The Effect of Flash Banners

on Multiattribute Decision
Making: Distractor or
Source of Arousal?
Rong-Fuh Day
Southern Taiwan University of Technology

Gary C.-W. Shyi

National Chung-Cheng University

Jyun-Cheng Wang
National Tsing Hua University

ABSTRACT

The role of peripheral flash advertisements in decision making as a

distractor or a source of arousal was examined. Participants were
asked to perform multiattribute decision making in a display envi-
ronment with or without banners of advertisement flashing occasion-
ally in the peripheral region of the display. The flash banners acceler-
ated the speed of decision making, although the participants rarely
made eye movements in response to the banners or fixated their eyes
on them. It was interesting to note that the participants’ pupil sizes
increased with the presence of flash banners. These findings suggest
that rather than distracting participants’ attention, flash banners
appear to elevate the general level of arousal of the participants,
which in turn led to making faster on-line decisions. © 2006 Wiley
Periodicals, Inc.

E-commerce has gradually emerged as an important platform for con-

ducting business in Taiwan as well as in other parts of the world. Com-

Psychology & Marketing, Vol. 23(5): 369–382 (May 2006)

Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com)
© 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/mar.20117
369
pared to the traditional physical stores, on-line cyberstores, using mod-
ern technologies, create a different informational environment. One of the
most notable cyberstore features is the wide use of flashing banners to
present information. Interest in the effectiveness of flashing banners as
means of influence has been growing in recent years. Flash technology
has been used for various purposes. Here, the discussion is limited to
peripheral flash advertisement.
Choosing and purchasing a product are common tasks performed by
visitors to on-line stores. Basically, on-line purchasing behavior can be
characterized as a kind of consumer decision making and can be aptly
viewed and analyzed from the perspective of information processing.
Much consumer and marketing research has already addressed how a
specific process is constructed and executed in terms of individual char-
acteristics, decision, and context (Bettman, Luce, & Payne, 1998). How-
ever, the role that peripheral flash ads, so popular today, play in making
decisions is not yet fully understood. It is believed that a better under-
standing of the role of flash in decision making will provide better insight
on the design of Web sites and add to the knowledge of how situational
factors may affect on-line consumers’ purchase decisions.
Theoretically, attention is conceived as an important mediating factor
for explaining the interaction between the flash ad and the on-line task.
A brief review of the literature indicates that attention can play at least
two different roles in the decision-making process when flash ads are
involved. One possible role is that, because flash ads typically appear
along with the information a consumer would use for making his or her
decisions, their presence may act as a distractor, interrupting the ongo-
ing decision process (Egeth & Yantis, 1997; Kahneman, 1973; Norman &
Bobrow, 1975). Another possible role for peripheral flash ads has recently
been suggested by Dreze and Hussherr (2003), who reported that par-
ticipants in their study learned to avoid allocating attention to periph-
eral ads, and by Gao, Koufaris, and Ducoffe (2004), who found that ani-
mated ads could sometimes induce negative feelings, such as irritation.
In these latter cases flash ads may have elevated arousal in the viewer
rather than distracting the viewer’s attention. Although these implicit
assumptions regarding the role of flash ads coexist in the literature, lit-
tle has been done to examine these possible roles directly.
This study examines the effect of flash banners on the process of deci-
sion making (see Table 1). Of specific concern is the question of whether
flash banners are better characterized as a distractor or as a source of
arousal for on-line consumers. To answer this question, a laboratory
experiment was designed with the dual-task paradigm (Pashler, 1995;
Pashler, Johnston, & Ruthruff, 2001). In contrast to the viewpoint of the
motivation, opportunity, and ability model (MacInnis & Jaworski, 1989;
MacInnis, Moorman, & Jaworski, 1991), decision making was assumed
to be the primary task, and ad information processing the secondary
task. Furthermore, eye movements and pupil sizes were recorded on-

