Explaining consumer choice

With this book we have arrived at an intriguing point in the development of a theory of consumer choice in the context of marketing. Consumer behavior is usually explained by reference to the intentions of the buyer: "She wants to buy this, or had a positive attitude toward it" "He needs that and intends to obtain one," and so on. But this kind of explanation is controversial throughout the social sciences, and it is essential that researchers acquire a reasoned framework of analysis within which intentionality can be convincingly ascribed to observed behavior in order to explain it. In addressing this issue in the context of consumer choice in marketing-driven economies, this book makes a substantial contribution to marketing theory. A means is proposed for the ascription of intentionalistic content in the explanation of behavior which is based on sound scientific reasoning: that of evolutionarily consistent neurological processes at the sub-personal level and that of consistent environment-behavior relationships at the super-personal level. The deficiencies of a purely descriptivist approach to consumer choice and of an extensional behavioral science of consumer choice have been exposed at the level of explanation (though they remain valid, indeed essential, approaches to the prediction and influence of consumer choice, suggest lines of explanation, and act as standpoints from which the prevailing cognitive orthodoxy can be uniquely critiqued). The result is a solid intellectual basis for the economic psychology of consumer choice and by extension marketing science. Written by an internationally acknowledged expert in the field in appropriate, accessible language, this book extends marketing thought, something that is highly necessary in a field dominated by the quest for practical results and the generation of empirical results that are unrelated to any overall framework of conceptualization and analysis

List of figures, tables and exhibits -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- PART I. FOUNDATIONS. Consumer behavior analysis -- What is intentionality? -- Intentionality and mind. -- PART II. KINDS OF CONTEXTUAL PSYCHOLOGY. Intentional psychologies -- Contextual psychology (1): intentional behavior -- Contextual psychology (2): super-personal cognitive psychology. -- PART III. BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS. Hernstein : matching and melioration -- Rachlin : teleological behaviorism -- Ainslie : picoeconomics. -- PART IV. EXPLAINING CONSUMER CHOICE. Everyday consumer choice -- Consumer initiation and imitation -- What kind of explanation? -- References -- Index.