Abstract: Reference dependent consumer preference has been the focus of marketing and behavioral decision researchers for a long while. It has become an active research area ever since the groundbreaking theory, Prospect Theory, was introduced by Kahneman and Tversky in 1979. Over the last four decades, researchers have explored various ways of conceptualizing reference points and capturing reference dependent consumer preference using quantitative marketing models. No extant research, however, systematically analyzes the classification of reference points and integrates related modeling methods. To fill in this research gap, the literature on reference points in consumer choice models is reviewed, what has been done is summarized, and the important yet underexplored research issues are identified.

Key words: reference dependence; reference points; reference effect; choice model