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Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/mar
Table 1. A Summary for the Roles of Flash Ads, Hypotheses, Predictions, and
Experimental Results.
Dependent Variable Hypothesis Result
Decision time (DT) Hypothesis: flash ads as a distractor
DT in no-flash-ads environment ⬍ DT in Not supported
flash-ads environment
Hypothesis: flash ads as an arousal source
DT in no-flash-ads environment ⬎ DT in Supported
flash-ads environment
Decision accuracy (AD) Hypothesis: flash ads as a distractor
AD in no-flash-ads environment ⬎ AD in Not supported
flash-ads environment
Hypothesis: flash ads as an arousal source
AD in no-flash-ads environment ⫽ AD in Supported
flash-ads environment
Level of arousal (LoA) Hypothesis: flash ads as an arousal source
AL in no-flash-ads environment ⬍ LoA in Supported
flash-ads environment

line while participants were making their decisions. With this approach,
direct observation of whether attention was allocated to the primary
task of decision-making or to the peripheral flash ads was possible.

Attention
Research on flash ad stems from two lines of investigation, namely, mar-
keting research of advertisement and visual search in the field of atten-
tion. In advertising research, researchers are mainly concerned with
whether or not flash would increase the recall of flash content or the
click rate (Cho, 2003; Li & Bukovac, 1999; Yoon, 2003; Zhang, 2000). In
attentional research on visual search, researchers have investigated
whether or not flash would increase or decrease the efficiency of infor-
mation search on the Web in terms of expended time and accuracy (Hong,
Thong, & Tam, 2004; Zhang, 2000). Although these two lines of research
clearly reflect different academic and practical interests, they both main-
tain the same theoretical assumption that attention plays an important
mediating role in information processing (Bettman et al., 1998; Kahne-
man, 1973; MacInnis & Jaworski, 1989; MacInnis et al., 1991).
Most researchers in the area of attention agree that attention can be
regarded as processing resources with limited supply when an individ-
ual is faced with multiple demands of concurrent mental activities (Kah-
neman, 1973; Luck & Vecera, 2002). Hence, issues regarding the allo-
cation and control of attentional resources are important. In general,
allocation and control of attention can be accomplished in two distinct
modes: voluntary and involuntary control (Kahneman, 1973). Voluntary

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attentional control, also termed top-down or goal-directed attention,
assumes that the allocation of attentional resources is dependent on
such endogenous factors as an individual’s goals or expectations (Egeth
& Yantis, 1997; Johnston & Dark, 1986). Involuntary attention control,
also termed bottom-up or stimulus-driven attention, assumes that the
allocation of attention is induced by the properties of an external event
without the individual’s deliberate intent, such as a sudden movement
in the periphery or a sudden flash or onset of light (Egeth & Yantis,
1997). Norman and Bobrow (1975) suggested that there was an impor-
tant relationship between attention allocation and task performance in
that task performance is a monotonic function of attentional resources
allocated to the mental activities required by the task. These views of
attention and their supporting empirical evidence provide a general
framework for analyzing and understanding the potential roles of atten-
tion in decision making.

Multiattribute Decision Making

A multiattribute decision in the marketing context is characterized by
a decision maker’s need to choose one brand out of a set of alternatives,
where each alternative is described by a common set of attributes. Because
this kind of decision is very common in everyday life, it has been widely
used and studied in the fields of behavioral decision making and con-
sumer behavior. One approach to studying multiattribute decision is
from the information processing perspective. According to this perspec-
tive, decision making is viewed as a kind of problem solving that, given
an initial problem state and goal, the decision maker transforms the
problem state step by step in the working memory until the goal state
is achieved (Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett, & Thagard, 1986; Newell & Simon,
1972; Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1993). The decision-making process
can, therefore, be subdivided into a set of elementary information
processes (EIPs), such as reading, comparing, etc. (Payne et al., 1993).
Based on the set of EIPs, a variety of the decision-making strategies can
be modeled, such as WAD, EBA, etc., and the processing effort for each
decision strategy can be estimated more precisely in terms of the num-
ber of EIPs. This approach allows ready comparisons among various deci-
sion-making strategies.

