Understanding Consumer Choice explores the expectation that consumers' attitudes are related to their behavior and shows why it was thwarted. It goes on to demonstrate how recent attempts to relate attitudes and actions have implicitly incorporated measures of the two situational variables on which a behavior-based model of consumer choice must be founded: the consumption theory of the buyer and the elements of the physical and social setting in which consumer behavior takes place. These variables are combined into a model of the consumer situation from which a typology of consumer situations is derived. The model has been tested in terms of its capacity to predict attitudes known to relate to consumer behaviors in a variety of situational contexts. In addition, the book explores the capacity of this model, and the methods of behavioral economics and marketing science, to elucidate and suggest an intellectual foundation for consumer brand choice. Beyond all that, however, the book proposes a novel interrogation of the cognitive and behavioral perspectives, an overarching philosophy for consumer research.