Mental Capacity and Decision Making: Where to From Here?

ABSTRACT Mental capacity is a growing marketplace issue as population aging, dementia, and mental illness intersect with increasingly complex consumer decisions across financial services, digital subscriptions, telecommunications, and healthcare. Yet marketing scholarship has focused primarily on competence—how well consumers perform a decision task—rather than capacity: whether consumers can form, use, and communicate a decision. This distinction, developed in clinical and legal settings, has rarely been operationalized for marketing contexts. The aim of this editorial is threefold: (1) to clarify the conceptual boundary between mental capacity and competence in consumer decision‐making; (2) to translate four widely used clinical capacity criteria—understanding, appreciation, reasoning, and communication—into marketing‐relevant consumer decision contexts; and (3) to outline a focused research agenda that addresses urgent and tractable questions for firms and policymakers. We argue that capacity is decision‐specific and dynamic, implying that marketplace interventions must preserve consumer autonomy while reducing vulnerability to misleading information, undue influence, and financial exploitation. In doing so, we call on marketing scholars to engage with this under‐studied domain before the scale of the problem outpaces the scholarship.