Marissa & Stephen on indecisiveness & opportunity costs

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Consumers consider opportunity costs when paying attn to outside options; increases sensitivity to value of outside options; individual differences

Fox, Barkley-Levenson, 2013: 3 types of indecisiveness: neurotic: unpleasant, perfectionistic: not unpleasant, but excessive info-skkg; lackadaisical: just can't get their shit together

RQs: How does indecisiveness affect opp cost consideration?
How tktktk?

Lack: consider fewer opp costs; even when forced to view opp costs, they neglect the value in their decisions

impulse
urgency
lack of premeditation
lack of perseverance
Barratt impulsivity scale
functional implusivity
dysfunctional impulsivity

they have a measure of indecisiveness, but have not manipulated it
create an incentive structure to drive
repeated decisions-->get easier when you've done it several times
cognitive load implications are a consideration
ease of retrieval--priming to get ppl to think of themselves as indecisive people
"act decisive by fiat"
vignettes about ppl who made bad decisions/good decisions to reinforce the implications end-->instead of reinforcing the perfectionist incentive
chain letter; didn't switch to DirecTV

what if you gave typical asymmetric dominance options and reason-based choice forces you to go one way
they've gone through 5-6 decisions where it's really hard to choose bt apples & oranges, or (Tannenbaum)
Fox: have to prime a particular group
Oppen: go to the pot shops

could you tell participants that previous participants said they felt a certain way?
play it to music--this music is supposed to make people feel.....

Keith: doesn't see how any of these things can be considered independent of opportunity cost

they end up in a situation not ready to make a choice
one manner in which they're not ready is not giving weight to these options. doesn't think tthey are the same constructs, but they've been thinking about how to separate these thngs out

Study 1
gift card shopping task
1 card offered each day
can choose to look ahead future gift cards
looking ahead=DV for opportunity cost consideration
(the extent to which they look ahead at future options is the measure of consideration of opp costs)

budget=2 cents (could have used tokens, but they didn't)
the budget carries over
value of the gift card is $5

did you get a measure of the preference for the gift card offered?

there is an indirect measure at the end where they can choose 4 out of 16
people don't click all the boxes
why frame in terms of weeks when the study is immediate? they did it to give it a sense of framing over time

carsten: elicit the willingness to pay to see the other options

can only look at the next three days

MT: do you think the 2-cent budget primes ppl to think these are not very valuable and not worth the consideration?

the more perfectionists look ahead, the less satisfied they are with their choices

Study 2
forced a look-ahead condition or couldn't see the next 3 options

MT: do you think the first option sets a tone for what's to come? In other words, people don't care about Kohl's, so they lower their expectations for what comes next?

defined attractiveness of each option as the proportion of ppl who chose that option in the budget allocation task
ran regressions for each indiv predicting purchase behavior (buy v. no buy) from average attractiveness of the next three options (Fox: why the average instead of the best?)
then used coefficients from each of the indiv regressions as the dependent variable

Results
significant lackadaisical x look-ahead interaction: not only did they consider the opp costs less, but even when forced o consider them
high lacks were not likely to purchase an item if the future options were low in attractiveness

what does it mean to not be sensitive to information you don't have-->so this is only in the forced condition so it's lack in the average quality

are you saying that there's no effect? at extreme values they get a good crossover, but they're assuming it's not robust

discriminant validity argument, not sure CRT is the way to go

Keith: can you analyze the end of the experiment independently? unless they've been saving cents, you're asking them which of these 4 do you want
it's satisficing
they're sensitive to how much they like today's option, but not to the future options

they found lacks are negatively correlated with satisficing

replicated the interaction with satisfaction

Study 3
will the findings be similar in a different context
main finding from studies 3 & 4 they find the same interaction that lacks are insensitive to opportunity costs
three conditions based on Jones 1998 JBDM-->framing as choices versus opportunities
opportunity: buy? y or n; if not, what would you do with the $?
choice: gbuy? y or n; if not, what would you do with the $? definitely buy alternative vs. buy DVD
mixed: no idea

scales for measurement: Nemkov; Turner

more it's framed as a choice, the more likely they don't buy the DVD

Lack interaction: not affected by the opp cost

Keith says he's not sure about the initial normative statement; options are not just to buy the DVD and the alternative
the normative claim isn't strong here, but they're less sensitive to the options presented

Ashley asked about the self-report alternative; they could only put one item.
you could measure according to how many alternatives ppl generated as preferable options on which to spend the $

Study 4: replication mturk
same interaction again, but not as strong

Danny asked about variance within the group of lacks

roughly centered, fairly normal, with full coverage across the scale

regression continuity/median split-->could it be the extreme ends that are driving this?

haven't looked much

Keith: you could put in a square tktk