Peripheral Flash Ad as a Distractor

Flash ads are comprised of two parts: flash function and ad information.
Flash is characterized as temporal discontinuities in the physical prop-
erty of objects presented in a scene. Prior studies have suggested that
visual transients, that is, motion, changes in stimuli over time, and abrupt
onset (appearance) or offset (disappearance) of objects, are likely to cap-
ture attention, especially when they occur briefly. In addition, because

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most Web ads are distinguishable in some respect of their physical prop-
erties from the main content of a Web page, they tend to create discon-
tinuities in the spatial distribution of physical properties and act like
singletons in a visual scene. A larger number of studies in visual atten-
tion have repeatedly demonstrated that singletons can capture atten-
tion automatically without a deliberate intent or effort on the part of an
observer (Egeth & Yantis, 1997; Yantis & Egeth, 1999). Because a flash
ad has these two properties, it can presumably trigger involuntary or
automatic allocation of attention. It captures a customer’s attention and,
as a consequence, diverts away part of the consumer’s processing resources
from the target.
As stated earlier, the deployment of attention in a visual scene is largely
dependent upon two opposing factors, namely top-down versus bottom-up
attentional controls (Egeth & Yantis, 1997; Pashler et al., 2001). As Pash-
ler et al. (2001) put it, “Human behavior emerges from the interaction of
the goals that people have and the stimuli that impinge on them” (p. 630).
More realistically, the information environment on the Web nowadays is
so complex that intensive and dynamic interactions between the two
modes of controls are inevitable. On the one hand, when consumers enter
an on-line store with the goal of choosing one brand of product from a set
of alternatives, the deployment of attention is voluntary in the sense that
attention plays an active role of monitoring and fueling the operation of
EIPs in the working memory. On the other hand, during the primary task,
a decision maker’s attention is likely to be captured by the peripheral
flash ad, and then the limited processing resources would be diverted to
process the ad, the secondary task. Two negative effects on the primary
task are expected to occur after the secondary task is activated. First,
when the secondary task is operating, a decision maker is expected to for-
get some of the information needed for processing the primary task. Sec-
ond, when the secondary task is finished, the decision maker returns to
the primary task to complete the task. At this point, a recovery period is
needed to reprocess information that was forgotten. Based on the above
rationale, flash peripheral ad is expected to act as a distractor. Specifically,
according to the distractor hypothesis, it is proposed that in an informa-
tion environment with flash peripheral advertisement, a participant needs
more time to perform decision-making tasks than in an information envi-
ronment without peripheral flash. Furthermore, each time the decision
maker recovers the original state, he or she may have to redo some EIPs.
These additional operations may increase the likelihood of errors during
the decision process, meaning that flash peripheral advertisement may
negatively affect performance in terms of decision accuracy.

Peripheral Flash Ad as a Source of Arousal

Rather than viewing flash ads as distractors, results from several recent
empirical studies on Web ads suggest that peripheral flash ads could play

