Marketing And Internet

18 Pages 4382 Words

e rise to new research issues, i.e., are CMEs generating new theories, or are they simply a different (albeit exciting) new laboratory for testing existing theories.

1. Decision Processes
While CME environments permit users to perform many tasks such as accessing product-related information, many of the environments permit customers to search for and evaluate alternative products and brands by their attributes. Thus, the CME environment is a sophisticated version of the old information board or computer-based Mouselab (Johnson, Schkade, and Bettman 1988) experimental environments used to test decision processes and strategies in the 1970s and 1980s. The main differences between Mouselab and CMEs are that with CMEs, there are more attributes, there is more information available through hypertext links, the purchasing situation is real rather than artificial, and there may be interactions between sellers and customers or customers and customers.
One area of research in consumer behavior that can be tested using CMEs is how sorting capabil...