Years, Months, and Days versus 1, 12, and 365: The Influence of Units versus Numbers

Ashwani Monga and Rajesh Bagchi

Journal of Consumer Research, 2012, vol. 39, issue 1, 185 - 198

Abstract: Quantitative changes may be conveyed to consumers using small units (e.g., change in delivery time from 7 to 21 days) or large units (1-3 weeks). Numerosity research suggests that changes are magnified by small (vs. large) units because a change from 7 to 21 (vs. 1-3) seems larger. We introduce a reverse effect that we term unitosity: changes are magnified by large (vs. small) units because a change of weeks (vs. days) seems larger. We show that numerosity reverses to unitosity when relative salience shifts from numbers to units (study 1). Then, arguing that numbers (units) represent a low-level (high-level) construal of quantities, we show this reversal when mind-set shifts from concrete to abstract (studies 2-4). These results emerge for several quantities--height of buildings, time of maturity of financial instruments, weight of nutrients, and length of tables--and have significant implications for theory and practice.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/662039 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/662039 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jconrs:doi:10.1086/662039

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Consumer Research is currently edited by Bernd Schmitt, June Cotte, Markus Giesler, Andrew Stephen and Stacy Wood

More articles in Journal of Consumer Research from Journal of Consumer Research Inc.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().