How relationship norms affect the amount & prediction accuracy of a gift under positive and negative option framing.

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to understand the choices of communal and exchange relations faced with two different customization processes. Communal cares about their friend’s needs and benefits; whereas Exchange relations regards everything their do as fair and has no incentive to understand each other’s mental state or preference. This study want to know what is the difference of these two types of people dealing with the positive and negative option framing (+ OF,-OF). Customized products tend to have different options, when customers select options, the price will rise and so will the product utility will increase; when the customers to reject options, the price will fall but product utility will decline. Communal relation clients has the motivation to get to know each other's preferences and needs, are also concerned about their friend’s “fuzhi”, will carefully elaborate the options, making them less susceptible to the impact of the option framing and the decrease the magnitude of base and full effect. Also, when selecting customers seek reasons for purchase; when rejecting, customers will find reasons to reject. Projection most likely would occur with communal relations dealing with reasons to buy, effected most by their own preferences influence and their knowledge of their friend’s preference. Under this condition creates a bias and decreases their prediction accuracy. With negative framing, however, gift givers have their eyes on negative (non-preference), should therefore not cast their preferences, thus delivering a relatively correct guess. Results show that the type of relationship and option framing does not have effect on purchase amount. But with prediction accuracy, exchange relations had better guesses than communal relations when using the positive framing; negative framing had opposite results.