“Feast or Famine?” The Impact of Vice Amount on the Attractiveness of Vice-Virtue Bundles”
by Mustafa Karataş
Koç University
Abstract
Vice-virtue bundles are becoming increasingly popular in the marketplace. This research investigates how an important aspect of vice-virtue bundles—the magnitude of the vice component—influences consumers’ evaluation of such bundles. Building on research on psychological licensing, the current research proposes that the comparability among payoffs associated with bundle components moderates the impact of vice magnitude on consumers’ evaluation of vice-virtue bundles. Results from four experiments show that, when payoffs are highly comparable, increasing the vice magnitude results in less positive evaluations of the bundle. In contrast, consumers evaluate a vice-virtue bundle with a larger vice more positively when payoffs of bundle components are less comparable. This effect is explained by distinct licensing mechanisms that come into play under high and low payoff comparability. More specifically, consumers license the vice component via psychological credits under high payoff comparability, and via psychological credentials under low comparability. This research significantly advances streams of research on vice-virtue bundles and psychological licensing, and offers substantive implications.
Biography
Mustafa Karataş is a Marketing Ph.D. student at the Koç University Graduate School of Business, Istanbul, Turkey. His research interests include consumers’ evaluation of product bundles, individual and social well-being, and the impact of foreign versus native language processing on consumer behavior. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Management from Bilkent University and INSEAD.
