An Alternative Decision-Making Paradigm: the Maintenance of Mental Health

Marketing and, to a lesser extent, Consumer Research have been limited by their basic foundation coming from Economics and by its normative emphasis. Despite Consumer Research’s broadened scope fostered by the incorporation of perspectives from Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, and other disciplines, we argue that the perspectives of consumer decision making have been based, implicitly if not explicitly, upon (modifications of) Economic theory. Hirschman (1993) argued that a cooperative perspective should be considered as well as a competitive one. We extend that by arguing that a mental health perspective should be used to evaluate decision making and, more importantly, to frame our expectations for the research.

Citation:

James Gentry, Suraj Commuri, and Mariam Beruchashvili (2009) ,"An Alternative Decision-Making Paradigm: the Maintenance of Mental Health", in AP - Asia-Pacific Advances in Consumer Research Volume 8, eds. Sridhar Samu, Rajiv Vaidyanathan, and Dipankar Chakravarti, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 219-224.