Person:

Karmarkar, Uma Reeta

Price is a key factor in most purchases, but it can be presented at different stages of decision making prior to a purchase. We examine the sequence-dependent effects of price and product information on the decision-making process at both neural and behavioral levels. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, the price of a product was shown to participants either before or after the product itself was presented. Early exposure to price, or price primacy, altered the process of valuation, as seen via altered patterns of activity in medial prefrontal cortex immediately prior to purchase decisions. Specifically, whereas viewing products first resulted in evaluations strongly related to products' attractiveness or desirability, viewing prices first appeared to promote overall evaluations related to products' monetary worth. Consistent with this framework, we show that price primacy can increase purchase of bargain priced products when their worth is easily recognized. Together, these results suggest that price primacy highlights considerations of product worth and can thereby influence purchasing.

Most daily decisions involve uncertainty about outcome probabilities arising from incomplete knowledge, i.e., ambiguity. We explore how the addition of partial information affects these types of choices using theoretical and empirical methods. Our experiments in both gain and loss domains demonstrate that when such information supports a favorable outcome, it strongly increases valuation of an ambiguous financial prospect. However, when information supports an unfavorable outcome, it has significantly less impact. We find that two mechanisms drive this asymmetry. First, unfavorable information decreases estimates of a good outcome occurring but also reduces aversive uncertainty. These factors act in opposition, minimizing the effects of unfavorable information. Second, when information can be subjectively interpreted, unfavorable information is less likely to be integrated into evaluations. Our findings reveal mechanisms not captured by traditional models of decision making under uncertainty and highlight the importance of increasing the salience of unfavorable information in uncertain contexts to promote unbiased decision making.