Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Repeated purchase decisions often violate assumptions of stan-dard economic or rational choice models, such as demonstrat-ing asymmetric or unstable responses to changes in underlyingpolicy, price, or tax variables. I propose a novel frameworkfor how such decisions can be interpreted through the lens of acognitive process model. This provides psychologically inter-pretable characterizations of individuals or population groups.It incorporates mental accounting, hedonic adaptation, confir-mation bias, and the influence of perceived trust and fairness.It shows how sequential experiences and contextual aspectssuch as political affiliation, are mediated by this cognitive pro-cess to produce evolving consumption patterns. This novel ap-proach can account for empirically observed violations of con-ventional choice models. The model is quantitatively fit to ex-perimental data for individual purchase decisions and demon-strates improved descriptive, predictive, and inference capabil-ities. A proof-of-concept analysis using this model to accountfor real world consumption trends is also demonstrated.