Research
Publications, Manuscripts in the Review Process, and Working Papers
My work exploring consumer evaluations
Mehr, Katie S., and Joseph P. Simmons (2024), “How Does Rating Specific Features of an Experience Alter Consumers’ Overall Evaluation of That Experience?” Journal of Consumer Research, 51(4), 739-760. (Click here for a copy of the paper)
Abstract: How does the way companies elicit ratings from consumers affect the ratings that they receive? In 10 pre- registered experiments, we find that consumers rate subpar experiences more positively overall when they are also asked to rate specific aspects of those experiences (e.g., a restaurant’s food, service, and ambiance). Studies 1-4 established the basic effect across different scenarios and experiences. Study 5 found that the effect is limited to being asked to rate specific features of an experience, rather than providing open-ended comments about those features. Studies 6-9 provided evidence that the effect does not emerge because rating positive aspects of a subpar experience reminds consumers that their experiences had some good features. Rather, it emerges because consumers want to avoid incorporating negative information into both the overall and the attribute ratings. Lastly, study 10 found that asking consumers to rate attributes of a subpar experience reduces the predictive validity of their overall rating. We discuss implications of this work and reconcile it with conflicting findings in the literature.
Mehr, Katie S. and Matt Meister, “The Dispersion Between Forecasts Changes Consumers' Reliance on Them,” under review.
Abstract: Consumers often seek out predictions from multiple sources; for instance, they might consult a financial advisor, family, friends, and more before investing their money. But how consumers integrate these predictions is uncertain. At one extreme, consumers could rely solely on the advisors’ predictions, and combine them via methods like averaging. At the other extreme, they could ignore the advisors altogether and instead rely on their priors. This paper shows that as the absolute difference between two estimates increases, consumers move from relying more on advisors’ predictions to relying more on their priors. When advisor estimates are similar, consumers rely on the estimates and largely average them to arrive at an evaluation. But as the dispersion between advisor estimates increases, consumers rely less on the advisors and more on their own priors. This pattern occurs for both hypothetical and incentivized choices, and across a wide array of domains (e.g., sports, stocks, etc.), prediction formats (e.g., percentage, price, etc.), and dependent measures (e.g., estimated likelihood, judgment of success, etc.). Results also show how firms can emphasize averaging advice to reduce reliance on priors when dispersion is high. Taken together, these results highlight how dispersion affects the information consumers use when facing advice.
Mehr, Katie S. and Matt Meister, “People Prefer Peer Advice for Evaluations from Experience and Expert Advice for Evaluations from Information,” under review.
Abstract: People are often exposed to advice from both “peers”—everyday people similar to themselves—and “experts”—specialists who are perceived to have domain-specific knowledge and provide their opinions professionally. This manuscript explores whether (i) people rely on both groups equally, (ii) if they consistently favor one over the other, or (iii) if people rely on peers in certain contexts and experts in others. Across four preregistered studies, we find evidence for the third possibility. Specifically, people rely more on peers for evaluations from experience (e.g., typically product or company ratings based on someone’s experience) and experts for evaluations from information (e.g., typically predictions of future events, like a firm’s yearly revenue). This is because people think peers have experiences that are more similar to the ones they will have, while experts are better at synthesizing information. Notably, this distinction is not simply about the domain being advised, but is specific to the advice generating process—in a given domain, people’s reliance on peers and experts can be manipulated by changing their understanding of how advice was generated. This pattern of results is generalizable to many domains (e.g., job choice, product ratings). Further, our results build on previous work highlighting from whom people seek advice, and provide practitioners with insight into when people may be more or less likely to rely on their advice.
Park, Alexander B.*, Katie S. Mehr*, and Amirreza Faghihinia, “Who Shares Matters: How Review Source and Quality Change Product Evaluations,” working paper.
Abstract: Consumers often rely on reviews for product information. Such information can come from different individuals, each describing a single experience (e.g., two people who each visited a restaurant once), or from the same individual describing multiple experiences (e.g., someone who visited a restaurant twice). This research (N = 6,985) examines how the source of such reviews–same or different individuals–interacts with the quality change described in the reviews to affect product evaluation. First, we document the same source penalty: when reviews from the same source indicate declining quality (e.g., an excellent experience followed by a mediocre one), consumers evaluate the product less favorably than when identical reviews come from different individuals. Second, this penalty is moderated 1) when the review source is seen as having fickle judgments, and 2) when reviews indicate improving quality (e.g., a mediocre visit followed by an excellent one). Lastly, when the same source provides only low-quality experiences (e.g., a bad visit followed by a terrible one), consumers evaluate the product more favorably than when the identical reviews come from different sources. Across all findings, we show that perceived diagnosticity of reviews explains why review source and quality change interact to shape product evaluations.
My work exploring motivation and prosocial behavior
Mehr, Katie S., Jackie Silverman, Marissa A. Sharif, Alixandra Barasch, and Katherine L. Milkman (2025),
“The Motivating Power of Streaks: Increasing Persistence Is As Easy As 1, 2, 3,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 187, 1-13. (Click here for a copy of this paper)
Abstract: Organizations often use financial incentives to boost employees’ commitment to work-relevant goals in an effort to increase persistence and goal achievement (e.g., to improve organizational efficiency or sales). We introduce and test a novel incentive scheme designed to enhance persistence by increasing commitment to the goal of maximizing earnings. Specifically, we test “streak incentives,” or rewards that offer people increasing payouts for completing multiple consecutive work tasks. Across six pre-registered studies (total N = 4,493), we show that, contrary to standard economic models suggesting people will complete more piece-rate work for larger rewards, people actually complete more work when compensated with streak incentives than with larger, stable incentives. We theorize that this occurs because, by encouraging consecutive task completion, streak incentives increase commitment to a goal of maximizing earnings, which in turn increases persistence. We also show that this effect is not driven by providing increasing rewards; rather, people’s goal commitment and motivation are boosted by the requirement that they complete work tasks consecutively to earn escalating payments. Taken together, our results suggest that designing incentives to encourage streaks of work is a low-cost way to increase goal commitment and therefore persistence in organizations and other contexts.
Mehr, Katie S., Amanda E. Geiser, Katherine L. Milkman, and Angela L. Duckworth (2020), “Copy
Paste Prompts: A New Nudge to Promote Goal Achievement,” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 5(3), 329-334. (Click here for a copy of this paper)
Abstract: Consumers often struggle to achieve self-set, life-improving goals. We introduce a novel, psychologically wise nudge - the copy-paste prompt - that encourages consumers to seek out and mimic a goal-achievement strategy used by an acquaintance. In a large (N = 1,028) preregistered, longitudinal study, participants randomly assigned to receive a copy-paste prompt spent more time exercising the following week than participants assigned to either a quasi-yoked or simple control condition. The benefits of copy-paste prompts are mediated by the usefulness of the adopted exercise strategy, commitment to using it, effort put into finding it, and the frequency of social interaction with people who exercise regularly. These findings suggest that further research on the potential of this virtually costless nudge is warranted.