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a very different role. Some research suggests that flash ads are not effec-
tive enough to capture the on-line users’ attention. For instance, Dreze and
Hussherr (2003) recorded on-line users’ eye fixations on a portal Web site
and analyzed their scanning paths. They found that on-line users only
occasionally fixated the regions at which Web ads were located, suggest-
ing that on-line users may have learned to avoid diverting attention to Web
ads. Furthermore, Hong et al. (2004) argued that on-line users tend to
suppress the interference caused by flash ads through exerting additional
mental efforts on doing the primary task. These suggestions depart from
the distractor hypothesis in which it is thought that flash might activate
and capture attention involuntarily to peripheral ads and therefore inter-
rupt the primary task at hand. Similarly, animation ads seem to influence
a visitor’s affective states. For example, Gao et al. (2004) argued that,
given the overpowering effect of continuous animation on the human
peripheral vision, on-line animated ads have become a form of intrusive
presentation that, like scrolling messages at the edges of a television
screen, is a source of irritation or negative arousal to the on-line users.
Taken together, these findings lead us to consider an alternative hypoth-
esis, one in which peripheral flash ads act as a source of arousal, rather
than a distractor, to on-line decision makers. Specifically, according to the
arousal hypothesis, it is proposed that in an information environment
with flash peripheral advertisement, an individual has a higher level of
arousal than in an information environment without peripheral flash.
Prior research also has established a theoretical link between arousal
and attention. For example, in Kahneman’s (1973) capacity model of
attention, arousal will increase the total capacity of attention or sup-
ply of processing resource, and narrow the attention focus by concen-
trating on the dominant aspect of the situation at the expense of other
aspects, leading to improved performance. Furthermore, one recent
study has demonstrated that at the higher level of arousal, the inter-
nal clock appears to run faster, leading to a shortening of subjective
time, which in turn helps to push the participants to speed up their
cognitive responses (Wearden & Penton-Voak, 1995). Based on such
reasoning, if flash ads indeed arouse rather than distract participants,
it is predicted that participants’ performances in decision making will
actually be improved. In other words, according to the arousal hypoth-
esis, it is proposed that in an information environment with flash
peripheral advertisement, a participant will perform decision-making
tasks more efficiently in terms of decision time than in an information
environment without peripheral flash. Furthermore, because arousal
helps narrow the focus of attention, the decision-making task may be
protected to some extent from interruption caused by the peripheral ad.
Consequently, there would be a dramatic decrease in the likelihood
that elementary information processes and calculation errors would
be done in the recovery period. Therefore, it is proposed that there is
no difference in decision accuracy between the information environ-
ment with or without flash peripheral advertisement. The study inves-
374 DAY, SHYI, AND WANG
Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/mar
tigates which hypothesis better explains the role of peripheral flash
ads—as a distractor or as a source of arousal.

METHOD

Participants
A total of 30 college students were recruited as participants from the
Southern Taiwan University of Technology, Taiwan. Each participant
was paid a cash reward of NT$100 for their participation. In order to
encourage them to make decisions accurately, an additional incentive of
NT$80 was awarded based on decision accuracy.

Stimulus Materials and Apparatus

The information environment was manipulated by placing either flash
banners around the decision information or no extraneous information
at all. The information for the decision-making task was arranged and
displayed in the form of an alternative-attribute matrix, which has been
widely used in prior research on decision making (Payne et al., 1993).
As shown in Figure 1, the information matrix consisted of four alter-
natives, each with four attributes. The layout of the information envi-
ronment was displayed in the medium resolution mode of 800*600 pix-
els. In the no–flash-banner environment, only the decision information

Figure 1. Layout of the two information environments used in the experiment. The
top banner shown in the right panel is the peripheral flash advertisement. The central
portion of the both layouts is the decision information matrix about four skin-protec-
tion lotions. It describes four attributes, including SPF, Polished, Moisture, and Fresh-
ness. The values of each attribute are relative scores, ranging from 1 to 5. It is worth
noting that the original experimental layout was in Chinese. In this case, the EBA
decision tasks on the two decision information matrices are equivalent in terms of ele-
mentary information processes. The spatial distribution of eye fixations for the EBA
tasks in the two information environments is shown. As can be seen from the figure,
only a handful of eye fixations were laid on the peripheral banners.

