Consumer choice of differentiated products, such as wine, depends on the composition of the choice set consumers are choosing from. However, choice sets are often situationally defined through wine-tasting lists or displayed wines in a particular tasting and sales environment. In this paper, we use an experiment to explicitly modify the saliency of wine options available outside the tasting room choice set and the amount of sensory information available about the wines before wine tasting. We explicitly test whether consumer regret and fear of missing out on alternative options or consumer search costs are more likely to drive behavior around large choice sets. We find that increasing the saliency of outside options decreases one's propensity to taste the wines available for tasting and purchase immediately, while changing search costs through sensory descriptions does not affect tasting behavior. This provides support for the anticipated regret and fear of missing out motivations for behavior around large wine-tasting lists.

Individuals are generally reluctant to trade goods—a phenomenon identified as the endowment effect. This paper focuses on consumers’ puzzling reluctance to exchange gambles, and in particular lottery tickets with identical distribution (i.e., same odds of winning), and identifies the ticket’s vividness as an important moderator. Three studies demonstrate that individuals are more willing to exchange less vivid lottery tickets (e.g., tickets concealed in envelopes, or tickets with an unknown number) compared to more vivid tickets (e.g., tickets not concealed in envelopes, or tickets with a known number) when offered an incentive to exchange. Moreover, this effect is mediated by anticipated regret, such that less regret is anticipated when exchanging less vivid tickets, thus increasing individuals’ willingness to exchange tickets.

Despite their efforts to choose the best of all available solutions, maximizers seem to be more inclined than satisficers to regret their choices and to experience post-decisional dissonance. Maximizers may therefore be expected to change their decisions more frequently and hence exhibit lower customer loyalty to providers of products and services compared to satisficers. Findings from the study reported here (N = 1978) support this prediction. Maximizers reported significantly higher intentions to switch to another service provider (television provider) than satisficers. Maximizers’ intentions to switch appear to be intensified and mediated by higher proneness to regret, increased desire to discuss relevant choices with others, higher levels of perceived knowledge of alternatives, and higher ego involvement in the end product, compared to satisficers. Opportunities for future research are suggested.

People overestimate their affective reactions to future events and decisions — a phenomenon that has been termed “impact bias.” Evidence suggests that completing a diary detailing events contemporaneous with the focal one de-biases judgments of affect. It is generally assumed that this is because diary completion helps people to realize that they will be distracted from the focal event. However, there is another possibility: de-biasing may occur because diary completion interferes with the processing responsible for the bias. In a first experiment, we showed that diary completion also lowers affect associated with past decisions. In a second experiment, we showed that solving anagrams has the same effect. A third experiment demonstrates that this is not because affect judgments are influenced by mood changes brought about by solving anagrams. Indeed, monitoring moods lowered affect in the same way as diary completion. It appears that cognitive tasks of any sort interfere with the processing required by judgments of affect.

The present article investigates the effectiveness of methods traditionally used to distinguish between the emotions of regret and disappointment and presents a new method — the Regret and Disappointment Scale (RDS) — for assessing the two emotions in decision making research. The validity of the RDS was tested in three studies. Study 1 used two scenarios, one prototypical of regret and the other of disappointment, to test and compare traditional methods (“How much regret do you feel” and “How much disappointment do you feel”) with the RDS. Results showed that only the RDS clearly differentiated between the constructs of regret and disappointment. Study 2 confirmed the validity of the RDS in a real-life scenario, in which both feelings of regret and disappointment could be experienced. Study 2 also demonstrated that the RDS can discriminate between regret and disappointment with results similar to those obtained by using a context-specific scale. Study 3 showed the advantages of the RDS over the traditional methods in gambling situations commonly used in decision making research, and provided evidence for the convergent validity of the RDS.

Previous research has demonstrated that consistency between people’s behavior and their dispositions has predictive validity for judgments of regret. Research has also shown that differences in the personality variable of action orientation can influence ability to regulate negative affect. The present set of studies was designed to investigate how both consistency factors and action-state personality orientation influence judgments of regret. In Study 1, we used a recalled life event to provide a situation in which the person had experienced either an action or inaction. Individuals with an action orientation experienced more regret for situations involving inaction (staying home) than situations involving action (going out). State-oriented individuals, however, maintained high levels of regret and did not differ in their regret ratings across either the action or inaction situations. In Study 2, participants made realistic choices involving either an action or inaction. Our findings revealed the same pattern of results: action-oriented individuals who chose an option that involved not acting (inaction) had more regret that individuals who chose an option that involved acting (action). State-oriented individuals experienced high levels of regret regardless of whether they chose to act or not to act.

