Inferential Beliefs in Consumer Evaluations: An Assessment of Alternative Processing Strategies

The purpose of this research is to investigate the processing strategies consumers use to form inferences about missing product information. We evaluate the relative effect of attribute information about a partially described brand and about other fully described brands, the effect of attribute intercorrelations, and the effect of prompting inferences. We find that attribute information about a partially described brand has a greater influence than that about fully described competitive brands, that highly correlated attributes more consistently influence inferences, and that prompting inferences produces substantially different results than less intrusive measures. M odels of consumers evaluative processes often assume that available information completely describes each alternative. However, product infor-mation is often incomplete, and consumers judgments may therefore be based on inferences about missing in-formation. Inferences, or the construction of meaning that goes beyond what is explicitly given (Harris 1981), are pervasive in social cognition (Fishbein and Ajzen 1975; Fiske and Taylor 1984; Wyer and Carlston 1979), suggesting that they may occur frequently in response to incomplete product information. However, infer-ential processes are of recent interest to consumer re-searchers, and the processing strategies underlying in-ferences are as yet poorly understood. This study, therefore, was designed to clarify how consumers use available information to form inferences about missing product attributes. INFERENCES AND CONSUMER INFORMATION PROCESSING Although relatively few studies of consumers infer-ential processes have been completed, two general con-