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matrix was shown at the center of the screen, occupying an area of
600*400 pixels. In the flash-banner environment, flash banners with a
size of 468*60 pixels were placed both above and below the area of deci-
sion information. Five designers drew a total of 64 single-framed ban-
ners with their sizes meeting the standards outlined by the Interactive
Advertising Bureau for a full banner of 468*60 IMU. In order to avoid
the potential effect of color, all banners were drawn in grayscale. Dur-
ing the experiment proper, two banners were randomly selected from the
banner pool and displayed for 1.5 seconds above and below the decision
information matrix in an alternating manner. This continuous and tran-
sient placement of different banners in the peripheral regions created
a distinct impression of flash.
An EyeLink II eye-tracking system (SR Research, Canada) with a sam-
pling rate of 500 Hz was used to track and record the participants’ eye
movements (saccades and fixations) and their pupil sizes while the deci-
sion-making task was being performed. Prior research has suggested
that eye movement is directly related to the underlying cognitive process
(Just & Carpenter, 1976; Rayner, 1998), which is also known as the
eye–mind assumption. Just and Carpenter (1976), for example, suggested
that eyes often fixated on the external referents whose corresponding
internal representations are processed. Various research tracking eye
movements in the past has provided the evidence to support the eye–mind
assumption in that eye movement is a sufficient and valid reflection of
the decision process. It should also be noted that pupil size has been
regarded as a reliable and sensitive index for reflecting the level of arousal
and the capacity of momentary mental effort (Beatty & Lucero-Wagoner,
2000; Kahneman, 1973). That is, the level of arousal and the momentary
effort in information processing are positively related.

Task and Strategies

Prior to the actual experiment, participants were trained to use two
strategies, the weighted additive rule (WADD) and the elimination-by-
aspects method (EBA), to solve two choice problems in each information
environment. The operational definitions of the two decision strategies
followed faithfully those of Payne et al. (1993).
As described by Payne et al., the WADD choice strategy not only con-
siders the values of each alternative for all the relevant attributes, but
also takes into account all the relative weights of the attributes. With
WADD, the decision maker can derive an overall evaluation of each alter-
native by multiplying the weight with the value for each attribute, and
adding together those weighted values across all attributes. After deriv-
ing the weighted value for each alternative, the one with the highest
value will be selected. In contrast, the EBA choice strategy first deter-
mines the most important attribute and the cutoff value for that attrib-
ute is also retrieved. Then, all alternatives with values for that attribute

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Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/mar
below the cutoff are eliminated. This process is repeated until only one
alternative remains.
In order to keep each participant’s performance on the decision tasks
comparable with one another, equivalent tasks were created by randomly
swapping columns designating the four attributes or rows designating the
four alternatives in the matrix of decision information. For both the
WADD strategy and the EBA strategy, the exchange of the attribute
columns or alternative rows of a decision information matrix would make
the choice tasks performed on the decision matrix equivalent. In this
way, it was ensured that equivalent tasks performed in the various infor-
mation environments were equivalent in terms of level of difficulty.

Design and Procedure

Only one within-subject factor was manipulated in the experiment; namely,
the primary decision-making task was performed either with flash banners
presented in the periphery of the display screen, or without.
The participants were tested individually in the actual experiment,
which was divided into two sessions: the training session and the exper-
imental session. In the training session, a video was played for 10 min-
utes to instruct the participants about how to use WADD and EBA strate-
gies to solve a choice task. After watching the instructional video, the
participants decided whether to replay the video or to start practicing the
two learned strategies on the computer. During the practice, participants
were told to use both the WADD and the EBA strategy three times to solve
the problem of selecting a restaurant location. The decision information
matrix for practice also consisted of four alternatives, each with four
attributes, in the same manner as those that were later used in the exper-
imental session. Upon arriving at a decision, the participants received
immediate feedback regarding accuracy of their decisions.
During the experimental session, the experimenter first put the eye
tracker’s leather-padded headband on the participant’s head and cali-
brated the eye tracker. The calibration and a subsequent validation took
about 7 minutes to complete. Then, an experimental program designed
for the present study was launched and the participant was told to arrive
at a choice as quickly and accurately as possible, with the use of the deci-
sion strategies practiced earlier. Each participant was asked to perform
one WADD and one EBA decision task with the flash banners presented
in the peripheral region, and to perform one of each task in the no-flash
peripheral ad information environment. The order of performing the
tasks with or without peripheral flash banners was randomly deter-
mined for each participant. The matrix of decision information stayed
on the screen until a decision was made. The participant’s decision choice,
along with his or her eye movement and pupil size were recorded. The
time to reach a decision, its accuracy, as well as variations in pupil size,
were the main dependent variables for data analysis.

