PhD Dissertation Defense - Wenting Zhong

About this event

DISSERTATION DEFENSE ANNOUNCEMENT

FOR THE DEGREE OF PHD IN BUSINESS

PhD Candidate : Wenting Zhong

Title : Understanding Consumer Decision-Making Processes: New Insights into Price Promotions, Socioeconomic Status, and Self-Improvement Motivation

Date & Time : Friday, November 13 th , 2026, 2:30-4:30 pm EST

Location : Smith 122 or via remote connection

Remote Connection : https://bentley.zoom.us/j/96465389915

Dissertation Committee Chair : Lan Xia, Professor of Marketing, Bentley University.

Committee Members : Fei Gao, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Bentley University; Nada Nasr, Associate Professor of Marketing, Bentley University; Anne L. Roggeveen, Charles Clarke Reynolds Professor of Retailing and Marketing, Babson College.

ABSTRACT

Consumers face many marketplace opportunities to save money and pursue personal improvement. Yet their willingness to take advantage of these opportunities depends on more than the financial benefits offered. This dissertation comprises three essays that examine how promotional characteristics and consumers’ socioeconomic status (SES) shape responses to stacked discounts, quantity discounts, and free self-improvement products. Using a series of experimental studies, the essays examine how consumers interpret discounts, weigh immediate costs against future savings, and perceive their ability to pursue personal goals. Together, they contribute to research on behavioral pricing, socioeconomic status, and consumer motivation, with implications for promotional design and consumer well-being.

The first essay examines the appeal of stacked discounts. Data from a deal-sharing website and a series of experiments show that stacked discounts are generally more attractive than a single discount of the same face value. Beyond computational errors or surprise, this appeal reflects the perceived uniqueness of the discount package, which elicits smart-shopper feelings and increases purchase intentions. However, stacked discounts also create greater perceived complexity, which weakens smart-shopper feelings. The findings generally extend across variations in discount format, presentation, sources, and who compiles the package. The advantage of stacked discounts is more pronounced when the overall discount magnitude is smaller. This essay shows how discount structure can create psychological value beyond its monetary savings.

The second essay investigates how Socioeconomic Status (SES) shapes consumers’ quantity-discount decisions for necessities. These offers involve an intertemporal trade-off: consumers pay more immediately to obtain a lower unit price and potential future savings. Across five studies, lower SES consumers are generally less likely than higher SES consumers to choose quantity-discount options. Greater immediate-cost focus and lower future-savings focus help explain this difference. Larger discounts increase lower SES consumers’ attention to future savings and narrow the choice gap, even as immediate costs remain a concern. In contrast, making unit-price information more noticeable does not significantly narrow the difference, and installment payment methods do not reliably reduce immediate-cost focus or the SES difference in choice as predicted. These findings help explain why consumers who value savings may still decline offers that require a larger upfront payment.

The third essay examines the relationship between subjective SES and willingness to try free self-improvement products, focusing on hope as an explanatory mechanism. Across five studies, lower SES is associated with lower willingness to try these products. Three mediation studies, along with an integrated analysis, provide evidence consistent with a serial pathway linking lower SES to lower hope, weaker self-improvement motivation, and lower willingness to try related products. Hope encompasses consumers’ perceived capacity to initiate and sustain goal-directed action and to identify routes toward desired outcomes. These findings suggest that interest in self-improvement opportunities depends partly on whether progress feels attainable, even when products are offered for free. This essay contributes to understanding socioeconomic differences in consumer motivation and identifies hope as a relevant consideration for organizations seeking to encourage engagement with self-improvement resources.