The assessment of alternative measures of consumer expertise

This study assesses a number of different measures of consumer expertise by examining their ability to predict correct choices in three stimulus-based choice tasks and to support a number of hypotheses derived from the cognitive psychology and consumer behavior literature. The hypotheses concern how consumer expertise should affect the content and organization of knowledge for a product class and reasons for choice across different usage contexts. After a factor analysis of the different measures of consumer expertise that yielded three orthogonal factors, we used regression and TOBIT analyses to examine the effect of each factor on the number of correct choices and the hypothesized differences in the content and organization of knowledge and reasons for choice in the choice tasks. Two of the factors, ''subjective/objective knowledge'' and ''friends owning motorcycles,'' predict the number of correct choices in the stimulus-based choice tasks, while the subjective/objective-knowledge factor supports almost all of the hypothesized relationships for the content and organization of knowledge and reasons for choice. The third factor, ''magazines read/motorcycles owned,'' also supports many of the relationships concerning general knowledge.