Air travel distribution has been transformed by Internet technology because of an increase in market transparency, the level of availability and accessibility of product and price information. This article attempts to explain and interpret changes in the market for online travel with the market entry of air carrier consortium-owned Orbitz, a second generation online travel agency (OTA) that significantly changed the competitive dynamics around market transparency. Our interpretation of the developments is based on market microstructure theory, and more recent work that relates market transparency to firm pricing strategies and consumer demand. Our interpretation is developed in three stages. First, we explore market transparency-related developments in first generation online travel since the mid-1990s in the United States. Second, we analyze Orbitz’s market transparency strategy and its impacts on the industry, leading to the emergence of new consumer expectations in the Internet channel. Third, we assess other related changes in the industry that have emerged that further suggest the broad impacts of Orbitz’s strategy, including recent changes in the highly pricesensitive leisure travel segment of the OTA market. Overall, our findings suggest that market transparency changes will continue to drive additional changes in the OTA sector.

this article, we explore the cognitive psychology-based structural alignment view of similarity for preferences formed during comparison and incorporate motivation research from so- Requests for reprints should be sent to Shi Zhang, University of California, Los Angeles, 110 Westwood Plaza B412, Los Angeles, CA 90095. E-mail: shi.zhanganderson.ucla. edu cial psychology to examine how this process is affected by one situafional variable (i.e., differences in the degree of involvement of the consumer with the preference formation task).. CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND The Nature of Differences For many years, the dominant model of comparison in psychology was Tversky's (1977) contrast model, which was initially designed to account for judgments of similarity. This model assumes that people represent information about an object (like the attributes of an option) as a set of features. The sets of features representing each option can be compared by finding their intersection. Those features in the intersection are the commonalities of the pair, and those features not in the intersection are the differences. Many studies have explored predictions of this feature comparison process for decision making (e.g., Houston, Sherman, & Baker, 1989, 1991; Sanbonmatsu, Kardes, & Gibson, 1991; see also Chernev, 1997; Dhar & Sherman, 1996). For example, because the differences of a pair of options, not the commonalities, are the determinants of choices, those differences of the focal (or comparing) option should draw more attention and carry more weight in judgments than those in the nonlocal option (Houston et al., 1989, 1991; Tversky, 1977)

In this article, explicit attention is paid to the impact of missing information on decisionmaking in the international marketing of services. Missing information may be dealt with in several ways by decision-makers in international service providing organizations. Furthermore, missing information can influence decision-makers ’ attitudinal and behavioral evaluative judgments of international marketing research efforts. In the context of decisionmaking in an international services marketing setting, several hypotheses are postulated and tested experimentally. The results suggest that decision-makers are unlikely to ignore missing information in an international research report. Instead, they will tend to apply a strategy of inferential, assumption-based reasoning. Additionally, the presence versus absence of different types of information has distinct evaluative consequences in terms of satisfaction with, trust in, and intention to use the information. These consequences are likely to depend

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Internet-based selling offers firms many new opportunities regarding the strategies for design of mechanisms to support consumer transactions. This chapter examines the use of transparency as a strategy for Internet-based selling for maximizing firms ’ value from their selling activities on the World Wide Web. We define transparency as the extent to which a seller reveals private information to the consumer, and explore three of its most often observed dimensions: product, price and supplier transparency. We evaluate consumers ’ responses to each kind of transparency in terms of their willingness-to-pay. We position the theory in the context of the online air travel (OTA) industry to showcase its applicability and the power of its theoretical insights in an appropriate real world context. We also generalize our findings to suggest some managerial guidelines that will help managers who want to make choices regarding transparency strategy in other Internet-related business contexts.

www.elsevier.com/locate/actpsy Comparative judgments with missing information: A regression and process tracing analysis

www.elsevier.com/locate/obhdp Why more can be less: An inference-based explanation for hyper-subadditivity in bundle valuation q