Utilizing Attribution Bias to Stimulate Consumer Preferences for Healthy Food: A Neuroeconomic Study

Résumé fourni par la source

Consumers routinely make choices under fluctuating internal states such as thirst, hunger, or fatigue, yet often treat the resulting consumption experiences as informative about the intrinsic quality of goods. Attribution bias arises when enjoyment generated under a heightened internal state is misattributed to product attributes rather than to the state itself, causing preferences to persist even after the state dissipates. This paper studies attribution bias in a policy-relevant applied context: healthy food choice. We test whether a positive consumption experience generated under thirst leads to higher subsequent enjoyment and willingness to pay (WTP) for the same product after the state has dissipated. We attribute any such persistence to partial misattribution of the initial enjoyment due to thirst to product quality. The study employs a two-day lab experiment with 120 participants who are required to abstain from drinking for at least 5 hours prior to participation. On Day 1, participants are randomly assigned to a thirst treatment or a control group that receives water to offset their thirst, after which all participants consume Poppi drink, a prebiotic soda marketed as a healthier alternative to conventional soft drinks. On Day 2, participants return under thirst-neutral conditions to report enjoyment, complete an incentivecompatible Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) task eliciting WTP, and undergo a cue exposure task during which electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking capture neural reactivity and pupil dilation. By holding Day 2 internal states constant, the design isolates persistent valuation effects from rational state-dependent utility, providing convergent behavioral, economic, and neurophysiological evidence on attribution bias in healthy beverage choice.

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