Dealing with Uncertainty in the Advance Ticket Sales Environment: An Empirical Examination on the Adaptive Nature of Consumer’s Intertemporal Choice Decisions

Abstract

Timing is everything. There are ideal times for essentially in everything we do. Every day we face questions of timing, but we have limited guiding principles to answer those questions. There is a science behind ‘when we buy’ and the advance ticket sales market provides a ripe laboratory for research. Consumer’s deal with myriads of uncertainty finding the ideal time to book that vacation they have been long time waiting for. Prices change daily based on real time demand and the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers further complicates this problem for consumers as decisional agents. Given this emerging research opportunity, this dissertation conducts a series of experimental studies to examine the underlying process consumers undergo when booking and purchasing sporting event tickets. Study 1 begins exploring two key decisional factors (sellout risk and opportunity cost) consumers use to guide their temporal choice under uncertainty. A selective attention bias was elicited where sport fans and casual consumers placed subjective weighted values on these uncertainty cues. Study 2 further examines distinct biases in temporal choice due to emotion and motivation of consumers. The study found that consumers with higher involvement led to the belief to find better priced deal in the future which was mediated by their overconfidence. Lastly, Study 3 examines the boundary conditions and tests how the information frame and structure of the environment can further influence consumer’s booking and purchase decision. The empirical findings from the dissertation highlight the importance of consumer’s decisional biases in inter-temporal choice and provides theoretical and practical implications for both marketing and pricing research. Unlike normative assumptions of rationality, the studies find that there is no one size fit all optimal decision model on whether to wait or purchase. The optimization strategy of temporal choice ultimately lies within the interaction between the individual and how they cope with uncertainty cues in their surrounding purchase environment.