Consumer Choice as Decision: Meso-Cognitive Psychology

Abstract

This chapter continues to seek to link the micro- and macro-depictions of decision making by means of a meso-cognitive psychology (MeCP) that demonstrates the capacity of individual consumers to choose and even create the contingencies to which their behavior will be subject. It does this by tracing the ways in which reinforcement histories support short- and long-range interests which interact in order to dominate the behavioral strategy of the consumer. Picoeconomic analysis provides a means of not only linking MiCP and MaCP but of suggesting the form that the necessary account of intra-personal, inter-agent communication, and cooperation takes. The picoeconomic strategy of bundling may enable the consumer who habitually selects a sooner-appearing but inferior reward so as to arrange the contingencies that he or she is more likely to forgo this and to wait patiently for a later-appearing but superior reward. It is appropriate to derive the decision perspective of the BPM when these considerations have been discussed and this is the subject of the concluding part of the chapter.