How The Past Shapes The Present: The Assimilation of Enjoyment to Similar Past Experiences

Throughout their lives, consumers sample experiential products (e.g., movies, coffee). Obviously, the type and number of experiences that consumers accumulate varies greatly. Some gather a great variety, others only a few. Some collect the most amazing product experiences, others only experience mediocre products. A coffee aficionado, for instance, has sampled elite and abysmal coffee while an inexperienced coffee drinker might have mostly visited Starbucks. Past work found that consumers learn distributional information about numeric stimuli such as prices (e.g., the range, the mean) through prior experiences, which boosts sensitivity for value (i.e., knowledge factor, general evaluability theory; Hsee and Zhang 2010). While distributional information about past prices might affect perceptions of how cheap/expensive a product is, it is unclear whether these findings apply to more experiential products. Our investigation is the first to test whether prior experiences boost sensitivity for the hedonic value of experiences. We also examine how past experiences trigger sensitivity. Consistent with evaluability theory, we suggest that prior experiences make consumers’ enjoyment more attuned to the hedonic value of experiential products (figure 1; A). Their enjoyment of higher vs. lower value products differs more strongly. To illustrate, a coffee aficionado should enjoy coffee of higher hedonic value more than coffee of lower hedonic value while a coffee novice should be more insensitive. While evaluability theory assumes that greater knowledge would generally benefit consumers (e.g., greater knowledge helps determine whether a price is favourable or not), we predict that having (vs. lacking) knowledge not only has hedonic benefits (“blessing of expertise”), but also hedonic costs (“curse of expertise”).