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The purpose of this study is to determine how and when choice variety influences consumers’ willingness to purchase, according to a personal emotion perspective. The choice paradox indicates that although having many choices can be beneficial, it can also cause customer decision paralysis and unhappiness. This article proposes that the desire and motivation to process information vary from person to person, and emotional factors are relevant.

With a 2 × 2 experimental design, this study examines the influence of the interaction of choice variety with need for cognition (NFC) on positive and negative emotions, and then tests the mediating effects on purchase intentions. The sample includes 214 college students, assigned randomly to self-assessment questionnaires.

Both high NFC respondents in the high variety condition and low NFC respondents in the low variety condition exhibit more positive emotions than low NFC respondents in the high variety condition but not more than high NFC respondents in the low variety condition. Positive (negative) emotions increase (decrease) consumers’ purchase intentions.

The experiment was conducted in a virtual store, which may not match real-life store environments or reflect participants’ actual purchase behaviours, so additional research should consider the influence of involvement further.

The results offer suggestions for developing more effective communication with emotions, increasing involvement to maintain consumers’ positive emotions and relieve their confusion, and managing product variety.

This article meets the identified need to study how choice variety influences consumers’ willingness to purchase from a personal emotion perspective.

This paper aims to propose a framework for psychological reactance–triggered adverse effects of variety reductions in grocery product categories on shoppers’ patronage intentions.

The paper tests this framework in two field studies with European shoppers.

Participants perceived mild (let alone aggressive or conspicuous) variety reductions as a threat to their prior freedom of choice (i.e. a precondition for the occurrence of domain-specific reactance). Through lower satisfaction with the reduced variety and anger towards the grocer, this threat, in turn, fostered adverse patronage intentions. Such effects depended on product category nature (utilitarian vs hedonic) and shoppers’ intrinsic need for variety, attitude towards private-label items and general proclivity towards experiencing reactance.

By applying psychological reactance theory to a variety reduction context, this paper offers new implications for assortment reduction research. Certain limitations call for future reactance theory–framed inquiry.

The findings caution against traditional grocers’ drastic variety reduction policy and highlight conditions enabling assortment rationalisation without severely affecting freedom of choice.

Drawing on notions such as “the tyranny of choice”, critics have urged traditional grocers to drastically reduce variety. However, this paper shows that shoppers perceive variety reductions as threats to their prior freedom, which traditional grocers themselves educated them to expect and enjoy.

The purpose of this study is to identify diners ' fundamental reasons for seeking variety in their choice of a restaurant and to understand their variety-seeking intentions from the perspective of personality characteristics.

An online survey was conducted using a self-administered questionnaire and 309 usable responses were collected. To test the hypothesized relationships, structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed. A multiple group analysis was also conducted to test the moderating effects of personality characteristics.

The results suggested that diners ' desired values are more critical than prior dining experiences in determining variety seeking intentions. Further, satisfaction and desired hedonic/utilitarian values differently affect variety seeking intentions across high and low allocentric personality groups.

Regarding personality types, satisfaction and desired values were found to have a significant impact on variety seeking intentions in the high allocentric group, but not the low allocentric group. This suggests that the restaurant industry could develop effective marketing strategies by considering their target customers ' personality characteristics.

This study is unique in that it identified customers ' fundamental reasons for seeking variety in consumption situations, particularly in terms of restaurant choice. This study also considered individuals ' personality characteristics associated with optimal stimulation level in order to understand why consumers seek variety.

That part of human behaviour which is not rigidly determined by external constraints can be considered as a sequence of more or less free choices. One can talk of a choice only if it is one of several alternatives, and of a free choice only in so far as it is not determined by conditions over which the individuals have no control. Moreover, we recognise an alternative only if it is actually elected by at least a fraction of a population. This leads to the concept of statistical freedom. Postulates are formulated which must be satisfied by any numerical measures of statistical freedom, and certain mathematical expressions are proposed which are shown to conform to these postulates. Statistical freedom has two fundamental features, which appear as factors in its numerical measure: diversity and independence. The measures of diversity and independence are derived in the first place front a certain model of society, but once they are obtained, the model is discarded, and the statistical coefficients are justified by their mathematical properties. Safeguards against arbitrary manipulation of statistical material are discussed, and the potential use of the new measures is illustrated by application to the problem of choice of profession.

This study aims to investigate the effect of winning-losing perception, including the winning or losing result and the closeness of this result, on consumers’ subsequent variety-seeking behavior.

Four experimental designs, one with a modified version of the Tetris game, were used to show how and when winning or losing perceptions will influence individuals’ variety-seeking behavior.

Consumers who have failed in a competition or not achieved a goal tend to seek less variety in their later consumption than do consumers who have succeeded because losing feedback weakens consumers’ perception of their control of personal mastery. This effect only exists when the closeness of winning or losing is narrow (e.g. the success is just missed) and diminishes when the result is clear and obvious.

The current study has systematically explored the interaction between winning-losing outcomes and the closeness of these outcomes.

This study offers marketing managers practical guidance on how to use competition results to conduct marketing activities, such as transmitting advertisements for classic flavors to those who have lost in a video game or properly increasing the proportion of new flavors or products in stores or vending machines near sports venues.

This research adds to the literature on competition, which has largely overlooked the possible moderating role of the closeness of the competition result and its influence on individuals’ follow-up irrelevant behaviors and it also adds to the work on variety-seeking behavior, which has not explored the impact of winning-losing perception.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze smallholder farmers’ perceptions of climate change and its adverse effects, identify major adaptation strategies used by farmers and analyze the factors that influence the choice of adaptation strategy by smallholder farmers in eastern Ethiopia.

