| Abstract: |
There are repeatedly raised concerns that marketing and consumer research
often neglects to implement realistic studies that foster generalizability to
real-world contexts, thereby limiting their findings’ practical relevance.
Representative of this issue, confidence in context effects’ (i.e., shifts
in consumer preferences based on specific choice set compositions)
applicability to actual consumer decisions was challenged. Indeed, prior
investigations demonstrated that context effects research generally contained
low levels of realism, resulting in calls to implement a set of proposed
guidelines (e.g., consequential instead of hypothetical choices) to produce
generalizable and practically relevant insights. This present systematic
literature review analyzes a total of 460 individual assessments of 15 context
effects in product choice from over 40 years in 30 top-tier marketing journals
whether they implemented these guidelines as well as further experimental
characteristics. Despite notable improvements, there are still overall low
levels of realism—most critically by not imposing economic
consequences—but pronounced differences in the degree of generalizability
between the analyzed context effects, with the attraction and compromise
effect having the most solid foundation regarding relevant results.
Consequently, this article presents a refined and easy-to-follow framework to
implement realistic context effects research as well as a research agenda to
generate practically relevant future findings in a systematic approach. For
practitioners, this article provides an overview of context effects’ level
of confidence regarding their current real-world applicability as well as
guidance on how to identify research that is relevant for their application
scenarios. |