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Purpose – The aim of the chapter is to show how two important facts of physicians’ behavior, (i) their tendency to “create” the demand for medical practices, and (ii) their delay and reluctance in using new treatments and therapies, can be explained with the lens of the neuroeconomics research on the neural and behavioral basis of regret.

Methodology – This chapter adopts a neuroeconomics perspective on decision-making, asking how the brain represents values and generates emotional states, which consequently influence choices. In the line of recent work on emotion-based decision-making, we expect to be able to characterize the brain areas underlying the studied processes and to specify the functional relationship between rational decision-making and the emotional influences that modulate these decisional processes.

Originality – Neurobiological approaches can contribute significantly to a better understanding of the cognitive and emotional underpinnings of medical decision-making, from how physicians might evaluate and anticipate the effect of alternative therapies, to how patients might anticipate future consequences of their health choice. This can explain some features of the doctor–patient relationship which are not consistent with simple maximization models.

Findings – Our findings suggest that physicians’ behavior can be often explained by regret avoidance. Likewise, they suggest that physicians play as actual agents when they make medical decisions that will affect the future well-being of their patients.

Research limitations – We limited our analysis to the potential role of anticipated regret; therefore, this chapter neglects many important factors of the health sector.

Discourses on ageing and childlessness coalesce around the notion that childless women will experience regret and loneliness in old age. In the United Kingdom, the idea that children (mostly women) will provide care in old age tends to be normalised and underpins social care provision. In recent times, media coverage of childless women has also tended to sustain and promote this. This discourse occurs within a context where childlessness is on the rise and where there is little academic interest in the topic.

Our chapter will report on a constructivist grounded theory study with women who choose not to have children. A key aim of the study was to explore the consequences of participants’ choices on their lives. Twenty-one women aged between 45 and 75, from across England, Scotland and Wales participated. The age criteria were chosen to reflect the category that is used by the Office of National Statistics to denote that women’s reproduction ends at 45. This also helps to construct a social norm that women aged 45 and over are seen as older women. Findings reveal that most participants experience no regrets following their choice not to have children. Some express ‘half regrets’ while all challenge the societal expectation that without children there will be no one to care for them when they are older.

This supports the limited, mainly autobiographical literature, on loss and regret. It also refutes the unquestioned and widely believed assumption that women who choose not have children will live to regret it. For participants, the choice for motherhood was but one choice from a menu of many others. Their choice was for something more meaningful for them rather than a choice against motherhood. Consequently, participants had no reason to experience loss or regret. These findings also question the discourse, which implies that children will ensure care in older age. It presents a challenge to the myth that the family is a haven of happiness and support in an ever-changing world. Crucially, it supports calls for more inclusive policy making to address the care needs of all older people.

This study aims to examine differences in regret between individuals with high vs low self-esteem that follows from negative appraisals for unsuccessful consumer decisions that are either congruent or not with perceived norms. This study also tested the mediating role of decision responsibility and the ability of psychological repair work in regulating regret.

Hypotheses were tested through four experimental studies using student and international panel samples across different consumer decision scenarios to generalize the findings of the study.

This study shows that high self-esteem individuals regret less a bad decision when it is congruent (normal) than when it is incongruent (abnormal) with the prevalent norms, while lower self-esteem individuals tend to regret equally both normal and abnormal decisions. This study further shows that this effect is driven by internal responsibility attributions. Finally, the results also suggest that high self-esteem people are more efficient than low self-esteem people in regulating regret, but only when the decision is abnormal.

The present research has important contributions to both regret and self-esteem literature. First, this study explored the role of self-esteem on regret, an individual variable that has been studied relatively little in regret literature. Second, this study has shown, consistent with recent findings, that decision congruence with the norms is a more suitable predictor of regret than whether the decision involves action or inaction. Finally, this study showed that stimulating individuals to self-enhance by engaging in psychological repair work led individuals to regulate regret, consistent with regret regulation theory.

This study aims to examine if relational attachment could be considered as a mediator in the relationship between social support and career regret. The theoretical framework is based on Kahn’s (2007) work on meaningful connections.

The authors used a three-part survey for data collection, spread over two months from 368 employees for co-worker social support and 324 employees for supervisor social support working in different sectors in India.

