The Influence of Regulatory Focus to Consumer Information Preference in Product Harm Crisis

This study was designed to investigate whether consumers with different regulatory focus have preference on crisis information and crisis response and their information process approach in the product-harm crisis. A number of 127 college students were tested to discover the information processing process when doing information board decision making. Result showed that: (1) the promotion focus subjects paid more attention to crisis response, while prevention focus subjects had preferences to crisis information; (2) promotion focus subjects had a deeper information processing than prevention focus subjects; (3) both group of subjects tended to use heuristic information processing strategies and when the higher the time pressure is, the more likely they use heuristic information processing strategies.