Joseph Alba
Consumer researcher at the University of Florida, co-author of the 2003 studies on price unfairness with Lisa Bolton as first author. His wider work is on consumer knowledge, memory and comparison, which is the relevant background for a paper about what people do and do not take into account when judging a price.
Who they are
Alba is a long-standing figure in consumer research on knowledge and judgement: what buyers know, what they can recall, and how they compare options.
Three-author papers do not report who did what, and this page will not invent a division of labour. The contribution it is here for is the 2003 finding that consumers' fairness judgements are biased in a consistent direction and only modestly correctable by information.
Key papers
Bolton, L. E., Warlop, L., & Alba, J. W. (2003). "Consumer perceptions of price (un)fairness." Journal of Consumer Research, 29(4), 474-491. Third author.
Key ideas
What consumers fail to take into account is as informative as what they attend to: inflation and the full range of vendor costs, in this case. See Price Fairness.
Reference points are multiple. Past prices, competitor prices and cost of goods sold all feed the judgement, which is why a single corrective explanation moves it so little. See Reference Point.
This site credits the paper to Bolton, per the rule that the first author gets the name.
Sources
- Bolton, L. E., Warlop, L., & Alba, J. W. (2003), Journal of Consumer Research, 29(4), 474-491, doi:10.1086/346244, verified at the published record 1 October 2026.