The results indicate that for co-workers, relational attachment acts as a mediator between instrumental support and career regret; but for personal support, the mediation effect is absent. However, instrumental support is not directly related to career regret. Notably, in case of social support from the supervisor, there does not seem to be any mediation effect for personal or instrumental support. But social support is related to career regret for both categories of support.

The authors contribute to literature that examines the mechanism, driving social support and career regret. By understanding how these factors interact and impact one another, researchers can develop interventions and strategies to help individuals navigate career decisions, improve their personal relationships and increase their access to social support. Ultimately, this research can lead to improved well-being and career satisfaction for individuals. As the sample is generalized, there is scope to examine if the relationships differ based on the work structures and idiosyncrasies of the industries.

This study examines the unmapped mechanism that mediates the social support and career regret relationship, and in the process, provides new directions for research.

Despite the merit of extant studies on career decision regrets, they are not well integrated, are developed at different speeds and differ in focus. Specifically, they do not address an important question about the levels and antecedents of regret arising from choosing entrepreneurship instead of paid employment and vice versa. The authors adopted the regret regulation theory as foundation to examining the moderated effect of entrepreneurial potential (EP) on career choice regret (CCR) among employees and entrepreneurs.

The authors surveyed 721 employees and 724 entrepreneurs from a developing country and applied partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to test the hypotheses.

Employees regretted their career choice three times more when compared with entrepreneurs. However, the authors failed to conclude that the latter had three times better living conditions when compared with the former. EP negatively influenced the regret of being an entrepreneur in lieu of an employee while it positively influenced the regret of being an employee in lieu of an entrepreneur. The perceived opportunity cost of being a higher EP employee was three times greater when compared with that of being a lower EP entrepreneur. The effect of EP on CCR was mitigated or amplified by duration in the career, former career status, decision justifiability, and perceived environment's supportiveness.

The design was cross-sectional, thus, the findings cannot be interpreted in the strict sense of causality.

The authors rely on an important yet often overlooked context of the choice between entrepreneurship and paid employment to test, clarify, and extend the regret regulation theory. The findings have novel human resource management and entrepreneurship policy implications.

The purpose of this study is to unearth antecedents of regrettable dining experiences related to the information source, action and inaction perspectives, dining companion influence and interactions among information source, the focal customer’s valence and the dining companion’s valence on regret, leading to sequential behavioral outcomes.

Using a scenario-based experimental study, 344 qualified questionnaires were collected. Univariate ANOVA and multiple linear regression analyses were implemented.

The results of this study reveal that action regret is more intense than inaction regret during the choice-making phase; dining companion negative feedback intensifies focal customer’s regret. The significance of the information source on regret disappeared when only one party reported negative feedback; conversely, when two parties in the co-consumption experience revealed negative feedback, the relationship between information source of choice and regret was sustained.

The nature of scenario-based design may lack realism. Thus, more field experiments are encouraged to test the propositions further. This research enhances our understanding of gastronomic experiences in a negative disconfirmation context, drawing upon action/inaction regret theory, attribution theory and the expectancy disconfirmation model.

From a triad relationship perspective, this study provides valuable input on who or what will be attributed to the issues when encountering a food and wine sensory failure. Additionally, insightful recommendations are supplied on avoiding the possibility of inducing the experience of regret and how practitioners can increase the potential for a memorable dining experience.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that enriched the existing knowledge of regrettable dining experiences relating to information sources and social influence.

Based on the theory of reasoned action, this study aims to illustrate how employees’ safety behavior can be enhanced in the workplace by specifically examining how anticipated regret leads to workplace safety behavior and the contextual factor of organizational ethical climate.

The authors adopted a quantitative approach and designed their survey from validated scales in prior studies. Data were obtained from two different sources, including 149 employees and 31 immediate supervisors. Hierarchical linear modeling techniques were applied to test the hypotheses.

The results showed that anticipated regret was significantly related to safety compliance and safety participation; egoistic ethical climate was negatively correlated with safety compliance and safety participation, while benevolent ethical climate was only positively correlated with safety participation. For cross-level moderating effects, both benevolent and principle ethical climate moderate the relationship between anticipated regret and safety participation, whereas all three ethical climates did not moderate the relationship between anticipated regret and safety compliance.

It contributes to current literature by identifying critical determinants of employees’ safety behavior, which would enable practitioners to manage safety in the workplace and foster a safe working environment. Specifically, fostering benevolent ethical climate can better promote employees’ perceptions of the importance of discretionary safety behavior.

