Price Promotions Cause Impatience

Abstract

In this research, the authors propose that incidental exposure to price promotions can cause downstream impatience in an unrelated domain. Specifically, price promotions trigger reward seeking—a general motivational state—and reward seeking, in turn, yields impatience. Seven experiments (N = 1,795) demonstrate how incidental exposure to price promotions can cause greater willingness to pay to avoid waiting (Experiments 1a and 1b), shorter actual wait times (Experiments 2, 3b, and 5), greater propensity to break a rule to save time (Experiment 3a), and greater discounting in a consequential intertemporal choice (Experiment 4). Consistent with this account, the effect is both more pronounced for people with greater reward sensitivity (Experiments 3a and 3b) and mediated by reward seeking (Experiment 4). Finally, a conceptual replication in a field setting underscores the external validity and managerial relevance of the findings (Experiment 5).