Deciding Without Reflecting is Like Thinking Without Concluding - The Impact of Contextual Experiences on Consumer Decision Making.

Human decision making does not exist in isolation, but is determined by consumers’ prior experiences expressed by the notion of “context-dependent choice” (Schwarz 2004). Few research has examined the effect of contextual factors on consumer decision making and there is a specific lack regarding how pre-shopping factors affect consumer decision making (Shankar 2010; Bell et al. 2011). The present research examines how consumers’ fluency experiences (e.g., experienced prior visiting a website) on their path to purchase affects their decision confidence. We provide novel insights into how fluency affects decision making by showing how predecisional fluency and subsequent fluency affect subsequent decision confidence. The insights of this research inform marketing practitioners about how to use referrer information to determine consumers’ experiences.