Implications of Motivating Operations for the Functional Analysis of Consumer Choice

Abstract

The present article introduces the concept of Motivating Operation (MO) to the context of consumer choice and discusses the function of the concept of MO in the context of the Behavioral Perspective Model (BPM). Including MO as part of the consumer behavior setting leads to a more comprehensive analysis and, as a result, improves our understanding of the complex world of contingencies operating within consumer situations. First, the concept of MO helps to distinguish between discriminative and motivational functions of antecedents in the consumer behavior setting. Second, the MO concept includes both unlearned and learned motivating effects. Third, we will argue that some types of rules could also be MOs. A functional analysis of consumer choice should take into consideration the concept of MO because it is a contribution to the ongoing discussion to describe and classify antecedent variables that influence consumer behavior.

KEYWORDS:

• Behavioral Perspective Model
• consumer choice
• establishing operations
• motivating operations

The authors are grateful to Jean Foxall and Dr. Bendik Bygstad for their critical reading on an earlier version of the manuscript. Thanks to Dr. Mirella Yani-de-Soriano for critical reading of this article.