Product Retention (vs. Acquisition) Choices and Preference for Person-Related Features

People regularly make choices about products they already own, such as which of two sneakers bought through Zappos.com to retain. However, decision research has focused on situations where choice precedes ownership, or acquisition, whereas situations where choice follows ownership, or retention, remain understudied. Previous research finds that people use ownership as a source of information to categorize objects relative to the category of “self” (Weiss and Johar 2013; Weiss and Johar 2016); simply thinking of an item as owned (unowned) fosters item classification in (outside of) the self (Turk et al. 2011). Relatedly, classifying an item in a category makes it is easier to process category-applicable (vs. -inapplicable) features of the item (Barsalou 1982; Medin 1989). Building on these findings, we suggest that simply thinking about items as already (vs. not yet) owned (and thus classifying these items as “self”) would allow one’s self-concept to facilitate the processing of information about certain item features. Specifically features like “resilience” or “daringness” that commonly apply to describe people, or person related features, would become easier to process and understand. Consequently, because the information that people process more (vs. less) easily has greater impact on choice (Schwarz 2004), people may afford greater decision-weight to person-related features when people think about items as already (vs. not yet) owned, specifically when making a retention (vs. acquisition) choice. Notably, such fluency advantage in retention (vs. acquisition) choices is not predicted for features like “portability” or “smoothness,” which primarily are applied to describing products, or product-related features.