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.

Although the influence of identity on consumer behavior has been documented in many streams of literature, the absence of a consistent definition of identity and of generally accepted principles regarding the drivers of identity-based behavior complicates comparisons across these literatures. To resolve that problem, we propose a simple but inclusive definition of identity. Identity can be defined as any category label with which a consumer selfassociates that is amenable to a clear picture of what a person in that category looks like, thinks, feels and does. Building from this definition, we propose the following five basic principles that can help researchers model the process of identity formation and expression:(1) Identity Salience: identity processing increases when the identity is an active component of the self; (2) Identity Association: the non-conscious association of stimuli with a positive and salient identity improves a person's response to the stimuli; (3) Identity Relevance: the deliberative evaluation of identity-linked stimuli depends on how diagnostic the identity is in the relevant domain; (4) Identity Verification: individuals monitor their own behaviors to manage and reinforce their identities; and (5) Identity Conflict: identity-linked behaviors help consumers manage the relative prominence of multiple identities. To illustrate the potential usefulness of these principles for guiding identity research, we discuss new avenues for identity research and explain how these principles could help guide investigations into these areas.

Measures derived from eye-movement data reveal that during brand choice consumers adapt to time pressure by accelerating the visual scanning sequence, by filtering information and by changing their scanning strategy. In addition, consumers with high task motivation filter brand information less and pictorial information more.Consumers under time pressure filter textual ingredient information more, and pictorial information less. The results of a conditional logit analysis reveal that the chosen brand receives significantly more intra-brand and inter-brand saccades and longer fixation durations than non-chosen brands, independent of time pressure and task motivation conditions. Implications for the theory of consumer attention and for pretesting of packaging and shelf lay-outs are discussed.

Rising levels of advertising competition have made it increasingly difficult to attract and hold consumers' attention and to establish strong memory traces for the advertised brand. A common communication strategy to break through this competitive clutter is to increase ad originality. However, ad originality may have detrimental effects when consumers pay more attention to the ad at the expense of the advertised brand. Moreover, the positive effects of originality may quickly wane when the ad becomes familiar. Surprisingly, no research to date has examined such brand attention and memory effects of ad originality and familiarity. The current study aims to fill this void. We use a stochastic model of the influence that ad originality and familiarity have on consumers' eye fixations to the key elements of advertisements---brand, text, and pictorial---and how the information extracted during eye fixations promotes memory for the advertised brand. The model explicitly accounts for heterogeneity due to consumers and advertisements. Infrared eye tracking was applied to collect eye fixation data from 119 consumers who paged through two general-audience magazines containing 58 full-page advertisements. Memory for the advertised brands was assessed with an indirect memory task. The model was estimated using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. In support of our hypotheses, original advertisements drew more attention to the advertised brand. More importantly however, advertisements that were both original and familiar attracted the largest amount of attention to the advertised brand, which improved subsequent brand memory. In addition, original and familiar ads were found to promote brand memory directly. Implications of these findings for communication and media planning strategy are discussed.bayesian models, attention and brand memory, advertising effectiveness, originality