Abstract:
This dissertation focuses on the consistency in the consumers' aesthetic judgments. In particular, it asks whether product choices and preferences are related across product categories in terms of style and gestalts. Further, it asks whether this coherence can be accounted for by categorization theory and the notion of social habituses.

In the context of fumiture and interior product categories, converging results from five experiments suggest that consumers actually make aesthetic judgments that are consistent across product categories and that this consistency is related to categorization theory. Across different product categories, altematives of the same style and of the same gestalts were chosen, preferred, and also categorized as the more central members of their categories. Moreover, consumers with well-developed aesthetic categories in their memory (i.e. design experts) showed more consistent choices and preferences than consumer with less developed aesthetic categories.

However, the results do not support that consistency is related to habitus. People under habitus-like social influence did not show more consistency in their choices and preferences than consumers not subject to such influence.

Key words: Aestetics, experimental economics, marketing, categorization theory, social habitus.

The dissertation was handed to the committee in February 2002, and sucessfully defended September 4, 2002. Professor Sigurd Troye, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, was the advisor for this dissertation.

Even Lanseng was born in Oslo, in 1968. He holds a MSc from the Norwegian School of Management (1993). Currently, he is Associate Professor of Marketing, at the Agricultural University of Norway, Department of Economics and Resource Management.