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Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/mar
RESULTS

Before any formal analysis, the eye movement data of each participant
were first inspected with a custom-made program to see whether or not
the data were valid (see Figure 1). Except for one participant whose data
was invalid, a total of 18,726 fixations from 29 participants were used for
further analysis, of which 12,036 fixations were recorded from the
no–flash-ad information environment, and 8,490 fixations were recorded
from the flash-ad information environment.

Basic Analysis of Banner Position and Decision Strategy

In the flash-ad information environment, the area of the top banner
received about 3.21% of the total fixations, whereas the area of the bot-
tom banner got only .41% of the total fixations. This result is consistent
with the prior finding that banners placed on top were more attractive
than those placed at the bottom (Wang & Day, in press).
With the use of an SPSS-based paired-samples t test, it was found
that the EBA decision task received significantly fewer fixations (M ⫽
103.87) than the WADD task (M ⫽ 203.01), t ⫽ 8.56, p <.001. Moreover,
participants spent significantly less time on the EBA task (M ⫽ 24618.82)
than on the WADD decision task (M ⫽ 54274.68), t ⫽ 9.83, p ⬍ .001.
These results were consistent with the previous findings reported in the
literature that the WADD strategy tended to require more cognitive
effort, hence more time, than the EBA strategy (Payne et al., 1993). How-
ever, there was no significant difference in response accuracy (percent cor-
rect) between the WADD decision strategy (M ⫽ 89.6%) and the EBA
strategy (M ⫽ 91.3%) (z ⫽ .14, p ⬎ .1). Judging from the mean accuracy
in each task, it seems obvious that the difficulty level of the decision
tasks did not exceed the participants’ mental capacity.

Analysis of Information Environment

To see how the difference in information environment may affect par-
ticipants’ performance on each task, the paired-sample t test was again
applied on the decision time for each task. The mean decision time for the
no–flash-ad environment (M ⫽ 43552.20) was significantly greater than
the mean decision time for the flash-ad environment (M ⫽ 35341.31), t
⫽ 2.831, p ⬍ .01. Analogously, the mean pupil size in the no–flash-ad
environment was significant smaller (M ⫽ 6165.90) than that in the
flash-ad environment (M ⫽ 6242.01), t ⫽ 3.471, p ⬍ .01. However, there
was no significant difference in response accuracy between the two infor-
mation environments (z ⫽ 0.14, p ⬎ .1). Taken together, these results
suggest that the presence of peripheral flash banners may have acted as
a source of (additional) arousal such that with their presence partici-
pants actually sped up their processes of decision making. Furthermore,

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as a consequence of a higher level of arousal, mobilizing more process-
ing resources may have helped compensate the possible deleterious effect
on response accuracy caused by the presence of flash banners.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

