Antecedents of Representative Bias and Choice Decision: A Case of Major Cities of Pakistan

The main theme behind this study was to identify the factors that generate the representative bias phenomenon among individuals as because of this phenomenon people usually make irrational buying decisions. Representative bias, sometimes referred to as the representativeness heuristic, is when we base our conclusions or judgments on how individuals or circumstances conform to a specific prototype or stereotype. Representative bias causes individual to categorize a situation on the basis of a pattern of earlier practices or opinions regarding the situation. It can be valuable when trying to make a rapid decision but it can also be restraining as it leads to close-mindedness for instance in stereotypes. For this study, semi-structured discussions with the professional people of major cities of Pakistan who are habitual in terms of shopping, and then reconfirm the answers by matching with existing literature and apply NVivo on their brief results to get a word-cloud for presuming the sure antecedents of representative bias, and check the context and content validity of the established scale by approving the scale subsequently the authorization of 5 language and 5 market experts. A self-developed semi-structured scale was used for data collection. The main population for this study was the professional people of major cities of Punjab who are habitual in terms of shopping. The conclusion of the study demonstrates that “choice of alternatives, environmental fluctuations, & own perception” are the variables that strongly generates the representative bias phenomenon in any individual.