Consumer Purchase Timing Decisions Under Uncertainty

消费者做出购买时机决策的过程是理解广泛的经济行为的核心。尽管这个过程可能往往很复杂，但它的核心是一个相当简单的两难境地：如何在立即消费的回报和延迟后悔的风险之间取得平衡。例如，在决定何时购买主要耐用品时，需要权衡一下立即享受的诱惑和担心以后可能会有更好的产品价值。同样，消费者会在多大程度上囤积打折的食品杂货，取决于支付低于正常价格所带来的回报与感知到的这种表面上的“折扣”实际上是相当平常的可能性之间的平衡。本研究将探讨在不确定的动态环境中，消费者进行序贯购买时机和购买数量决策的过程。通过使用交互式计算机实验，该研究将探索消费者在时间价格和产品质量变化的模式和可预测性、未来产品需求的不确定性、决策的风险和复杂性以及顺序信息收集成本的变化下形成合理的顺序购买策略的能力。这项研究应该确定顺序决策启发式的集合，这将允许当前不确定性下的决策的形式化行为理论扩展到时间域。

The process by which consumers make purchase timing decisions is central to understanding a wide range of economic behaviors. Although this process may often be complex, at its center is a rather straightforward dilemma; how to balance the rewards of immediate consumption with the risks of delayed regret. The decision of when to buy a major durable, for example, requires one to weigh the lure of immediate enjoyment against the fear that a better product value may become available later. Likewise, the extent to which a consumer will stock up on a discounted grocery item depends on how the rewards associated with paying the lower-than-normal price are balanced against the perceived likelihood that the apparent "discount" is, in fact, a rather routine one. This research will explore the process by which consumers make sequential purchase timing and quantity decisions in uncertain dynamic environments. Through the use of interactive computer experiments, the research will explore the ability of consumers to form rationale sequential buying strategies under variations in the pattern and predictability of temporal price and product quality changes, uncertainty of future product demand, the risk and complexity of decisions, and the cost of sequential information gathering. The research should identify sets of sequential decision heuristics which will allow current formal behavioral theories of decision making under uncertainty to be extended to temporal domains.