The study was based on a cross-sectional survey of 296 sample households selected from three districts in east Ethiopia. Data were collected with the aid of a semi-structured questionnaire and review of literature, documents and databases.

The study provides empirical evidence that majority of farmers in the study area are aware of climate change patterns and their adverse effect on income, food security, diversity, forest resources, food prices and crop and livestock diseases. In response to these adverse effects, major adaptation strategies used by farmers include cultivating different crops, planting different crop varieties, changing planting dates, use of soil and water conservation techniques, conservation agriculture practices and engaging in non-farm income activities. Choice of adaptation strategies are influenced by gender of household head, household size, farm size, distance from market and number of farm plots.

The study suggests that developing more effective climate change adaptation strategies need support from the government. Such an effort needs provision of the necessary resources such as credit, information and extension services on climate change adaptation strategies and technologies, and investing in climate smart and resilient projects.

The study adopts multivariate probit model that models farmers’ simultaneous adaptation choice behavior which has been rarely addressed by previous researches.

Research conducted over the last decade, on the influence of brand inertia or variety seeking on promotional response, has yielded mixed results. Variety seekers have been found to be more price‐sensitive by one set of researchers, while another stream of work finds them to be less sensitive. Reconciling the two findings, the current study empirically addresses the proposition that variety seekers use price promotions strategically, as a way to experiment with different brands over time. Although consumers evaluate price promotions differently according to whether the promoted brand is more or less intrinsically favored than a reference brand, high and low variety seekers respond to brand comparisons differently, leading to differences in evaluation and responsiveness to price promotion offers. The empirical results confirm that high variety seekers are less sensitive to the preference order of considered brands, but only within a limited range of intrinsic brand favorability. Once differences in brand favorability are accounted for, moreover, finds that high variety seekers are more sensitive to promotional effort. This is compatible with the notion that, within an acceptable set of brands, variety seekers use price promotions as a low‐cost strategy for experiencing different brands over time. This understanding of the relationship among promotional offers, specific brands and consumer segments, provides valuable insights to brand managers as they consider their strategic promotional options, and design an effective promotional strategy.

Understanding the effect of assortment composition on attentional levels is an essential topic for academic researchers and practitioners. This work has important implications when analyzing the influence of shopping frame time and search effort on the relationship between the reaction to assortment composition and visual attention to stock-keeping units (SKUs) pricing.

Two experimental studies through gauze behavior analysis technology (using eye-tracking equipment) analyze the variable's large assortment, visual attention to SKU pricing, search effort and shopping frame time.

The results suggest that, although it increases the search effort, a large assortment decreases the visual attention to SKU pricing. Further, our results indicate a moderating effect associated with mitigating the negative effect by medium-low levels of search effort and a moderating impact of time in this relation.

Marketing professionals can carefully optimize the in-store experience by managing the assortment and variety and by influencing consumers' visual attention to SKU pricing along the journey as part of the experience. Assortment and SKU pricing strategies need to be aligned with consumer journey design.

Our findings contribute to assortment theory and management by detailing the relationship between consumers' reactions to assortment perception and visual attention to SKU pricing in time flow. We reinforce the importance of considering assortment strategies from the consumer perspective and giving reliable information about in-store behavior.

I begin my historical analysis of the co-evolution of reproductive norms and desires, approaches to fertility control, and the meaning assigned to contraceptives with an examination of the Grafenberg Ring, the first modern IUD. The Grafenberg ring, developed in the late 1920s by a German doctor, Ernst Gräfenberg, was a small ring made of silkworm gut and coiled silver that can be compressed to be inserted into the uterus. The Grafenberg ring appeared at a time when changes in social attitude towards sexuality had formed a favorable climate for a new contraceptive method. The device was greeted with much interest from the European birth control movement, and Gräfenberg was invited to speak at the Third Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform held in London in 1929 and at the Seventh International Birth Control Conference in Zurich in 1930 (Davis, 1971).

Scientists in Pakistan are currently developing biofortified wheat varieties to address widespread zinc deficiency, especially among women and children in poorer rural households. The purpose of this paper is to understand how the productivity and efficiency of small-scale and marginal wheat farmers can be improved so that their households may benefit from zinc-fortified varieties.

The authors estimate a stochastic frontier production function model with data from a survey of wheat farmers conducted in Punjab, Pakistan in 2011.

The productivities of the newer varieties of wheat were significantly greater than the older varieties, as expected. Farmers growing wheat in the rice-wheat and cotton-wheat zones tend to be more efficient than farmers from the mixed zone. Farmers who wait to adopt a leading variety are not less efficient than earlier adopters, but the longer the time until they switch varieties again, the more inefficient is their wheat production. Older farmers tend to be more technically inefficient than younger farmers, but the effect of education is not statistically significant. Wheat farmers with access to extension advice are more efficient. Farmers whose land suffered from severe salinity or severe toxicity are less productive and less efficient than others.

The authors find no differences in technical inefficiency effects associated with growing the four most popular varieties, either grown alone or with other varieties – suggesting that no single leading variety should be targeted for biofortification. In contrast to some earlier studies, the authors find that small-scale farmers tend to be less technically efficient. This result underscores the need to specifically target this group in promotional programs, and also to complement these with reinforcement of agronomic recommendations.

This project is part of the HarvestPlus program to determine the appropriate variety or varieties to biofortify with zinc so that Pakistan’s population can have better health and well-being. Further, the results show that there it is desirable to undertake further studies to improve the productivity and efficiency of wheat farmers in the Punjab, Pakistan to increase the health and well-being of the population in general.