Abstract
Consumers typically overstate their intentions to purchase products, compared to actual rates of purchases, a pattern called “hypothetical bias”. In laboratory choice experiments, we measure participants’ visual attention using mousetracking or eye-tracking, while they make hypothetical as well as real purchase decisions. We find that participants spent more time looking both at price and product image prior to making a real “buy” decision than making a real “don’t buy” decision. We demonstrate that including such information about visual attention improves prediction of real buy decisions. This improvement is evident, although small in magnitude, using mousetracking data, but is not evident using eye-tracking data.
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There is only one study directly comparing results from both measures on a common task (Lohse and Johnson 1996).
Only male subjects were recruited, because it is desirable to have a set of consumer goods for which preferences of the subjects are not too different.
Two additional subjects participated in Experiment M, but their data were excluded from the analysis (online appendix A.3).
By design, participants faced exactly the same product-price pairs in the hypothetical and surprise real blocks. In the absence of hypothetical bias, subjects should make the same decisions between these two blocks. Note that subjects responded to prices to some extent even in the hypothetical block (see online appendix B.1).
We also examine “spatial gaze distribution maps” using gaze data from Experiment E, and obtain qualitatively similar results (online appendix B.3).
There was no clear-cut way to measure latency as defined above in Experiment E unless subjects actually closed their eyes after the last fixation until the decision submission. Hence, we used the total duration of the gaze at blank areas instead.
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This paper is based on part of Ph.D. dissertation of Taisuke Imai. Authors thank Daw-An Wu and Rahul Bhui for their help with data collection and analysis. This work was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Imai acknowledges financial support from the Nakajima Foundation and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through CRC TRR 190.
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Imai, T., Kang, M.J. & Camerer, C.F. When the eyes say buy: visual fixations during hypothetical consumer choice improve prediction of actual purchases. J Econ Sci Assoc 5, 112–122 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-019-00071-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-019-00071-3