In general, consumers enjoy products less with repeated consumption. Unfortunately, there are few known ways to slow such satiation. The authors show that consumers satiate more slowly on a product when it is available for consumption only at limited times. Specifically, they find that perceived limited availability made a product more enjoyable, and yet this effect largely emerged only after repeated consumption. The authors attribute this finding to an urge to take advantage of a rare consumption opportunity, which leads people to pay less attention to the quantity consumed and subsequently to experience less satiation. A series of studies establish the effect of perceived limited availability on the rate of satiation, show that it influences how much people eat, provide mediation evidence of the proposed theoretical account, and eliminate the effect by making salient the total amount consumed. The authors conclude with implications of these findings.

In this article, we examine the different ways in which consumers balance their consumption behavior in order to maximize utility. In particular, we focus on how people balance repeating the same options with the decision to seek variety. While earlier research represented variety seeking as a means of reducing physical satiation (McAlister, 1982), more recent research suggests that the relationship between choosing variety and minimizing satiation is more complex, as these behaviors may be motivated and influenced by exogenous factors. Past reviews have largely looked at the two processes separately. In this article, we discuss the nuanced relationship between these two constructs and point to future research directions that may help us further understand how consumers tackle the everyday challenge of maximizing enjoyment over time.

The authors identify and examine the effect of space-to-product ratio on consumer response; very generally, consumers perceive products as more valuable when more space is devoted to their display. In both lab and field studies, the authors find that this phenomenon influences total sales, purchase likelihood, and even perceived product experience (taste perceptions). More interstitial space increases perceptions of individual products as more aesthetically pleasing and the store as more prestigious. The authors find these effects across a variety of product categories and rule out a number of competing alternative explanations that are based on perceptions of product popularity, scarcity, assortment search difficulty, and messiness.

This research demonstrates the effect of the completeness of a product's shape on size perceptions, preference, and consumption quantities. The authors show that people estimate an incompletely shaped product to be smaller and, therefore, prefer it less in general than a completely shaped one of equal size and weight. They also find that the reduced size estimations for incompletely shaped products lead to increased consumption quantities of this type of item. Finally, the authors demonstrate that the “completeness heuristic” operates even when the incompletely shaped item has a larger primary dimension than its completely shaped counterpart.

Satiation frequently occurs from repeated consumption of the same items over time. However, results from five experiments show that when people anticipate consuming something different in the future, they satiate at a slower rate in the present. The authors find the effect in both food and nonfood consumption settings using different approaches to measure satiation. This effect is cognitive; specifically, anticipating variety in future consumption generates positive thoughts about that future experience. The authors find two boundary conditions: the future consumption outcome must be (1) in a related product category and (2) at least as attractive as the present consumption outcome. The authors rule out potential alternative explanations such as mere exposure to variety, the possibility that the future experience is more attractive (rather than just different) than the current one, and perceptions of scarcity associated with the item consumed in the present.