In the current paper we investigate how feedback over decision outcomes may affect future decisions. In an experimental study we demonstrate that if people receive feedback over the outcomes they obtained (“factual outcomes”) and the outcomes they would have obtained had they decided differently (“counterfactual outcomes”), they become regret-averse in subsequent decisions. This effect is not only observed when this feedback evoked regret (with counterfactual outcomes being higher than factual outcomes), but even when the feedback evoked no regret (with factual outcomes being equal to counterfactual outcomes). The findings suggest that this effect on subsequent decisions is at least partly due to the transfer of a comparison mind-set triggered in the prior choice.

People tend to overestimate emotional responses to future events. This study examined whether such affective forecasting errors occur for feelings of regret, as measured by self-report and subsequent decision-making. Some participants played a pricing game and lost by a narrow or wide margin, while others were asked to imagine losing by such margins. Participants who experienced a narrow loss reported more regret than those who imagined a narrow loss. Furthermore, those experiencing a narrow loss behaved more cautiously in a subsequent gambling task. Thus, the study provides self-report and behavioral evidence for a reversal of the affective forecasting phenomenon for feelings of regret.

Regret is one of the most common emotions, but researchers generally measure it in an ad-hoc, unvalidated fashion. Three studies outline the construction and validation of the Regret Elements Scale (RES), which distinguishes between an affective component of regret, associated with maladaptive affective outcomes, and a cognitive component of regret, associated with functional preparatory outcomes. The present research demonstrates the RES’s relationship with distress (Study 1), appraisals of emotions (Study 2), and existing measures of regret (Study 3). We further demonstrate the RES’s ability to differentiate regret from other negative emotions (Study 2) and related traits (Study 3). The scale provides both a new theoretical perspective on regret, and a tool for researchers interested in measuring post-decisional regret.

“Waste not want not” expresses our culture’s aversion to waste. “I could have gotten the same thing for less” is a sentiment that can diminish pleasure in a transaction. We study people’s willingness to “pay” to avoid this spoiler. In one scenario, participants imagined they were looking for a rental apartment, and had bought a subscription to an apartment listing. If a cheaper subscription had been declined, respondents preferred not to discover post hoc that it would have sufficed. Specifically, they preferred ending their quest for the ideal apartment after seeing more, rather than fewer, apartments, so that the length of the search exceeds that available within the cheaper subscription. Other scenarios produced similar results. We conclude that people may sometimes prefer to be wasteful in order to avoid feeling wasteful.

Investors, like any decision maker, feel regret when they compare the outcome of an investment with what the outcome would have been had they invested differently. We argue and show that this counterfactual comparison process is most likely to take place when the decision maker’s expectations are violated. Across five scenario experiments we found that decision makers were influenced only by forgone investment outcomes when the realized investment fell short of the expected result. However, when their investments exceeded prior expectations, the effect of foregone investment on regret disappeared. In addition, Experiment 4 found that individual differences in the need to maximize further moderated the effects of their expectations, such that maximizers always take into account the forgone investment. The final experiment found that when probed to make counterfactual comparisons, also investments that exceed expectations may lead to regret. Together these experiments reveal insights into the comparative processes leading to decision regret.

Commercial practices such as drip pricing, reference pricing and best-price guarantee can be used to set higher prices and mislead consumers, but protective measures can restore efficiency. In a placebo-controlled market experiment, we examined a treatment allowing for the use and misuse of commercial practices. Three additional treatments tested the effects of formal sanctions, informal sanctions and a regret nudge. We found that commercial practices led to higher prices, cheating was systematic and regret nudging was ineffective. Furthermore, formal and informal sanctions reduced both the likelihood of using commercial practices and the likelihood of cheating, leading to welfare increases.

Research on complementizer selection has shown that the presence of a negative particle in a subordinate complement clause influences complement choice, leading to a relatively higher proportion of finite complementation patterns by increasing the complexity of the syntactic environment. Studies have also shown that different types of negation, namely not- and no-negation, increase the tendency towards more explicit complementation options (Rohdenburg 2015). The current study focuses on the effect of not- and no-negation on the complementation profile of the verb regret, which allows variation between finite that/zero-complement clauses and nonfinite (S) -ing clauses. The GloWbE corpus was used to create a data set of more than 4,000 examples from 16 varieties of English. The results of the analysis support previous findings that the presence of a negative marker in the complement clause increases the preference for finite patterns, especially in L2 varieties of English. However, contrary to the expectations of this study, no-negation was found to have a stronger effect on complement choice than not-negation.

When people are making certain medical decisions—especially potentially transformative ones—the specter of regret may color their choices. In this essay, I ask whether predicting that we will regret a decision in the future serve any justificatory role in our present decision making. And if so, what role? While there are many pitfalls to such reasoning, I ultimately conclude that considering future retrospective emotions like regret in our decision making can be both rational and authentic. Rather than indicating that one is about to make a mistake or that there is some underlying value that one already cares about but is overlooking, the prediction that one will regret a decision in the future makes one confront how her present values and priorities may change as a result of her choice in ways she cannot at present anticipate.