Bio
Welcome to my website!
I am an assistant professor of marketing at Yale University.
I received my Ph.D. from the Wharton School and worked as a research fellow at Harvard University.
Embedded Files
Research Interests
I am broadly interested in numeric judgments and decisions, with a focus on two themes:
(1) How consumers respond to numeric information
Prices and promotions framed as percentages, multipliers, or absolute values
Trends in stock prices or performance statistics
Lower-priced, lower-refund versus higher-priced, higher-refund options
Even versus odd quantities
(2) How researchers and marketers should interpret numeric responses
Whether higher subjective probabilities of success following choice reflect an illusion of control or an alternative phenomenon
Whether larger belief changes following positive or negative information depend on overlooked moderators
Whether greater likelihood of consumption after sunk costs stems from prior expenditures or additional factors
Selected Abstracts
Klusowski, J., Small, D.A., &, Goldenberg, J. Even number preference in quantity selection. Manuscript in preparation.
We find that people choose even numbers more frequently than odd numbers when selecting quantities to acquire or consume (e.g., choosing how many apples to buy for oneself at a store). Drawing on a mix of data sources—including the Kilts-NielsenIQ consumer panel data and online survey data—we find evidence of this tendency not only in shopping decisions but also in a variety of other quantity selection contexts. We propose that this phenomenon occurs because even numbers are more accessible and complete than odd numbers. This extends previous research findings related to round numbers (e.g., typically those ending in 0 or 5) and shows that disproportionate selection of certain numbers occurs at a more granular level. We discuss implications for understanding and influencing quantity selection.
Fulmer, Alexander G. & Klusowski, J. When and why consumers prefer high refunds to low prices. Under review at Journal of Consumer Research.
Many consumer decisions require purchasing a product or service before knowing whether it will ultimately be used (e.g., travel, insurance), and this uncertainty can discourage purchases. In such situations, consumers may encounter lower-priced, lower-refund options or higher-priced, higher-refund options, each offering a different way to encourage purchase. Although the effectiveness of these options should, in part, depend on expected consumption versus cancellation, we find that, beyond this intuitive consideration, higher-priced, higher-refund options increase purchase intentions even when economically dominated. We posit that this effect stems from evaluability: refunds are readily evaluated relative to original prices, whereas prices themselves, somewhat counterintuitively, often lack comparable benchmarks. This asymmetry can make higher-refund options more appealing despite their higher prices. Moreover, even when both options are presented side by side, some consumers choose the higher-refund option, creating additional opportunities for firms to profit. These findings enhance our understanding of how consumers respond to different pricing structures and how marketers can design them to promote purchases and generate additional revenue.
Klusowski, J., Banker, M. & Zauberman, G. Does positive or negative information generalize more? The role of priors and measurement. Under 2nd round review at Management Science.
People frequently generalize from one entity to another. A positive or negative experience with a business or an individual can lead people to expect a similar experience with another such entity. Extending research on whether positive or negative information generalizes more, we show that either positive or negative information can appear to generalize more depending on (1) whether people hold positive or negative priors and (2) how generalization is measured. We also show that, after accounting for these factors, positive information appears at least directionally more likely to generalize than negative information. We discuss implications for researchers studying valence effects and for practitioners assessing the relative importance of positive and negative information.
Klusowski, J. Prediction horizon effects on trend forecasts. Under 2nd round review at Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
People sometimes expect trends to continue, yet other times they do not. Previous research has primarily attributed this phenomenon to characteristics of past trends (e.g., what they reflect and how long they persisted). The present research shows that such expectations also depend on a feature of future predictions: the prediction horizon. Specifically, people judge trends as more likely to continue in the next period when forecasting that period alone than when forecasting several future periods—even though this variation should not affect predictions for the overlapping period. This pattern emerges across different types of trends and domains. It appears to arise in part because, compared to shorter horizons, longer horizons increase uncertainty, shifting focus from observed trends toward expected base rates. These findings suggest that forecasting is not only a retrospective process dependent on past trends but also a prospective one shaped by future horizons—even beyond the period being predicted.
Business managers and policymakers must often communicate magnitudes. Yet, conveying large relative magnitudes without desensitizing people to further increases can be challenging due to diminishing sensitivity to large numbers. In this research, we propose that percentage expressions not only make large relative magnitudes (e.g., 500%) appear larger than equivalent non-percentage expressions but also make large increases in relative magnitudes (e.g., from 500% to 600%) appear larger. We posit an explanation: percentages typically have values between 0% and 100%, so when percentages and percentage-point differences reach 100% or more, they seem unusually large. This hypothesis is supported by data scraped from the New York Times articles and a series of online experiments employing both management-relevant scenarios and incentive-compatible decisions. Existing theories of magnitude perception either cannot predict all the results of these studies (e.g., numerosity and unitosity) or need further specification to do so (e.g., decision-by-sampling and range-frequency theory). We discuss implications for the theory of magnitude and difference perception and the practice of communicating large magnitudes and changes.
Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time intervals. The lack of comparability of such individual investigations limits their potential to inform policy. Here, to address this limitation and accelerate the pace of discovery, we introduce the megastudy—a massive field experiment in which the effects of many different interventions are compared in the same population on the same objectively measured outcome for the same duration. In a megastudy targeting physical exercise among 61,293 members of an American fitness chain, 30 scientists from 15 different US universities worked in small independent teams to design a total of 54 different four-week digital programmes (or interventions) encouraging exercise. We show that 45% of these interventions significantly increased weekly gym visits by 9% to 27%; the top-performing intervention offered microrewards for returning to the gym after a missed workout. Only 8% of interventions induced behaviour change that was significant and measurable after the four-week intervention. Conditioning on the 45% of interventions that increased exercise during the intervention, we detected carry-over effects that were proportionally similar to those measured in previous research. Forecasts by impartial judges failed to predict which interventions would be most effective, underscoring the value of testing many ideas at once and, therefore, the potential for megastudies to improve the evidentiary value of behavioural science.
Previous research suggests that choice causes an illusion of control—that it makes people feel more likely to achieve preferable outcomes, even when they are selecting among options that are functionally identical (e.g., lottery tickets with an identical chance of winning). This research has been widely accepted as evidence that choice can have significant welfare effects, even when it confers no actual control. In this article, we report the results of 17 experiments (N = 10,825 online/laboratory participants) examining whether choice truly causes an illusion of control. We find that choice rarely makes people feel more likely to achieve preferable outcomes—unless it makes the preferable outcomes actually more likely—and when it does, it is not because choice causes an illusion, but because choice reflects some participants’ pre-existing (illusory) beliefs that the functionally identical options are not identical.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse