Leonard Lee

The Stability of Temporal versus Monetary Evaluations

Coauthor(s): M. Lee, Gal Zauberman.

Abstract:

Consumers constantly make product decisions involving temporal and/or monetary considerations. This work examines the stability of consumer evaluations of these two fundamental economic resources in product choice. Specifically, we propose that the degree of preference consistency depends on whether the focal resource is time or money. Prior research suggests two competing hypotheses: while some research demonstrates that the value of time is more ambiguous than the value of money, implying less consistency in time- than in money-based product evaluations, others suggest that monetary evaluations lack emotional tags and are more prone to cognitive noise, implying less consistency in money-based product evaluations. We test these competing predictions in five experiments. Our results demonstrate that, in general, money-based product evaluations generate less consistency than time-based evaluations, supporting the emotion-based explanation.

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