Product Attributes, Evaluability, and Consumer Satisfaction

We studied the determinants of consumer satisfaction with mobile phones on the basis of their perceived product attribute performance, and the disconfirmation of product attribute expectations. Disconfirmation refers to the discrepancy between the prior expectation about the performance of a product's attributes, and its perceives realizations after purchase. Evaluability theory assumes that the perceived attribute performance has a larger effect on consumer satisfaction for easy-to-evaluate than for difficult-to-evaluate attributes, after product acquisition. Furthermore, we used predictions of the asymmetric evaluations of gains (product performs better than expected) and losses (product performs worse than expected) from prospect theory, in combination with evaluability theory. We studied how evaluability influences the effects of the asymmetric evaluations of both positive and negative disconfirmation of product attribute expectations on consumer satisfaction. Our empirical study included 3099 participants of Amazon Mechanical Turk. We found that negative attribute disconfirmation had a larger effect on satisfaction than positive attribute disconfirmation, which is in line with loss aversion theory. Although the perceived product attribute performance positively influenced satisfaction, we found little support for the effects of perceived attribute performance being influenced by attribute evaluability. However, our findings indicated that negative attribute disconfirmation influenced satisfaction to a greater extent for relatively difficult-to-evaluate attributes than for relatively easy-to-evaluate attributes. We discuss both theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.