Dr. Edward Webb - Explaining consumer choice anomalies using eye-tracking

Explaining consumer choice anomalies using eye-tracking

Thursday 23 February 2017

Abstract:
Consumers often exhibit preference reversals by choosing a low quality, low price good when prices are low, but a high quality, high price good when prices are high, even though the price of the quality premium is held constant. We examine whether such reversals can be predicted from the attention paid to each aspect of the choice set as proposed by salience theory. We conduct an eye-tracking experiment and construct and compare models of consumer choice incorporating visual attention. We find that attention shifts between high and low quality goods reliably predict preference reversals, but inconsistent with salience theory, not shifts between quality and price.