This study suggests that organizational practitioners could use the salience of anticipated regret to promote the safety behavioral intentions of employees in the workplace. Further, the authors examined a multilevel framework, which elaborates individual- and organizational-level antecedents of employee safety behavior as well as the impact of cross-level interactions on employee safety behavior.

Grounded in the theory of mental budgeting, this paper aims to investigate how the regret and perfectionism of exposition attendees influences their purchasing strategy.

This research collected on-site data at a well-established specialty food exposition in China. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were applied to test the proposed model.

The findings confirm the effect of psychological mechanism (regret and perfectionism) on exposition attendees’ purchasing strategy as one that boosts/impairs their confidence in purchasing healthy food at the exposition. Specifically, regret and perfectionism show differential contributions to purchasing strategy dimensions. Variety seeking has a positive effect, whereas price consciousness has a negative effect, on purchase confidence.

Event organizers and exhibitors should understand attendees’ consumption-related psychological mechanism and devise effective management and marketing strategies for optimal consumption experiences at expositions. They can create an informative and worry-free experience that facilitates a pleasant thought process to reduce uncertainty in attendees’ on-site decision-making.

The current research pioneered a unique model conceptualizing the important, yet underexplored, phenomenon of purchasing mechanism in the exposition setting. Addressing the emerging interest in food expositions, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first for examining purchasing mechanism from the perspective of mental budgeting, providing insightful knowledge about how the psychological mechanism affects exposition attendees’ pre-purchase evaluation and confidence toward purchasing healthy food at expositions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine differences among fashion trendsetting groups in money attitudes and consumer tendency to regret (CTR).

Students completed questionnaires containing demographic items and scales measuring money attitudes (power/prestige, quality, anxiety and distrust), CTR (CTR^purchase, CTR^{not purchase}) and trendsetting. Data analysis included descriptive statistics, Cronbach’s α, M/ANOVA and SNK post hoc test.

Participants lowest in trendsetting scored lower in power/prestige than earlier adopters. Trendsetters scored higher in quality and anxiety than later adopters. Trendsetters scored higher in CTR^{not purchase} but not in CTR^purchase. Participants higher (vs lower) in CTR^purchase scored higher in power/prestige, distrust and anxiety but not in quality. Participants higher (vs lower) in CTR^{not purchase} scored higher in power/prestige, quality and anxiety but not in distrust.

Generalization of results is limited because the college student sample was not representative of the general population of consumers.

Many retailer sales tactics are designed to pressure consumers to buy and buy now – thus raising consumers’ level of anxiety. Retailers might benefit from strategies to reduce consumers’ negative emotions (e.g. anxiety, distrust) and to encourage attention to positive social or personal benefits of products.

Results extend cognitive dissonance theory and the post-purchase evaluation model by finding differences among fashion trendsetter groups in post-purchase evaluation and money attitudes. No prior research has explored CTR and money attitudes among fashion trendsetter groups.

The purpose of this paper is to present the concept of consumers' erroneous affective self‐forecasts, and discuss the implications of such forecasts for consumer purchasing behaviour and marketing planning.

First, the literature on inaction inertia – the lowering of the likelihood that a bargain will be taken once a better bargain has been missed – is reviewed. Second, the literature on affective self‐forecasting is reviewed. Finally, the implications that the authors synthesis of the behavioural evidence carries for marketing are discussed.

The inaction inertia literature implicates the regret that consumers associate with purchasing a discounted item once they have missed a much larger discount on it as a major contributing factor to consumers' unwillingness to purchase the item on the second occasion. The literature on affective self‐prediction suggests that regret (and other emotions) is systematically mispredicted.

The likely effect of erroneously anticipated regret in inaction inertia situations is depressed purchasing behaviour. The paper argues that because affective anticipations are typically erroneous, their impact on consumer decision‐making processes cannot be deemed rational. It is proposed that marketing should intervene to either increase the accuracy of such anticipations, or to lead consumers to discount them.

Price promotions can have negative side effects, such as those observed in inaction inertia circumstances. To some extent, these are driven by consumers anticipated regret (and possibly other relevant emotions). Marketing techniques can counteract the disproportionate impact of such emotions.

The paper offers a synthesis of behavioural evidence on inaction inertia and affective self‐forecasting – two quite separate literatures that have yet to be brought together in the present context. In addition, the paper outlines implications for marketing and suggests possible strategies to moderate the discussed effects.