主题：Costly Signaling: Conspicuous Consumption as a Means of Restoring Inferiority
时间: 2014年12月17日(周三)，中午12:30
地点:中央财经大学学院南路校区主教14楼1411会议室
Xiaoying Zheng is a PhD candidate atGuanghua School of Management, Peking University. She graduated from Beijing Normal University in 2010 with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology. She was a visiting scholar at the School of Management at Yale University during 2013-2014. She is broadly interested in consumer judgment and decision making. Her research focuses on social comparison and consumer behavior, branding and advertising. She has been rewarded the National Scholarship, President Fellowship of Peking University, Dean’s Research Fellowship of Guanghua School of Management.
Social comparison, the process of assessing self relative to others, is a fundamental and pervasive psychological mechanism that influences people’s judgments, experiences, and behavior greatly (Festinger, 1954). The current research investigates the effect of social comparison on conspicuous consumption behavior. We propose that the inferiority individuals experience after making upward comparison would motivate them to engage in conspicuous consumption. Four studies support this prediction. Study 1 manipulates social comparison in an academic performance context and finds that undergraduates who make upward comparison are more willing to spend money on conspicuous products. Study 2 suggests that participants prefer conspicuous brand logos over invisible ones after receiving a negative comparative feedback on their intelligence test. Study 3 demonstrates that after making upward comparison, consumers are more likely to spend money on public products than their counterparts. Study 4 examines the moderating role of self-concept clarity and shows that the proposed effect occurs only among consumers with low self-concept clarity.
