How I Decide Depends on What I Spend: Use of Heuristics Is Greater for Time than for Money

Abstract

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..

Years, Months, and Days versus 1, 12, and 365: The Influence of Units versus Numbers

“…For instance, the quantity of time (vs. money) encourages a broader perspective (Mogilner and Aaker 2009) and a higher reliance on heuristics (Monga and Saini 2009;Saini and Monga 2008). Thus, reliance on units as a judgmental cue is likely to occur for time, as we show in study 2.…”

A Generalizable Scale of Propensity to Plan: The Long and the Short of Planning for Time and for Money

“…The scale that we develop can be extended to such topics, but we focus in this initial investigation on planning the use of two fundamental resources to consumer behavior, time, and money (Holbrook and Lehmann 1981;Jacoby, Szybillo, and Kohn Berning 1976). Research shows that people think differently about these two basic resources (Leclerc, Schmitt, and Dubé 1995;Liu and Aaker 2008;Mogilner and Aaker 2009;Okada and Hoch 2004;Saini and Monga 2008;Soman 2001;Spiller and Lynch 2009;Zauberman and Lynch 2005), so it is not obvious whether individual differences in propensity to plan for time will extend to money.…”

“…Our interest in these particular initial applications of our scale to compare time and money planning was motivated by work showing that people think differently about these two basic resources (Liu and Aaker 2008;Mogilner and Aaker 2009;Okada and Hoch 2004;Saini and Monga 2008;Soman 2001;Zauberman and Lynch 2005). Our interest in comparing planning in the short run to planning in the long run came from work on intertemporal choice that shows that people seem to think about the next day or so in a sharply different way than they think about events a few weeks or months into the future (Laibson 1997;Soman 1998;Trope and Liberman 2003;Zauberman 2003).…”

Time-based versus money-based decision making under risk: An experimental investigation

“…the money domain do not always translate perfectly to the time domain (Leclerc et al, 1995;Okada & Hoch, 2004;Saini & Monga, 2008;Soman, 2001;Zauberman & Lynch, 2005).…”