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Liad
Weiss is a doctoral candidate in Marketing at the Graduate School of Business,
Columbia University.
Liad’s broad
research interests lie in the interplay between consumers and brands. More specifically,
Liad is interested in the psychological processes that lead to, and the ones that follow from,
product acquisition, and how such processes affect product judgment and consumer choice.
Liad is currently working on several projects that directly relate to this area. For example,
in his dissertation, Liad investigates whether and how acquiring a product changes the way
consumers judge the product. Specifically, Liad explores how the acquisition of a product may
lead consumers to differentially assign decision weights to product traits with which they can
relate (e.g. creativity, dependability) versus traits that are unique to a product (e.g. durability, portability).
Liad also examines how product acquisition can lead consumers to use information about their own traits as
comparison standards when evaluating the acquired product. Further, Liad explores how acquiring a product
induces consumers to use standards set by the product (e.g., the creativity of an apple computer) to judge
their own traits and abilities.
Liad is also interested
in how the way consumers construe a tradeoff (or choice) affects psychological processes that precede and follow choice,
as well as in the impact of these processes on a variety of choice outcomes. For example, in one project Liad
looks at two specific ways in which consumers can construe a tradeoff, as incidental
or inherent. Consumers perceive a choice as incidental
when the tradeoff arises from feasibility constraints that are exogenous to the considered choice set,
as when a consumer receives a movie and a concert ticket but has to choose one because the events happen
to coincide; in contrast, consumers perceive a choice as inherent if the set of available opportunities is
intrinsically constrained, as when consumers earn a marketing incentive that requires choosing between
different rewards (e.g., a movie or a concert ticket). Liad explores how the construal of such a tradeoff
affects the type of counterfactuals evoked by choice (e.g. thoughts of utilizing all of the tradeoff options
versus thoughts of utilizing the unselected option), as well as the consequences for whether choosers end up
actually utilizing the option they selected (e.g. whether consumers redeem a chosen reward).
Liad
earned his M.Sc. in Behavioral and Managerial Sciences as well as his B.Sc.
in Industrial Engineering and Management from the Technion-Israel Institute
of Technology.
Antecedents and consequences of product acquisition:
ABSTRACT:
Previous research uses
categorization principles to analyze the interplay between individuals and groups. The present
research uniquely employs categorization principles to analyze the interplay between individuals
and products. It proposes that consumers classify owned (but not unowned) products as integral
to their personal-self (experiment 1). Consequently, consumers judge product traits
(e.g., masculinity) as consistent with their own traits (assimilation) if they own the product,
but as inconsistent with their own traits (contrast) if they interact with the product but do
not own it, even when owning the product is non-diagnostic of its properties (e.g., following
random ownership assignment; Experiments 2-4). For example, less creative consumers who enter
a drawing for an iPhone may judge it as less creative (assimilation) if they win the product,
but as more creative (contrast) if they do not win the product. Individual and situational moderators
of these effects are identified, and their theoretical and substantive implications are discussed.
- Weiss, Liad and Gita V. Johar: "Products
as Self-Evaluation Standards," Invited revision at the Journal of Consumer Research
ABSTRACT:
Social-comparison research finds that consumers
judge their traits relative to human references (e.g., the beauty of a model). The present research proposes that (i)
consumers may also judge their traits relative to product references (e.g., the creativity of an Apple computer), and
that (ii) a product trait would affect consumers’ self-evaluation in a way that depends on whether consumers own the product.
Three experiments confirmed that consumers judge themselves and behave consistently with traits of owned products (assimilation),
but inconsistently with traits of unowned products (contrast). For example, assigning people to own headphones that authentically
reproduce (vs. artificially improve) sound increased subsequent honest and authentic behavior, whereas assigning people to use
(but not to own) the same headphones decreased subsequent honest behavior. The findings are consistent with the possibility that
consumers categorize owned (but not unowned) products in their self-concept, leading to assimilation/contrast of self-evaluation
and behavior to product traits.
- Weiss, Liad and Dan
Bartels: "Which
Product to Retain? The Effect of Product-Self Commonalities (versus
Product Distinct Features)," Working
paper
ABSTRACT:
How do preferences differ
for choices about product retention (where a consumer owns two products and chooses which one to retain)
versus acquisition (where a consumer chooses which of two products to acquire)? We propose that when
consumers make a retention (vs. acquisition) choice, they give more weight to product-self commonalities---
product features that can also apply to consumers' self-concept (e.g., intuitiveness)---and less weight to
product distinct features---features that apply to products but cannot describe people (e.g., durability).
Thus, for example, consumers who trade off durability and intuitiveness in choosing a tablet computer are
more likely to acquire the durable tablet but to retain the intuitive tablet. Findings across five studies
support a categorization account, whereby consumers classify owned products in the category “self”, which
serves to increase the accessibility of attributes that are common to the self and the products and thus
the decision weight of product-self commonalities in product choice. Theoretical and practical implications
for marketing are discussed.
Choice construal:
- Weiss, Liad and Ran Kivetz: "Following-Through on
Opportunities: The Effect of Incidental
(versus Inherent) Choice,”
Invited revision at the Journal of Marketing Research
ABSTRACT:
Consumers often plan to
pursue desirable opportunities yet fail to follow through. Such lack of follow-through has negative
implications for consumers, who forgo opportunities for consumption and progress, as well as for marketers,
who miss sales opportunities. We suggest that consumers are more likely to follow through with opportunities
that are selected from incidental choice sets, in which the necessity to tradeoff one opportunity for another
arises from extraneous feasibility constraints (e.g., when two desirable events happen to co-occur), than from
inherent choice sets, in which the tradeoff is “built-in” (e.g., when a marketing incentive offers a choice
between two desirable events). Seven studies demonstrate that incidental choice sets induce consumers to
imagine ways to utilize all of the choice set’s competing offers. Consequently, consumers feel that by failing
to follow through on their selected opportunity, they miss-out on all of the opportunities combined (although they
could have actually only realized one of the opportunities). The findings also indicate that incidental, but not
inherent, choices can eliminate the well documented tendency to overweigh out-of-pocket costs relative to
opportunity costs.
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