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This study aims to extend the previous research on contagion and proposes an integrative paradigm in which consumer goals and contagion recipient factors are identified as the key variables leading to the emergence of the contagion phenomenon. When a consumer has an active goal, a product touched by goal-congruent sources leads to positive product evaluation and enhances consumer performance when the product is used.

This research conducted five experimental studies in online and offline retail settings to examine the effect of contagion on evaluations of contagion objects and performance in goal-related tasks.

Across five studies, the authors demonstrated that the activation of a goal leads to contagion-based product evaluation and performance enhancement effects. The authors theorized and showed that the contagion-based process triggered during goal pursuit led to a more favorable evaluation of contagion products (Studies 1, 2 and 3). The authors also showed that enhanced consumers’ commitment toward a goal, which in turn led to enhanced performance in a real task that contributed to achieving one’s goal (Study 4). These effects emerged only when the object was physically touched by a goal-congruent contagion source and were more pronounced for the consumers who experience a high (vs low) degree of goal discrepancy (Study 5).

The current research examined the contagion phenomenon in a few predetermined goal domains (e.g. health improvement goals, career success goals, marriage success goals). Although the authors found consistent effects across different types of goals, future research can examine a more comprehensive set of consumer goals and improve the limitation of the current research to generalize the goal-based contagion phenomenon to various consumer goals.

This study suggests that it is important for retailers, in particular sellers and buyers in the secondhand markets, to understand consumer goals and prepare an appropriate contagion environment for favorable evaluation of their offerings. One possible implication is that sellers may be best served as priming certain goals. The findings also indicate that secondhand sellers may be well served to emphasize seller characteristics in certain instances and de-emphasize them in others to maximize sales.

This research proposes a new variable, namely, goal activation, and presents an integrative contagion paradigm that not only helps explain previous research findings but also offers a new perspective on the contagion phenomenon.

Investors frequently make judgments and decisions in the presence of affect (i.e., mood or emotion). Investors' moods may influence the extent to which they incorporate available financial information in their investment judgments. I propose that investors interpret their moods as signals of the extent to which financial information should be processed to make investment judgments, but only when other, more direct signals regarding the need for in-depth processing are unavailable. Consistent with research in psychology, my experimental results suggest that investors experiencing positive mood exert less effort to process available financial information than investors experiencing negative mood. Consequently, positive mood results in lower-quality financial judgments in my setting. However, when investors receive cues suggesting that initially received information is subjective, the effect of mood on effort to process financial information is mitigated. Overall, my results suggest that factors associated with positive investor mood (e.g., positive market sentiment) reduce the depth of investor analysis and lower judgment quality absent signals regarding the subjectivity of financial information.