This study aims to clarify the role that flash peripheral ads may act as
a distractor or as a source of arousal in the on-line process of making
decisions. It was found that, with the same level of decision accuracy,
participants actually reached decisions with less time and exhibited a
higher level of arousal for equivalent decision tasks in the information
environment with peripheral flash ads than without. Moreover, it was also
found that participants fixated directly on the peripheral flash banners
only occasionally, with an average of less than 4% of the time. These find-
ings provide support to the view that flash peripheral ads tend to be a
source of arousal rather than a distractor. According to Kahneman’s
(1973) capacity model, the presence of flash peripheral ad first aroused
the participant, which in turn may have motivated the participant to
increase the supply of processing resources. Concomitantly, the decision-
making tasks benefited from sharing the additional supply of mental
resources and resulted in improved performance.
One of the most interesting aspects in these findings is that although
participants fixated their eyes on the peripheral ads only sparingly, they
were unable to isolate themselves completely from the influence of the
peripheral ad. Such influence is consistent with the nature of visual sys-
tem in that peripheral vision is dominated by the retinal magnocellular
system, which is sensitive to motion or signals of transient change (e.g.,
flash) arising from objects located in the peripheral area of the visual
field (Palmer, 1999). Therefore, in this study, the flash can exert its influ-
ence on the participants through peripheral vision, perhaps even with-
out their conscious awareness.
These findings also extend the popular Yerkes-Dodson (Yerkes & Dod-
son, 1908) law of psychological motivation to the on-line decision sce-
nario. The main idea suggested by the Yerkes-Dodson law is that arousal
is an important mediator or intervening variable in many types of behav-
ior. According to the Yerkes-Dodson law, when arousal level is posited on
a continuum where one end entails a state of calm and the other entails
an extreme heightened state, the relationship between the arousal level
and the cognitive performance can be characterized as an inverted-U
shape. In the present study, the information environment without flash
banners may represent a situation in which the participant’s inner state
was at the calm end. Upon the sudden presence of flash banners, how-
ever, the participant’s inner state may be shifted to the more heightened
end. As a consequence of heightened arousal, the participant accelerated
his or her speed in reaching a decision. The findings not only contribute

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to identify the subtle effect on arousal by the presence of flash periph-
eral ad, but also empirically confirm the theoretical link between the
arousal and the cognitive activity, that is, on-line decision making.
Finally, the present study contributes to methods for directly meas-
uring the working of attention with the eye tracker. In doing so, a poten-
tial risk of a circular inference was avoided by the usage of the recall
test and task performance as a substitute for the mediating effect of
attention (MacInnis et al., 1991). Moreover, this study specifically
addresses the changes in pupil size. This affective index did, however,
shed light on subtle changes in the physiological states of the partici-
pant and thus provides an additional dimension to understanding the
effect of flash ad.
The findings have two significant implications. As prior research
noted, arousal may cause attention narrowing and speed up response so
that a decision is taken before all relevant information has been assim-
ilated (Kahneman, 1973; Payne et al., 1993). This suggests that in the
real Web environment in which individuals can freely decide their own
strategies, flash ads may push on-line customers to use more heuristic
or simpler strategies to quickly arrive at a choice, although this may
not represent an optimal solution. Second, the results empirically val-
idated the belief that ads on the tops of Web pages are more valuable
than those at the bottom.

Limitations and Future Research

When interpreting these results, the reader should be aware of certain
limitations. First, the task is more fit to the on-line purchase scenario
in which customers are ready to buy and have a clear goal in mind. Sec-
ond, in order to control the moderating effect of decision strategy, the
strategies to be used were provided as part of the experiment. This
design feature of the present study may not fully reflect the actual on-
line decision behavior of individuals, which has been characterized as
being constructive and opportunistic (Payne et al., 1993). Third, the
decision information layout is based on the tradition of behavioral deci-
sion making. It abstracts the actual purchase information environment
in order to exclude irrelevant confounding factors. In spite of the bene-
fits of this more abstract approach, future research can be executed in
a more realistic Web environment to investigate the effects of other fac-
tors. Finally, this research used a restricted flash that had only contin-
uously changing single-frame banners at a constant speed. Future
research can use different ways to display ad information, such as onset,
offset, movement, etc., and different frequencies such as quick versus
slow or constant or unexpected with the aid of up-to-date Web technol-
ogy. Such manipulations have been validated as beneficial in revealing
the role of peripheral vision and involuntary attention control (Yantis
& Jonides, 1990).

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Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/mar
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Correspondence regarding this article should be sent to: Jyun-Cheng Wang,

Institute of Technology Management, National Tsing Hua University, 101, Sec-
tion 2, Kuang Fuh Road, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan (jcwang@mx.nthu.edu.tw).

382 DAY, SHYI, AND WANG

Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/mar