Doing Worse But Feeling Better: Consequences of Collective Choice

Consumer decisions are often made together with other people (Davis 1976). Nonetheless, marketing scholars typically investigate consumers as independent individuals who chose alone, leaving joint decisions under-researched (Bagozzi 2012). However, choosing with others differs substantially from choosing alone. This article compares the implications on decision outcome and emotions felt when either an individual or a group of two people chose from a set with many alternatives. Group decision is not the averaging of its members (Zajonc Wolosin, and Wolosin 1972). When several people choose together, they frequently have different tastes and goals, which can lead them to disagreement. Despite this latent conflict, groups are typically still able to reach a decision agreement. This is possible because collective consumer decision is fundamentally cooperative in nature (Fisher, Grégoire, and Murray 2011), which implies that conflicting preferences are overcome through self-sacrifice and mutual concessions (Corfman and Lehaman 1987). Therefore, knowing the consequences of cooperation and self-sacrifice on the value of the alternative selected constitutes one of the contributions of the current article. Iyengar, Wells, and Schwartz (2006) demonstrated that individuals who do better in taxing decisions can actually feel worse. However, it is unclear whether these effects are also extended to collective choice. On one hand, research on individual decision-making suggests that engaging in a difficult selection can lead to the experience of negative emotions (Bettman, Luce, and Payne 1998). Given that group decision might imply contradictory preferences which can degenerate into affective conflict (Amason 1996), groups might experience even stronger negative emotions than individuals. Nevertheless, groups’ cooperative mindset and the fact that human beings have a tendency to enjoy sharing an activity with others (Baumeister and Leary 1995; Raghunathan and Corfman 2006) could elicit positive emotions in dyadic decision. Which of these drivers has a stronger influence on dyadic emotions experienced during choice is still unknown in the consumer literature and is the other goal of the current article.