Abstract

The present study was based on the assumption that consumer decision making can be seen as a search for a dominance structure and was conducted to verify the mental operation which was assumed in the dominance search model. The dominance search is assumed to involve hypothesis testing activities, i. e. the hypothetical choice of an alternative after the beginning of the decision process and subsequent tests of whether this alternative is the best. In experiment 1(using the think-aloud protocol analysis), the results revealed that a selected alternative was evaluated more positively than competitive alternatives in the beginning of the decision process and evaluated best in many trials. These results suggest strongly that only one promising alternative would be selected after the initial search process. The second results showed that the de-emphasizing and the bolstering operation were performed exclusively in the later process and in the direction that a selected alternative might be dominant than the others. In experiment 2, the results showed that the importance of dominant attributes in the selected alternative was bolstered more strongly in a post-decision than in a pre-decision, however, the importance of the dominant attributes in the competitive ones were de-emphasized much more low. Experiment 3 was conducted to test the assumption of the dominance search model, that a certain promising alternative is selected tentatively after the pre-editing stage and this alternative has high likelihood to be selected later finally. The results showed that regardless of the number of the competing dominant alternatives, the selection rate of the promising alternative was about 75% of all trials after th beginning process and of the alternative was selected finally 85% of the times even in competitive situation. Some possible limits and the future directions of the present research were discussed.