Broad Mind - Sets to Broad Baskets : The Effect of Manipulating Category Width on Consumer Decision Making

their helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. 3 Changes in consumers' category width (the level of coarseness-fineness with which people categorize objects) alter their decision making processes, which in turn alter their categorizing and purchasing behavior. Participants manipulated to be broad categorizers base their decisions on fewer, highly salient dimensions. In contrast, narrow categorizers actively seek additional dimensions and base their decisions on all available information. Consequently, broad categorizers are more susceptible to many context effects and decision heuristics, whereas narrow categorizers make more compensatory decisions, invariable across contexts. We show the effects of manipulating category width on basic cognitive behaviors (e.g., grouping), in substantive consumer domains (e.g., new product adoptions), and for general decision making strategies (e.g., susceptibility to heuristics). 4 Imagine two consumers, A and B, who each decide to rent a movie and order in pizza for a relaxing evening at home. A and B go to two different video stores. In A's store, movies are classified by genre, in broad groups including comedy and drama. In B's store, movies are also classified by genre, but with much narrower groupings including comic action, dark comedy, romantic comedy, courtroom drama, historical drama, etc. After considering the options they both head home. When A and B call their local pizza parlor they are told that the parlor has a new line of pizzas available called world pizzas, with new innovative toppings. Who is more likely to try the new innovative world pizzas? This research suggests that A will be more likely to try them. This research further suggests that the first task of deciding on a video altered A and B's category width (the level of coarseness or fineness with which people categorize objects). This in turn influenced the nature of how A and B processed information in the subsequent pizza task. Because A's category width was broad, she focused on one salient dimension, which in this case was the innovativeness of the new line of pizzas. On the other hand, because B's category width was narrow, she carefully thought of multiple dimensions and concluded that while the world pizzas were innovative, choosing them might also be risky. Despite the extensive use of concepts related to categorization in consumer research, few papers have examined how the internal structure of categories in consumers' minds relates to consumer decision making (for an exception, see Boush and Loken 1991). Rather, …