Making the Wait Worthwhile: Experiments on the Effect of Queueing on Consumption

Customers spend a significant amount of time waiting in lines, however, the effect of waiting in a line on consumption decisions is not known. Existing literature indicates waiting results in psychological costs such as boredom, frustration, and anxiety and unpleasant negative emotions and cognitions (Maister 1984; Larson 1987; Taylor 1994; Carmon and Kahneman 1995; Hui and Tse 1996; Brady and Cronin 2001; Dabholkar and Bagozzi 2002). However, a long stream of behavioral literature suggest that consumption decisions may be positively influenced by sunk (temporal) costs incurred when waiting in lines due to mental accounting of investments (Thaler 1985). In the queueing context, time invested waiting prior to making a consumption decision opens an account, and we anticipate consumers purchase more so as to be able to close the account with a more favorable balance. In order to explicitly attribute the effect of queueing on consumption decisions to the sunk-cost fallacy, we demonstrate that the effect is moderated by customers’ individual susceptibility to the sunk-cost fallacy. That is, we propose that individuals with greater susceptibility to the sunk-cost fallacy exhibit a greater positive effect of queueing on purchase decisions. Finally, we examine the moderating impact of operational levers which influence the waiting experience, and in turn consumers’ mental accounting. Because “the same quantity of time investment may have a different sunk cost impact in different settings, i.e., when the quality of the experience was different” (Soman 2001), we anticipate service improvements which increase satisfaction and reduce the perceived cost of waiting will moderate the relationship between waiting and consumption. In other words, service improvements decrease consumers perceived temporal investments (despite the same objective temporal investment), and as a consequence, consumers do not have to increase their consumption to close their mental account more favorably.