Introduction

Miyuri Shirai specializes in consumer behavior and conducts research to elucidate the psychological processes underlying consumer decision-making, with the aim of providing actionable insights for marketing strategies. Her previous work has analyzed how various marketing strategies, such as pricing, price promotions, loyalty programs, and line extensions, influence consumer judgments. Drawing on theories and concepts from social psychology, her research takes into account both contextual factors and consumer characteristics to examine the mechanism behind decision-making. Moreover, she has examined various perceptual structures, including price and quality perceptions. In recent years, her research has focused on sustainable consumption, with ongoing studies exploring communication strategies to promote it.

■Sustainable Consumption
・Research Objective: To investigate how the placement of product information and the presence or absence of anthropomorphic cues in advertisements for sustainable products influence product evaluation.
- Title: Location Matters When Advertising Sustainable Products: Influences of Conceptual Metaphor and Anthropomorphism, Miyuri Shirai (International Journal of Consumer Studies) 49(2) e70040 Mar. 2025
■Intertemporal Choices
・Research Objective: To analyze the roles of implicit theories and psychological reactance in the psychological processes underlying intertemporal choices.
- Title: The role of implicit theories in consumer intertemporal preference, Miyuri Shirai （Journal of Consumer Marketing） 40(7) 815-825 Nov. 2023
■Line Extensions
・Research Objective: To investigate consumers’ evaluations of upward and downward vertical line extensions, focusing on the moderating role of implicit relationship theories and the mediating role of inferred motives.
- Title: Vertical line extensions: consumers' preferences for downward and upward extensions, Miyuri Shirai （Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics） 35(8) 2047-2065 Nov. 2023
・Research Objective: To examine how core customers respond to vertical line extensions of a brand.
- Title: How Do Core Customers Evaluate Vertical Line Extensions? Miyuri Shirai (Mita Business Review) 66(3) 145-158 Aug. 2023
■Loyalty Programs
・Research Objective: To examine factors influencing consumers’ evaluations of two types of loyalty programs—coalition and single-firm.
- Title: Which loyalty program do customers prefer: a coalition program or a single-firm program? Miyuri Shirai （Journal of Services Marketing） 37(5) 563-573 May 2023
■Pricing and Price Promotions
・Research Objective: To analyze the effects of three unit pricing approaches—time-based, weight-based, and usage-based—on consumer perceptions.
- Title: Effects of price reframing tactics on consumer perceptions, Miyuri Shirai （Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services） 34 82-87 Jan. 2017
・Research Objective: To investigate how unit pricing across different package sizes within the same brand influences consumer evaluations.
- Title: Unit pricing for multiple product sizes: identifying moderators and mediators of consumer evaluations, Miyuri Shirai, Takuya Satomura （European Journal of Marketing） 55(5) 1539-1566 May 2021
・Research Objective: This study defines deal expectation as the time consumers expect to wait until the next deal and examines how this expectation influences their price evaluations.
- Title: Consumer Expectations Concerning Timing and Depth of the Next Deal, Miyuri Shirai, James R. Bettman (Psychology & Marketing) 22(6) 457-472 Apr. 2005

Areas of Research

・Commercial Science

Social Contributions

・Enhancing Marketing Strategies
・Improving Consumer Understanding
・Proposing Solutions to Social Issues