Events

Professor Kristin Diehl
Herrmann Family Endowed Chair
Professor of Marketing
USC Marshall School of Business
University of Southern California

ABSTRACT

People frequently plan their experiences. Whether planning a vacation or the visit to a museum, prior research found people prefer “improving sequences” of experiences. We revisit these findings. For purely positive experiences, across conceptual and direct replications (N = 2175), including consequential studies, we find a reversal of prior findings: most respondents prefer “declining sequences”. Given the many differences between any replication and the original studies it is impossible to know what caused the observed reversal. Still, trying to understand the phenomenon better, we explored the effect of sample characteristics (age) and two theoretical moderators (impatience and uncertainty about life overall), previously unexamined background factors that might have contributed to the reversal. We only found suggestive evidence that generalized uncertainty may contribute to our findings.