Search

Many consumers struggle to repay their credit card debt, in part because paying small portions of large bills often feels fruitless. We introduce a novel credit card payment option – repayment-by-purchase – and examine its influence on both the amount consumers’ repay and their perception of progress toward reducing their debt. With typical repayment, consumers simply enter the amount they wish to pay toward their total balance – often the minimum required payment. With repayment-by-purchase, in contrast, consumers can select specific purchases (e.g., a coffee at Starbucks, a utility bill) that they wish to repay, and make payments specifically directed toward “eliminating” these purchases. Five studies reveal that repayment-by-purchase increases awareness of what is being repaid, which increases perceptions of progress toward reducing debt, which in turn encourages higher repayment. In a large field experiment, credit card customers who were given the opportunity to allocate their payment toward specific purchase categories paid 12.18% more toward their debt balance than a control group. These findings advance our practical understanding of how consumers can be encouraged to pay more toward credit card debt and offer conceptual insight into how both increased awareness and perceived goal progress enhance consumer motivation to get out of debt.

Scholars from many disciplines have investigated self-deception, but defining self-deception and establishing its possible benefits have been a matter of heated debate — a debate impoverished by a relative lack of empirical research. Drawing on recent research, we first classify three distinct definitions of self-deception, ranging from a view that self-deception is synonymous with positive illusions to a more stringent view that self-deception requires the presence of simultaneous conflicting beliefs. We then review recent research on the possible benefits of self-deception, identifying three adaptive functions: deceiving others, social status, and psychological benefits. We suggest potential directions for future research.

The pursuit of long-term goals is often thwarted by immediate desires--a pattern particularly common in food choices. Research in economics, psychology, and marketing has identified a rich supply of unrelated small influences or “nudges” that can help make healthy choices easier, aligning behaviors with intentions. We organize these streams of research using a novel taxonomy, the 4Ps Framework for Behavior Change, to integrate nudges within a dual-system model of consumer choice and to provide suggestions for extensions. We conclude with a discussion of some practical challenges facing researchers in this area.

Results of four experiments reveal a counterintuitive solution to the common problem of feeling that one does not have enough time: Give some of it away. Although the objective amount of time people have cannot be increased (there are only 24 hours in a day), this research demonstrates that people’s subjective sense of time affluence can be increased. We compared spending time on other people with wasting time, spending time on oneself, and even gaining a windfall of “free” time, and we found that spending time on others increases one’s feeling of time affluence. The impact of giving time on feelings of time affluence is driven by a boosted sense of self-efficacy. Consequently, giving time makes people more willing to commit to future engagements despite their busy schedules.

It is more than mere coincidence that the highest rates of HIV occur in the world’s poorest countries. Of the over forty million people currently living with HIV, 95 percent are in the developing world. The first part of this article explores the economics of HIV and treatment from a social marketing perspective. The second part of the article uses three specific case histories of successful social marketing organizations in Africa, Asia, and South America to inductively generate a consumer (patient)-centric marketing model. The focal organizations are unique in that they all identify patient needs first, then work backwards to develop economically viable solutions. Their solutions are not without flaws, and the future of these programs remains uncertain, but the authors hope that illuminating specific cases within the consumer-centric marketing paradigm will shed light on ways in which other organizations may be able to serve the poor profitably.

We suggest that online dating frequently fails to meet user expectations because people, unlike many commodities available for purchase online, are experience goods: Daters wish to screen potential romantic partners by experiential attributes (such as sense of humor or rapport), but online dating Web sites force them to screen by searchable attributes (such as income or religion). We demonstrate that people spend too much time searching for options online for too little payoff in offline dates (Study 1), in part because users desire information about experiential attributes, but online dating Web sites contain primarily searchable attributes (Study 2). Finally, we introduce and beta test the Virtual Date, offering potential dating partners the opportunity to acquire experiential information by exploring a virtual environment in interactions analogous to real first dates (such as going to a museum), an online intervention that led to greater liking after offline meetings (Study 3).

In an effort to bolster employee satisfaction, many employers provide free snacks at the office. Unfortunately, keeping employees happy can conflict with the goal of keeping them healthy, since increased snacking at work can contribute to overeating and obesity. Building on the growing body of research in choice architecture, we tested one factor that might influence snack consumption without impacting satisfaction: the relative distance between snacks and beverages. In a large field study at Google, we measured snack consumption when snacks were closer to or farther from beverages. We found that employees who used the beverage station closer to the snack station were more likely to take a snack- the likelihood of snacking increased from 12% to 23% for men and from 13% to 17% for women when the beverage station closest to the snack station was used. These results imply that employers and even families could reduce snack consumption easily, cheaply, and without backlash, by increasing the relative distance between beverages and snacks.