The role of relaxation in consumer behavior
A forthcoming paper in the American Marketing Association's Journal of Marketing Research by Professor Michel Tuan Pham, Kravis Professor of Business, Marketing, Columbia Business School; Iris W. Hung, Assistant Professor of Marketing, NUS Business School, National University of Singapore; and Gerald J. Gorn, Wang Seng Liang Professor of Business, Marketing Area Chair Professor at the School of Business, Faculty of Business and Economics, the University of Hong Kong, finds that states of relaxation consistently increase the monetary valuations of products, actually inflating these valuations by about 10 percent. This phenomenon is demonstrated in six experiments involving two different methods of inducing relaxation, a large number of products of different types, and various methods of assessing monetary valuation. In all six experiments, participants who were put into a relaxed affective state reported higher monetary valuations than participants who were put into an equally pleasant but less relaxed state.