Charities often request donations while offering a near-worthless token, like a key chain, in exchange. Little research has examined whether such ‘exchange’ requests are met with higher compliance rates than simply asking people to donate. Our studies suggest that in simple donation settings people may have difficulties in estimating a socially acceptable donation amount and therefore prefer opportunities that provide them with an anchor price. The value of a material good in a donation setting can play this anchoring role and signal a reference price. To the extent that the suggested reference price is low enough, exchange requests lead to more compliance than simple donation requests. However, our results indicate that, when accompanied by specified amounts, simple donation requests result in even better compliance rates than exchange requests.

The present paper shows that the frequency of people's compliance with a request can be substantially increased if the requester first gets them to agree with a series of statements unrelated to the request but selected to induce agreement. We label this effect the ‘mere-agreement effect’ and present a two-step similarity-based mechanism to explain it. Across five studies, we show that induced mere agreement subtly causes respondents to view the presenter of the statements as similar to themselves, which in turn increases the frequency compliance with a request from that same person. We support the similarity explanation by showing that the effect of agreement on compliance is suppressed when agreement is induced to indicate dissimilarity with the interviewer, when the request is made by some other person, and when the artificially high level of agreement is made salient. We also validate the practical relevance of the mere-agreement persuasion technique in a field study. We discuss how the mere-agreement effect can be broadly used as a tool to increase cooperation and be readily implemented in marketing interactions.

This report attempts to provide an evolutionary explanation for humans' motivation to strive for money in present-day societies. We propose that people's desire for money is a modern derivate of their desire for food. In three studies, we show the reciprocal association between the incentive value of food and of money. In Study 1, hungry participants were less likely than satiated participants to donate to charity. In Study 2, participants in a room with an olfactory food cue, known to increase the desire to eat, offered less money in a give-some game compared with participants in a room free of scent. In Study 3, participants' desire for money affected the amount of M&M's® they ate in a subsequent taste test, but only among participants who were not restricting their food intake in order to manage their weight.

This study experimentally investigates the value of cost report accuracy in an interactive pricing context. Market agents received feedback about their own profits via either a volume-based costing or a more accurate activity-based costing report. They also received a typical market report containing the performance of their rivals. While prior work suggested that market discipline and learning from salient competitors can overcome performance decrements due to inaccurate costing, our results imply that the corrective nature of market feedback depends on the decision maker's role in the competitive play. Compared to other participants, decision makers endowed with the role of a 'reputational' market leader are less effective in screening available market feedback because they predominantly fixate on their own cost data. Even when receiving biased volume-based costing, reputational leaders ignore valuable market signals of opponents having access to more accurate cost data. Consequently other market players can take advantage of them.