Cognitive models of decision strategies in consumer preference

Many decision strategies have been proposed to explain how consumers choose competing options. However, discriminating between possible strategies is complicated as many predict the same choices. This thesis begins with a survey of a wide selection of consumer choice strategies, each reviewed with a particular focus on its underlying assumptions. The initial aim of this thesis is to develop new methods of discriminating between decision strategies. Chapters 2 and 3 leverage different tools from the decision-making and perception literature to help with this goal. Firstly, Chapter 2 uses classifications of the decision strategies based on their assumptions about their compensatory and non-compensatory nature as well as the selective or exhaustive information processing they assume. These categories are then equated to the processing architectures that Systems Factorial Technology are designed to discriminate between. In this way, the architecture diagnosed by SFT can be used to infer the class of decision strategy that formed the basis of an individual's choices. Chapter 3 reframes the same type of decision strategies and assumptions using methods from the decision-making literature, particularly evidence accumulation models. The Bayesian estimation of these parametric models allows us to expand the inferences to more choices while maintaining the discriminatory power between classes of decision strategies. An added advantage of the hierarchical estimation approach is that it allows more intuitive inference at the group and individual levels. Chapter 4, however, reframes the investigation of consumer choice away from discriminating between decision strategies and towards a more holistic understanding of how people represent and process attribute information when making consumer choices. This new representation is formed by drawing on the literature of categorisation and similarity judgements to create a new cognitive model of consumer choice options representation. By placing each option within a multidimensional psychological space and proposing decision rules that operate over this space, I bring a new principled approach to the study of consumer choice. I finish by drawing attention to this new model's possible future directions and tests.