Business Commons^™

Decomposing Time Effect On Valuation And Choice, Yan Meng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intertemporal choice, defined as tradeoffs consumers make between the costs of waiting and the benefits of larger reward size, is an important and ubiquitous effect in marketing. Individuals’ perception of time has been shown to impact intertemporal choice. Event markers are demarcations that cut time duration into intervals and make time discrete rather than continuous. Event markers impact individuals’ decision making, such that a large number of event markers make individuals perceive the future to be far away. Therefore, when faced with an intertemporal choice, they take a Small-Sooner (SS) reward rather than waiting for a Large-Later (LL) reward. The …