Abstract
Marketing and consumer researchers have demonstrated that the choice context has a significant bearing on purchase decisions. Research in the area shows that the choice set composition and the choice framing influence consumers’ decisions strongly, which is not in line with the stable preferences concept. Over the last decades, researchers have identified a plethora of so-called context effects, such as the attraction and the compromise effect. While present literature reviews offer important insights into the mechanisms underlying prominent context effects, they do not reveal the structure of scholarly networks that researchers’ co-authored works form, nor do they reveal an overarching structure of research topics. In addition, existing literature reviews focus primarily on seminal effects, such as the attraction effect and compromise effect, neglecting less prominent context effects, such as the zero comparison effect or the common attribute effect. To address these issues, we present the results of a large-scale bibliometric analysis of 334 articles in context effect research, which unveils the fields’ structure and identifies research themes. A co-authorship analysis identifies four large network components covering author groups that focus on, for example, compromise and similarity effects in general and their relevance for marketing (e.g., Ravi Dhar, Itamar Simonson, and Amos Tversky) and aspects related to choice modeling (e.g., Jonathan Pettibone, Jörg Rieskamp, and Jennifer Trueblood). In addition, the pioneering authors of attraction effect research, Joel Huber, John Payne, and Christopher Puto, form their own, smaller component. Furthermore, these components relate to topics that drive the research field. Specifically, drawing on keyword co-occurrences and topic modeling we identify several topics related to three different schools of thought: (1) psychological research on the foundations of context effects, their initial description, and background processes; (2) behavioral and experimental economics that relates to choice modeling and the processes behind the context effect-induced preference shifts and violations of the rational choice axioms; and (3) consumer and marketing research on context effects in applied contexts and moderators that explain actual product choice. Our results suggest that researchers from different components and schools of thought should join forces and expertise. Doing so would allow for addressing the overarching research questions to consider, for example, important moderators and the field’s latest methodological discussions (e.g., implementing experimental designs that enhance the external validity).
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Keywords
- Bibliometric analysis
- Context effect
- Attraction effect
- Compromise effect
- Similarity effect
- Asymmetric dominance effect
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Adler, S.J., Schöniger, M.K., Lichters, M., Sarstedt, M. (2023). A Bibliometric Analysis of Context Effects and a Research Agenda: An Abstract. In: Jochims, B., Allen, J. (eds) Optimistic Marketing in Challenging Times: Serving Ever-Shifting Customer Needs. AMSAC 2022. Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24687-6_143
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24687-6_143
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