Let Me Give You a Piece of Advice: Empirical Papers about Advice Taking in Marketing

Using advice in decision making is widespread for all sorts of important personal and professional decisions. Yet, traditional research on individual decision making has failed to systematically study the impact that social interactions about a decision problem can have on the decision outcome. A separate literature stream about advice giving and taking emerged in the 1980s in order to model a decision making structure where one person is responsible for the final decision, but seeks advice from one or more other persons as input in the decision making process. To date, a breadth of research questions have been addressed in order to gradually develop a theory of advice taking. This dissertation is a bundle of three empirical papers on advice taking in marketing that each studies a specific topic within the advice taking domain. Using similar experimental methodologies, the papers bundled in this thesis all find and discuss variable utilization of advice based on the manipulation of one element in the advice situation: advisor wealth, advice justification, and emotions experienced by the decision maker. As such, each of the papers offers some interesting managerial implications and contributes to the development of a more comprehensive theory of advice taking in its own right.

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