Ellen Evers and Alex Imas, “Mental Accounting, Similarity, and Preferences Over the Timing of Outcomes,” September 12, 2019, available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=3452943.
• Do we experience life events in a bundle – a good day, say – or do we experience life more discretely, like a good work day followed by a nice dinner? Our “valuation” (of a day, for instance) will depend on the bundling, because of prospect-theory-style reference points. If we have a good morning, do we record that "event" as complete, in the hedonic books, as it were, and then start fresh in the afternoon?
• We might get more satisfaction if we could consume a good day in two or more parts, as a good morning followed by a good afternoon, as opposed to one indivisible event, a good day. Given "diminishing sensitivity" to gains and losses (a standard element of prospect theory), we would prefer to take gains discretely, and to bundle losses together.
• But can we actually choose how to bundle our experiences to maximize our well-being, to engage in “hedonic editing”? Maybe our control over the mental accounts is limited, maybe similar things (like a good morning and a good afternoon, both spent at the office) in a day will be bundled together.
• Similarity, here, takes the form of shared salient attributes. Temporal proximity is one salient feature, and hence, all else equal, with diminishing sensitivity, people would prefer losses to occur close together and gains to be spread out – but all else is not always equal, sometimes there are other factors (salient similarities) that lead to losses being mentally separated or gains being mentally bundled.
• Evers and Imas suggest that mental bookkeeping is done to economize on the comparison of attributes. At any rate, their “hedonic accounting hypothesis” is that people prefer to suffer similar losses in a short time span but dissimilar losses in a longer time span; alternatively, similar gains are spread over time and dissimilar gains are taken closer together. The similar losses are in the same mental account, and hence, treating them jointly helps (via diminishing sensitivity) to take away some of their sting. Dissimilar losses are sort of fated to be in different mental accounts, so there is no gain to bundling them, and something to be said for postponing one of them.
• In four online experiments (using mTurk, with more than 100 respondents for each of the experiments), the authors find support for their hypotheses: (1) more similar events are more likely to be bundled into a single event; (2) the more similar two negative events, the greater the desire to bundle them (by choosing to experience them in close temporal proximity); (3) the more similar two positive events, the greater the desire to separate them temporally; and (4) rendering events more similar by increasing the salience of their shared characteristics makes them more likely to be assigned to the same mental account.
• Do we experience life events in a bundle – a good day, say – or do we experience life more discretely, like a good work day followed by a nice dinner? Our “valuation” (of a day, for instance) will depend on the bundling, because of prospect-theory-style reference points. If we have a good morning, do we record that "event" as complete, in the hedonic books, as it were, and then start fresh in the afternoon?
• We might get more satisfaction if we could consume a good day in two or more parts, as a good morning followed by a good afternoon, as opposed to one indivisible event, a good day. Given "diminishing sensitivity" to gains and losses (a standard element of prospect theory), we would prefer to take gains discretely, and to bundle losses together.
• But can we actually choose how to bundle our experiences to maximize our well-being, to engage in “hedonic editing”? Maybe our control over the mental accounts is limited, maybe similar things (like a good morning and a good afternoon, both spent at the office) in a day will be bundled together.
• Similarity, here, takes the form of shared salient attributes. Temporal proximity is one salient feature, and hence, all else equal, with diminishing sensitivity, people would prefer losses to occur close together and gains to be spread out – but all else is not always equal, sometimes there are other factors (salient similarities) that lead to losses being mentally separated or gains being mentally bundled.
• Evers and Imas suggest that mental bookkeeping is done to economize on the comparison of attributes. At any rate, their “hedonic accounting hypothesis” is that people prefer to suffer similar losses in a short time span but dissimilar losses in a longer time span; alternatively, similar gains are spread over time and dissimilar gains are taken closer together. The similar losses are in the same mental account, and hence, treating them jointly helps (via diminishing sensitivity) to take away some of their sting. Dissimilar losses are sort of fated to be in different mental accounts, so there is no gain to bundling them, and something to be said for postponing one of them.
• In four online experiments (using mTurk, with more than 100 respondents for each of the experiments), the authors find support for their hypotheses: (1) more similar events are more likely to be bundled into a single event; (2) the more similar two negative events, the greater the desire to bundle them (by choosing to experience them in close temporal proximity); (3) the more similar two positive events, the greater the desire to separate them temporally; and (4) rendering events more similar by increasing the salience of their shared characteristics makes them more likely to be assigned to the same mental account.
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