6.6 Time, Discounting, and the Consumer Experience

Session Submission Type: Special Session

Session Overview

Time impacts consumers’ perceptions and experiences through such factors as temporal location (i.e., whether something is in the past or future; Van Boven and Ashworth 2007), distance (Trope and Liberman 2010), and duration (Ariely and Loewenstein 2000). Additionally, consumers must often make temporal tradeoffs that test their patience for purchases, finances, or experiences (Dai and Fishbach 2013; Thaler 1981), which in turn rely on how consumers perceive time (Zauberman et al. 2009).

However, though there is much work examining how time both influences peoples’ experiences and evaluations, and how those evaluations of time relate to discounting, there are still many open questions regarding consumption experiences and time. This session assembles multiple perspectives from established researchers on time to explore theoretical and practical questions regarding the impact of time on consumers’ experiences, evaluations, and perceptions of events occurring over time. For example, how specifically does the duration of an experience change how people evaluate that experience? Do consumers discount gains more than losses in both the past and in the future? How does an evaluation of a product affect patience for acquiring that product? How does a consumer’s perception of a structure of a payment (i.e., lump-sum versus payment stream) influence the discount rate?

This session examines these questions among several others. First, Diehl, Weingarten, and Zauberman develop a new conceptualization by which, contrary to duration neglect, duration has an impact on overall evaluations of experiences indirectly through its effect on experienced peak and end. Second, Molouki, Hardisty, and Caruso test in six studies how the sign effect, by which people discount gains more than losses, applies to future but not past outcomes. This asymmetry results from greater emotional intensity differences between gains and losses for the future but less so for the past. Third, Roberts, Shaddy, and Fishbach find in seven studies how, despite the possibility that liking could lead people to be impatient, liking instead increases patience. That is, people are more willing to wait for products they like more compared to products they like less. Fourth, Malkoc, Goodman and Rosenboim examine how people perceive and discount lump sums versus payment streams (e.g., monthly paychecks). Specifically, they find people are more patient with payment streams than with lump sums because they concentrate on the first payment of the payment stream.

Altogether, these four papers speak to the conference theme of expanding wisdom by illustrating how time, which is often a scarce resource, is interwoven in multiple contexts within consumer behavior and by investigating what heuristics people use when making temporal judgments.

These four papers are all in later stages of development, having all completed at least three or more studies. This session should appeal to a variety of researchers and practitioners studying time and temporal discounting, financial decision-making, emotion, judgment and decision-making, self-control, perception, and consumer experiences.

Sub Track

• Special Sessions

Individual Presentations

• Duration Sensitivity of Key Moments - Kristin Diehl, University of Southern California, USA; Evan Weingarten, University of California San Diego, USA; Gal Zauberman, Yale University, USA

• The Sign Effect in Past and Future Discounting - Sarah Molouki, University of Chicago, USA; David Hardisty, University of British Columbia, Canada; Eugene M. Caruso, University of Chicago, USA

• Love is Patient: People Are More Willing to Wait For Things They Like - Annabelle Roberts, University of Chicago, USA; Franklin Shaddy, University of Chicago, USA; Ayelet Fishbach, University of Chicago, USA

• Discounting a Lump-Sum Versus a Payment Stream: More Payments Leads to More Patience - Selin A. Malkoc, Ohio State University, USA; Joseph K Goodman, Ohio State University, USA; Mosi Rosenboim, Ben Gurion University, Israel

Session Chairs

• Evan Weingarten, University of California San Diego, USA

• Annabelle Roberts, University of Chicago, USA