Subjective Time and Decisions: The Role of Perception and Experience of Time in Consumer Decision Making

SESSION OVERVIEW Almost every decision that a consumer engages in has a temporal dimension. For instance, consumer decisions on which shipping option to choose and how long to wait for service, whether and when to save for future, decisions to keep on waiting on hold when calling customer service or renege from queue, all involve time decisions. While oftentimes the end behavioral variable studied varies, e.g. line chosen, time delivery option, renege or stay; most of them deal with first making a time estimate that is often biased that then leads them to display a downstream behavior. Prior research in different domains have often looked at this problem as either a pure time perception problem or alternatively as an intertemporal decision with the implicit or explicit assumption that time perceptions are unbiased and it is the outcomes valuation that changes at different points in time. Unlike previous research, the three papers in this symposia systematically study how consumers perceive and experience time, and point out the important consumer behavior implications in intertempooral as well as non-temporal settings. Specifically, these three papers explore