The article introduces and develops the idea of dual market navigation, showing how insured consumers living along the U.S.–Mexico border routinely move between two structurally distinct healthcare systems to meet ongoing needs, rather than staying confined to a single national market. It uses in‑depth interviews, diaries, and cross‑border observation to build a new market‑level framework—strategic cue auditing—that explains how people interpret and compare quality cues across markets with different economics, governance, and cultural norms.
Dual market navigation is defined as consumers’ ongoing engagement with structurally distinct and institutionally separate market systems (for example, U.S. vs. Mexican healthcare), where they actively maintain connections and switch strategies over time to manage costs, access, and quality.
The authors introduce strategic cue auditing as the sensemaking process through which consumers evaluate intrinsic and extrinsic cues and compare market‑level quality signals across markets, identifying three approaches—reactive, cultural‑relational, and cross‑comparative—that differ in effort and vulnerability to misunderstanding.
These navigation strategies can lead to “cue misalignments” and “cue misfires,” where even informed consumers misread what cues mean in a given market, resulting in problems like duplicative care, treatment delays, or mismatched expectations, with broader implications for policy and marketing in cross‑border, online–offline, and formal–informal markets.
“Strategic cue auditing is defined as the sensemaking process by which consumers evaluate intrinsic and extrinsic cues and make comparative assessments of these market-level quality cues across structurally distinct contexts,” the authors write
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