Tradeoff between time and money: The asymmetric consideration of opportunity costs

Subimal Chatterjee, Dipankar Rai and Timothy B. Heath

Journal of Business Research, 2016, vol. 69, issue 7, 2560-2566

Abstract: This paper investigates how consumers make tradeoffs between time and money with and without reminders to consider the opportunity costs of these currencies and finds an asymmetric pattern in opportunity cost consideration on the part of consumers. When reminded about the opportunity costs of time and money, consumers act to save time but not money when they acquire an experiential possession, and they act to save money but not time when they acquire a material possession. Process tests show that when a consumer acquires a possession that is both material and experiential in nature, her focus shifts to the possession's experiential (material) features when she is reminded about her time's (money's) opportunity cost, and it is this shift in her mindset which leads her to favor saving time over money (saving money over time) to acquire the possession.

Keywords: Opportunity costs; Time and money; Experiences; Material possessions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296315005597
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jbrese:v:69:y:2016:i:7:p:2560-2566

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2015.10.136

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().