Purpose: To identify the relevance ethnocentrism, affinity and product country-image (the

three theory effect affectionately called “the enchilada effect” by the authors) have on the

consumers’ decision-making process as well as their effect on the consumers’ preferences for

certain product attribute importance and types.

Problem: In modern society most marketplaces around the world are full of foreign products.

The importance ethnocentrism and the country of origin (COO) effect have on the consumers’

decision process has already been studied and identified on several researches along several

decades. This mentioned, the authors think not only ethnocentrism, but also affinity and PCI

might have an effect on this decision process as well. Therefore, they believe this to be an

interesting and important consumer behavior phenomenon to investigate. Further, they want

to identify how much these theories influence the consumers in two areas: first, the relative

preferences of 8 attributes importance (price, quality, design, weight, energy saving, capacity,

material, and HDD storage capacity) distributed in 4 product categories (laptops, refrigerators,

bicycles and shoes); and second, their effect on consumers’ preferences over two types of

product versions (low-end versus high-end) that differ in price and their added features with

the basic price-quality relationship i.e. the more expensive the better it is.