experiments to manipulate budgets across time, money, and various allocation domains. Participants facing budget decreases displayed less variety in their allocations than those facing increases, even when high-budget allocations were held constant across groups. This asymmetry was attributed to a loss-minimization coping strategy in which consumers concentrate cuts into fewer categories rather than distributing reductions broadly, shedding categories to protect what remains. The second paper (Ross, Meloy, & Carlson, 2020) examined whether this preference narrowing reflects genuine preference change or a transient process artifact. Within-participant experiments showed that reduced allocation variety persisted even after budgets were fully restored, indicating that the narrowing represents a durable refinement of preferences rather than a temporary accommodation. This pattern held across time, money, and space, in both hypothetical and real scenarios.
The third paper (Ross, Carlson, & Meloy, 2026, working paper) reconceptualizes the manipulations in the first two papers as purchasing power (PP) manipulations, and this reframing opens a new path for investigation: if what matters is purchasing power rather than budget per se, then PP can be moved not only by changing the budget but by changing overall price levels (i.e., raising prices reduces PP and lower prices raises PP). This reconceptualization motivates a new set of studies that manipulate PP through price changes rather than budget changes. Results confirm that price-driven PP declines produce preference narrowing comparable to that observed in the first two papers, and that this narrowing persists when prices return to original levels, establishing category shedding as a general response to reduced PP regardless of how that reduction is produced.
The paper then turns to a broader question about coping. Category shedding is one way for consumers to respond to reduced PP, but it is not the only way, and the form coping takes depends on what alternatives are available. Consumers do not prefer to cut a little from many categories: when cuts must be made, concentrating them is the dominant strategy. But concentrating cuts into fewer categories is itself just one path. When quality substitution is available, consumers can maintain category breadth by trading down within categories rather than exiting them, preserving more of their consumption set at lower quality. And when consumers face price-driven PP declines, a third response emerges: if saving is possible, some consumers set money aside rather than reallocating it within the choice set, effectively removing categories not in favor of other categories but in favor of outside options entirely. Together these findings suggest that the preference refinement observed in the first two papers reflects a specific coping response that dominates under specific conditions, rather than a universal feature of how consumers always respond to reduced PP.
Taken together, these findings challenge standard constrained optimization models, which predict symmetric and reversible responses to budget and price changes and treat the form of adjustment as determined solely by the structure of prices and preferences rather than by the coping options available. The results suggest instead that PP declines trigger adaptive responses whose form is contingent on circumstances: consumers shed categories when that is the available path, trade down in quality when that path is open, and save for outside options when that option exists. Critically, the effects of these adjustments can outlast the conditions that produced them, with preference narrowing persisting even after PP is restored. This asymmetry between decline and recovery, and the finding that the same decline in PP can produce meaningfully different preference structures depending on how consumers cope, sheds light on how preferences are not simply revealed under constraint but actively shaped by it, with implications for how we understand consumer value functions and the conditions under which they change.