Technological innovations are creating new products, services, and markets that satisfy enduring consumer needs. These technological innovations create value for consumers and firms in many ways, but they also disrupt psychological ownership––the feeling that a thing is “MINE.” The authors describe two key dimensions of this technology-driven evolution of consumption pertaining to psychological ownership: (1) replacing legal ownership of private goods with legal access rights to goods and services owned and used by others and (2) replacing “solid” material goods with “liquid” experiential goods. They propose that these consumption changes can have three effects on psychological ownership: they can threaten it, cause it to transfer to other targets, and create new opportunities to preserve it. These changes and their effects are organized in a framework and examined across three macro trends in marketing: (1) growth of the sharing economy, (2) digitization of goods and services, and (3) expansion of personal data. This psychological ownership framework generates future research opportunities and actionable marketing strategies for firms aiming to preserve the positive consequences of psychological ownership and navigate cases for which it is a liability.

We demonstrate that decision making is more heuristic in situations that involve spending time rather than money. Relative to participants in the money condition, those in the time condition show a higher propensity to choose a compromise option (experiment 1) and to rely on an arbitrary anchor (experiment 2). We propose that such heuristics are used more for time because, compared to monetary expenditures, temporal expenditures are harder to account for. Consistent with this proposition, when participants in both time and money conditions are primed to account for their expenditures, they no longer differ in their use of heuristics. The associated response times offer additional process evidence (experiment 3). (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Quantitative changes may be conveyed to consumers using small units (e.g., change in delivery time from 7 to 21 days) or large units (1–3 weeks). Numerosity research suggests that changes are magnified by small (vs. large) units because a change from 7 to 21 (vs. 1–3) seems larger. We introduce a reverse effect that we term unitosity: changes are magnified by large (vs. small) units because a change of weeks (vs. days) seems larger. We show that numerosity reverses to unitosity when relative salience shifts from numbers to units (study 1). Then, arguing that numbers (units) represent a low-level (high-level) construal of quantities, we show this reversal when mind-set shifts from concrete to abstract (studies 2–4). These results emerge for several quantities—height of buildings, time of maturity of financial instruments, weight of nutrients, and length of tables—and have significant implications for theory and practice.

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After people incur costs to get future benefits, they usually track these costs in their mental accounts and are keen to receive the benefits when they become available. We introduce the notion that costs and benefits can occur either in the same accounting period (day, season, etc.) or in different periods. Our key argument is that monetary costs are tracked across accounting periods but that temporal costs are written off at the end of the period in which they are incurred. Thus, accounting periods lead to a time-money asymmetry in the tracking of costs and, consequently, in the likelihood of seeking benefits. In a laboratory study, an online-panel study, and a field study with movie-theater patrons, we demonstrate how this relationship among accounting periods, cost tracking, and benefit seeking is different for time than for money. Our findings offer insights into the sunk-cost effect, time-money differences, and mental accounting. (c) 2010 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Consumers’ reactions to a difference in price can depend on how it is framed. If buyers interpret paying $60 rather than $65 as getting a $5 discount, then they are likely to consider paying $60 to be a gain and paying $65 to be a nongain. Alternatively, if they interpret having to pay $65 rather than $60 as incurring a $5 penalty, then they may consider paying $60 to be a nonloss and paying $65 to be a loss. Similarly, sellers can also experience gains, nongains, nonlosses, and losses. This article suggests that buyers are prevention focused and consequently place a greater emphasis on loss‐related frames, whereas sellers are promotion focused and place a greater emphasis on gain‐related frames. Therefore, for equivalent positive outcomes, buyers feel better about nonlosses, but sellers feel better about gains. For equivalent negative outcomes, buyers feel worse about losses, but sellers feel worse about nongains. These effects, however, disappear when there is little motivation to process information about the monetary transaction.

In intertemporal choices between smaller‐sooner (SS) and larger‐later (LL) rewards, five studies reveal that patience for the LL option is influenced by an interactive effect of the measurement units used to express wait time (large vs. small) and the type of the reward (hedonic vs. utilitarian). Specifically, larger time units boost patience, but more so when rewards are hedonic rather than utilitarian. In line with the numerosity heuristic, the effect of time units on patience is mediated by larger time units shrinking wait time perception. This effect arises because hedonic (vs. utilitarian) rewards promote a reliance on heuristics rather than systematic calculations. Therefore, a more calculative mindset diminishes the effect of units even for hedonic rewards and eliminates the hedonic‐utilitarian asymmetry. These results contribute to research on numerosity, intertemporal choice, and hedonic‐utilitarian differences, and offer a simple tool for practitioners to influence patience.

for their feedback on this project. This article has also benefited from the suggestions of Om Narasimhan, Rajesh Chandy, and the anonymous JMR reviewers. ASHWANI MONGA and MICHAEL J. HOUSTON*The authors demonstrate that choosing one product from a set of competing alternatives can change expectations about the chosen product such that consumers can become optimistic about the product's performance, and this optimism can then fade away. In five experiments, the authors show that this phenomenon of fading optimism in products is robust across different experimental settings and product categories and is moderated by prior attitude toward the product category and ambiguity of the product's performance.