This study aimed to investigate the influence of visual symbols on the perception and evaluation of two fictitious products as well as the effect of demographic characteristics (nationality) on consumers' evaluations. A sample of 373 participants was split into two groups and two experimental conditions (products with Swiss symbols and products without Swiss symbols). One group of participants rated the packaging without a Swiss flag and the other one rated the same packaging with a Swiss flag. A semantic differential scale and the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) were used to assess attitudes toward the products. Results confirm that there are differences between the two independent groups and that nationality has an effect on product perception and evaluation. Visual symbols such as a country flag can lead to a better product perception and evaluation. Finally, implications for research are discussed.

The authors examine the implications of electronic shopping for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. They assume that near-term technological developments will offer consumers unparalleled opportunities to locate and compare product offerings. They examine these advantages as a function of typical consumer goals and the types of products and services being sought and offer conclusions regarding consumer incentives and disincentives to purchase through interactive home shopping vis-à-vis traditional retail formats. The authors discuss implications for industry structure as they pertain to competition among retailers, competition among manufacturers, and retailer-manufacturer relationships.

A series of studies demonstrates that consumers are inclined to believe that the selling price of a good or service is substantially higher than its fair price. Consumers appear sensitive to several reference points-including past prices, competitor prices, and cost of goods sold-but underestimate the effects of inflation, overattribute price differences to profit, and fail to take into account the full range of vendor costs. Potential corrective interventions-such as providing historical price information, explaining price differences, and cueing costs-were only modestly effective. These results are considered in the context of a four-dimensional transaction space that illustrates sources of perceived unfairness for both individual and multiple transactions.

This article proposes a prototypical schema theory of memory. Such a theory assumes the operation of four central encoding-processes: selection-a process that chooses only some of all incoming stimuli for representation; abstractiona process that stores the meaning of a message without reference to the original syntactic and lexical content; interpretation-a process by which relevant prior knowledge is generated to aid comprehension; and integration-a process by which a single, holistic memory representation is formed from the products of the previous three operations. The article evaluates the supportive and critical evidence for these processes in light of the need for any theory of memory to account for three fundamental observations: accuracy, incompleteness, and distortion. The central retrieval process of schema theory, reconstruction, is also discussed in this context. Evidence seems to indicate that the memory representation is far richer and detailed than schema theory would suggest.

Consumer knowledge is seldom complete or errorless. Therefore, the self-assessed validity of knowledge and consequent knowledge calibration (i.e., the correspondence between self-assessed and actual validity) is an important issue for the study of consumer decision making. In this article we describe methods and models used in calibration research. We then review a wide variety of empirical results indicating that high levels of calibration are achieved rarely, moderate levels that include some degree of systematic bias are the norm, and confidence and accuracy are sometimes completely uncorrelated. Finally, we examine the explanations of miscalibration and offer suggestions for future research.