1 Tightwads and Spendthrifts SCOTT I. RICK CYNTHIA E. CRYDER GEORGE LOEWENSTEIN* 2 Scott I. Rick (
[email protected]) is a visiting professor of Operations and Information Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Cynthia E. Cryder (
[email protected]) is a doctoral student, and George Loewenstein (
[email protected]) is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics & Psychology, both at the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. This article is based on the first author’s dissertation. For helpful comments, the authors thank the editor, the associate editor, three anonymous reviewers, Dan Ariely, Eloise Coupey, Robyn Dawes, Michael DeKay, J. Wesley Hutchinson, Eric Johnson, Uzma Khan, Jennifer Lerner, Julie Ozanne, Kathleen Vohs, Joachim Vosgerau, Roberto Weber, Christian Wheeler, Patti Williams, Gal Zauberman, and participants at the 2005 JDM conference in Toronto, the 2006 JDM pre-conference at SPSP in Palm Springs, the 2006 BDRM conference in Los Angeles, the Second Annual Whitebox Advisors Graduate Student Conference at Yale, and the 2007 SCP conference in Las Vegas. We also thank NBC’s WCAU affiliate, The Globe and Mail, and John Tierney of The New York Times for their invaluable assistance in collecting data. This research was supported in part by grants from the Center for Behavioral Decision Research at Carnegie Mellon and the Russell Sage Foundation, an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to Rick, and a MacArthur Foundation network grant to Loewenstein. 3 Consumers often behave differently than they would ideally like to behave. We propose that an anticipatory pain of paying drives “tightwads” to spend less than they would ideally like to spend.