Awareness of Choice Architectures in Marketing: Introducing Temporal Separation - Fenqi Guo
This interdisciplinary project aims to examine how consumers’ awareness changes the effectiveness of marketing tools. In a previous study, we found that background awareness exerts a negative effect on the effectiveness of anchoring defaults. This study is designed to examine whether this effect persists one week after the generation of awareness.
This mixed-method project employs online survey experiments with hypothetical choices. We use both quantitative methods from economics and qualitative methods from marketing and psychology to study consumers’ decision-making. We deployed the experiment in July, recruiting 2600 UK participants from Prolific, and analyzed the data in August.
Based on the results we obtained, several new research questions emerged, for example:
1. Is it really the awareness that made participants pay less? Or attention / deliberation, which could be generated by the placebo text and illustration as well? This may lead to project proposals that connect consumer behaviour with Judgment and Decision-Making research.
2. Is it possible that the awareness manipulation drew participants’ attention to one CA but led them to neglect another? This may lead to project proposals that connect consumer protection with public policy.
This project forms the second chapter of my PhD thesis. A working paper including this and two previous experiments will be drafted in the Autumn. Potential outlets include e.g. Journal of Consumer Psychology (ABS4*). In addition, this project has been orally presented at Subjective Probability, Utility, and Decision Making (Sep 2025), accepted as poster presentation at Society for Judgment and Decision Making (Nov 2025), and submitted to American Marketing Association (Feb 2026), Society for Consumer Psychology (Mar 2026).
This project funded by the Small Grant Scheme forms one chapter of my PhD thesis. It is designed to examine whether the effect of background awareness persists one week after the generation of awareness, using a mixed-method design with 2600 UK participants from Prolific. This project has been orally presented at Subjective Probability, Utility, and Decision Making (Sep 2025) and accepted as poster presentation at Society for Judgment and Decision Making (Nov 2025).
Short abstract:
In this pre-registered study, we investigate whether the significant main effect of awareness for the anchor persists by introducing a temporal separation of awareness generation and purchase decision-making, with a 2 (Anchor VS No Anchor) x 2 (Aware VS Unaware) x 2 (Immediate VS Separate) design.
We partially replicated the results in the Immediate condition, where a significant smaller proportion of participants stick to the default price, suggesting an effect of awareness. In the Separate condition, any effects of awareness completely faded out after one week, which is in line with our prediction.
Our study suggests that marketers do not need to worry about such background awareness in their practice. However, government and consumer advocate associations may need to think of better ways to inform, educate, and protect consumers.