Marketing Research Seminar
Participate
Guest speaker: Gabriele Paolacci, Associate Professor or Marketing at Rotterdam School of Management
Talk at 11:00 am in Room T004 (T Building)
The advantage of disadvantage in consumer distributional preferences
All else being equal, a resource is more valuable when people have less of such resource. For this reason, consequentialist ethics and common sense both prescribe that people in lower socioeconomic status are more deserving targets of help, and may be granted better conditions in the marketplace.
However, disadvantage does not necessarily imply greater gains from a given resource. Across two related projects, I show that people’s decisions of how to allocate finite resources tend to favor the disadvantaged more than what disadvantage entails from a consequentialist viewpoint.
When allocating life saving resources, many people choose to help the more disadvantaged even when this transparently entails saving fewer lives than they could.
When evaluating market transactions, people find the practice of value pricing (i e setting prices at customers’ willingness to pay) less acceptable if customers are disadvantaged.
These phenomena jointly illustrate that inequality aversion can affect consumers preferences even when background distributions are not consequentially relevant.