Itamar Simonson
| Itamar Simonson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
25 December 1951 Israel |
| Residence | U.S. |
| Nationality | US & Israel |
| Academic background | |
| Doctoral advisor | James Bettman |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | Stanford Graduate School of Business |
Itamar Simonson is a professor of marketing, holding the Sebastian S. Kresge Chair of Marketing in the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He is known for his work on the factors that determine the choices that buyers make. His academic career started at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught for six years, before he moved to Stanford. Many of his former PhD students (such as Ravi Dhar, Ziv Carmon, Stephen Nowlis, Aimee Drolet, and Ran Kivetz to name a few) hold senior positions at some of the best universities in the world.
He received his B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the Hebrew University in 1976, his MBA from the UCLA School of Management in 1978 and his PhD in Marketing from Duke University in 1987.
Simonson has studied both preferences that are created "on the fly" when people make choices and predetermined preference elements that reflect people's habits, predispositions, and genes. He began studying consumer choice in 1987. Simonson's doctoral dissertation introduced the notion that consumers select the options that are supported by the best reasons or justifications, rather than the options that maximize utility. He demonstrated the "compromise effect", whereby consumers often select the middle or, alternatively, an "extreme" option in a set regardless of its real values. Consumers often rely on a comparison with the options they encounter, and "compromise" because it is the easiest to justify and least likely to be criticized. He also showed how consumers use irrelevant product features to determine an option's attractiveness. For example, offering consumers a product "bonus" (e.g., getting the option to pay for a collector's plate when buying a product) that many regard as unneeded leads consumers to reject that brand and prefer a competing option.
Simonson also demonstrated that the mere fact that consumers buy multiple products at the same time (e.g., several cartons of yogurt for several days) causes them to choose more variety than they would have selected had they bought just one product each time.
Anticipating the possibility of regret tends to lead consumers to buy a product that is on "sale" now instead of waiting for a better "sale" later, and to choose a well-known, expensive brand over a lesser-known, less expensive brand. When making risky choices, anticipating regret leads to the opposite effect than anticipating responsibility or blame.
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