Book Review: An Information Processing Theory of Consumer Choice

Each of us has our own criteria for what a good book, or in this case, a good consumer behavior theory book, should achieve. Mine are less ambitious than the 15 criteria proposed by Zaltman, Pinson, and Angelmar (1973), but at the very least the book should succeed when measured against most or all of the following standards: (1) parsimonious yet comprehensive in structure and functional relationship specification, (2) accurate and well founded on prior research, (3) empirically testable, (4) strong heuristic value in generating new research, (5) precise and elegant in construction and exposition, (6) does more than simply invent new words/constructs to describe what is already known (i.e., strikes new ground), and (7) has potential application to marketing management or public policy issues. Bettman has succeeded admirably on some of these criteria, but has done less well on others. Before specifically evaluating his work on these standards, some comment about what the book is and how it relates to other consumer behavior theories is in order. Most consumer researchers are undoubtedly familiar with Bettman's pioneering research which applied information processing theory, mostly parented by Newell and Simon (1958, 1972), Miller, Galanter, and Pribham (1960) and Simon (1967), to consumer decision making. The appearance of Bettman's "decision nets" and verbal protocols in articles published in the Journal of Marketing Research (Bettman 1970, 197lb) proposed a dramatically new method of conceptualizing and measuring the way in which consumers acquired and processed information. This perspective has been continued over the decade by his many students and colleagues. As Hughes (1974) noted, the major strength of Bettman's perspective is the extreme richness of detail and general depth provided in describing the way individual consumers develop and implement decision rules in attaining goals and in that process, acquire and evaluate information. But the weakness is the difficulty in generalizing results of such studies across individuals and situations. Further, the methodology employed to generate data on what goals, plans (sets of subgoals), and decision heuristics are being employed leads