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The psychology of warranties Protection racket

游客2025-04-14  2
问题                     The psychology of warranties Protection racket
                            保单心理学保护之诈
    If extended guarantees are overpriced, why are they so popular?
    CUSTOMERS tend to agonise over the relative merits of different models of electronic goods such as digital cameras or plasma televisions. But when they get to the till, many spend freely on something they barely think about at all: an extended warranty, which is often more profitable to the retailer than the device it covers.
    Shoppers typically pay 10-50% of the cost of a product to insure it beyond the term covered by the manufacturer’s guarantee. 【R1】______Yet products rarely break within the period covered, and repairs tend to cost no more than the warranty itself. 【R2】______
    So why, asks a paper published in the December issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, so many consumers still buy extended warranties? The authors — Tao Chen of the University of Maryland, Ajay Kalra of Rice University and Baohong Sun of Carnegie Mellon University — examined purchase data from a big electronics retailer for over 600 households from November 2003 to October 2004. 【R3】______
    If a customer is about to buy something fun(ie, a plasma television rather than a vacuum cleaner), he will be more inclined to splash out on extra insurance. This is because consumers value "hedonic" items over utilitarian ones, regardless of the actual price tag. 【R4】______The study also found that poorer consumers are more likely to buy " potentially unnecessary and overpriced insurance" , because they are more worried about the expense of replacing a product if it breaks.
    【R5】______But although most policies go unused, he admits that the emotional tranquillity that comes with buying a new warranty is not in itself without value, even if "rationally, it doesn’t make sense".
A. This is especially true if the item is on sale, as finding an unexpected bargain leaves buyers feeling flush and pleased.
B. The terms of these deals vary(and there is often a great deal of fine print), but they usually promise to repair or replace a faulty device for between one and four years.
C. Only in the present century has one species man acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.
D. This is because consumers are more likely to buy "hedonic" items.
E. They concluded that the decision to buy a warranty had a great deal to do with a shopper’s mood.
F. The popularity of warranties should logically depend on the likelihood of a product’s failure, says Mr. Kalra.
G. That makes warranties amazingly profitable: they generate over $ 16 billion annually for American retailers, according to Warranty Week, a trade journal. [br] 【R3】
选项
答案 E
解析 空格所在的段落开头提出：为什么那么多顾客依然要多买保单呢?接着提到Tao Chen和Baohong Sun对此作了调查，按照逻辑，接下来就应该是调查的结果或结论。选项E中的concluded说明这是一个结论，选项后面的内容buy a warranty与本段首句中的buy extendedwarranties呼应，而had a great deal to do with a shopper’s mood是对首句why的回答。故答案为E。
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