Journal of Marketing Science ›› 2015, Vol. 11 ›› Issue (2): 99-117.

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Discounts or gifts? Not just to save money A study on neural mechanism from the perspective of fuzzy decision

Gong Yanping, Hou Wei, Tian Shuang   

  1. Business School of Central South University.
  • Online:2015-06-01 Published:2015-08-28

Abstract:

According to Decision Theory, the ambiguity of decision-making information will affect the choice of decision makers that means "ambiguity aversion" will occur when making fuzzy decision. In this study, we use the event-related potential (ERP) method to explore the neural mechanism of how ambiguity of promotion information of different means influences consumers’ purchase decision. The results prove that the information fuzziness of the means of online sales promotion do affect purchase intention which can be concluded from the amplitude of brain wave peaks exists significant differences when consumers are confronted with various means of promotion. There are significant differences in consumers’ brainwave P2, N2, P3 amplitude peaks when they face discount promotions and gift promotions, that reflects the differences of online promotion information’ s ambiguity lead to the diversity of consumers’ risk perception, decision-making attitude and decision-making confidence. Compared with discount promotion, gift promotion will make consumers perceive higher risk, higher decision difficulty and lower confidence. This finding can offer explanation on a neurological level for why consumers prefer discount promotion.

Key words: means of promotion, fuzzy decision, event-related potential (ERP), neural mechanism