The Role of Market Efficiency Intuitions in Consumer Choice: A Case of

Alice Tybout, and the three anonymous JMR reviewers for providing valu-able comments on this research. ALEXANDER CHERNEV and GREGORY S. CARPENTER* The authors examine consumer inferences about product attributes that are unobservable at the time of the decision. Extant research pre-dicts that in the absence of an explicit correlation between product attrib-utes, consumers will infer that the brand that is superior on the observ-able attributes is also superior on the unobservable attributes. The authors propose an alternative inference strategy that makes the coun-terintuitive prediction that the apparently superior brand is inferior on the unobservable attributes. The authors refer to these inferences as “com-pensatory inferences ” and assert that they are associated with con-sumers ’ intuitive theories about the competitive nature of a market. In a series of four experiments, the authors examine the occurrence of com-pensatory inferences and compare them with other inference strategies